Why are we wrong so often about ed tech?
By Adrian Sannier
Higher education has been discussing — and implementing — digital technology to improve quality and access for most of a generation now. Since computing and then the Internet began penetrating popular use in the 1980s and 90s, educators and entrepreneurs have been drawn by the promise of the expanding landscape of new capabilities to try to improve their educational offerings.
But, for all the promise, gains have been modest, and it’s still hard to predict where and when ed tech will realize its potential. There is plenty of precedent for unforeseen twists and turns. For example, look at the history of open online courses. Just three years ago digitally enabled open online courses, such as MOOCs, were being heralded as the sweeping innovation that would disrupt the educational establishment and quickly scale quality higher education to a global audience. Today, while open courses continue to attract students and provide new learning opportunities, expectations for their sweeping disruptive power have all but vanished.
Some of that, of course, is due to the evolving nature of technology itself and is reflected in disruptions in every other field of endeavor that adopts digital tools. Across sectors, major developments like software-as-service, cloud computing, and the migration to mobile have rerouted innovation every few years. Higher education is impacted by that process as well.
But another piece of the puzzle involves education’s model for implementation and experimentation. Technology in education is too often deployed at cottage-industry scale, making it a challenge to concentrate the resources and effort needed to maximize technology’s contribution. Sample sizes have typically been small and disparate, making comparison, analysis, and continuous improvement challenging. The pace of research and the sharing of conclusions has lagged behind the operating speed institutions must maintain to adapt and evolve their ed tech offerings in real time, semester by semester, leaving most institutions “flying blind” as they make technology implementation decisions.
For ed tech to fulfill its potential, scale is critical. We need larger sample sizes where program designs can be rapidly assessed and research results can feed back quickly to drive the evolution of those programs, enabling educators to integrate powerful, continuously improving programs in their pedagogy rather than repeatedly starting over from scratch, working at the scale of their individual courses.
One of the most exciting things for me, working at ASU, is the opportunity to work with a group leading just that sort of effort. The scale of our course offerings and enrollments, with over 100 online degree programs and tens of thousands of online students, gives us the largest laboratory for ed tech development in the nation. And we will be driving that laboratory with an accelerated, comparative research program to yield real-time efficacy feedback through ASU’s Action Lab program, launching this year under the leadership of ed tech pioneer Lou Pugliese. The feedback loops we’re establishing allow us to constantly refine and improve educational outcomes for our students.
What we are implementing, testing, and evolving at ASU Online is a proven ability to use technology to offer individualized learning at scale. The size of our student enrollments and our research approach allows us to test and continuously improve multiple individualized learning platforms and designs side by side. An evolving toolkit — that includes interactive video, real-time needs assessment, personalized tutors, and other aspects of course design — is making dramatic improvements in student success. Over the next five years, teachers providing personalized math instruction through the use of adaptive tutoring software will become the pedagogical norm, and student achievement in math will rise as a result. We will be able to show dramatic results in a broad way, making it irresistible for our institutional peers not to move in this same direction.
At this moment in our country’s history, the higher ed community is called to innovate its educational models to broaden access to post-secondary education and substantially improve student success. Technology’s history of unanticipated innovations demonstrates that there are no universal solutions for implementing technology in education. But our work at ASU is identifying effective new approaches that are making individualized learning a productive reality for students at scale. By sharing our work with other leaders in the higher ed community, and co-developing effective solutions that work across many institutions, we can help achieve the goals of the New American University — to increase access to higher education without compromising excellence, achieving maximum impact for our students and our society.
