Edtech and Socioeconomics
Increasing Access and Reducing Inequalities
In my personal educational experience, edtech came in rather late. In middle and high school, I had access to projectors whereby some teachers showed PowerPoint presentations and videos on YouTube. Laptops and cellphones were forbidden for all students and could only be used outside the classroom during breaks. Technology was seen as a distraction rather than a learning tool. Evidently, things have changed and education technology has gained much attention in the last few years. However, the way edtech is used in different socioeconomic contexts varies greatly.
I have noticed this trend when I was a tutor working with fifth and sixth graders at an international school. Teachers used technology in the classroom not only to display PowerPoint presentations and YouTube videos, but to play educational games and even to teach programming languages to middle schoolers. With this experience, I was impressed but also worried. I thought: “this school is a private, affluent environment where most students come from wealthy families, but what if the same technology were implemented in low-income neighborhoods?”
Later, I also found out about online courses in open platforms like EdX and Coursera. I took classes from University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and the French École Polytechnique. When I started engaging in distance learning, I saw it as a way to satisfy some of my intellectual curiosity in addition to college classes. However, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), do not reach every socioeconomic group, despite their promise to provide universal access and decrease education inequality.
Why doesn’t “open” mean “equitable”?
Sociologist Paul Attewell has researched what he calls the two Digital Divides: “the divide of access and the divide of usage”. Once we overcome the divide of access (giving equal access to technology to all socioeconomic groups), the divide of usage will still be a barrier. His study has found that “young people from more affluent neighborhoods will have more opportunities to use tech for more creative and production-oriented uses”.
In addition, Justin Reich, an educational researcher and professor at MIT, has identified a few myths related to edtech. I want to highlight two of them. Firstly, “open” does not mean “equitable”. Free technologies still disproportionately benefit the wealthy. In a research on classroom uses of wikis (a website that allows collaborative sharing and editing) in the United States and use of MOOCs by Americans, Justin has found that more affluent schools used wikis “more often and for more interesting purposes”. He also found that American residents using MOOCs were from “neighborhoods about a half a standard deviation more affluent than typical Americans”.
The second myth I would like to highlight is that we can “close some of these digital divides by expanding technology access”. Simply giving the wealthy and the poor the same access to the same education technology is not going to solve the problem. We all wish it would, but reality is far more complex than that. Social and cultural exclusions are much more difficult to overcome and are reflected in differences in outcome and usage across different socioeconomic classes.
Developers keep making such mistakes and refrain from testing their assumptions because the social distance between them and minority groups leads to several blind spots and lack of visibility of the needs of target groups. Bias inevitably happens because it is unconscious and, sometimes, institutionalized. When learners notice these biases, they feel like outsiders and refrain from using the tool. In open online learning communities, for instance, learners will often neglect to participate or drop out from the program (Reich et al 10).
Developing the tech is a challenge, but it should be accompanied with efforts to promote integration into different socioeconomic realities by including lessons learned from the local context into the product’s design and implementation. This effort may imply constantly adapting the tool according to how it is used and seen by its beneficiaries.
“A surge of effort is needed from all stakeholders to investigate and address these barriers to creating more equitable learning through learning technology.” — Justin Reich
What can we learn from existing efforts?
Thankfully, we have good examples from inspiring edtech solution that have improved learning outcomes for low-income students. Existing solutions have incorporated ways to mitigate psychological barriers, reduce costs and reach low-income areas (Reich 14–15).
To test whether psychological barriers influence achievement gaps in least developed countries and developed countries, researchers at Stanford and MIT applied two intervention questionnaires to random students in two MOOC platforms. Both questionnaires consisted in writing about their experience as students in an online platform; one of them was about whether students feel like they belong to an online community and the other one was about how taking a course affected their values. After such interventions were applied, researchers noted that, in both intervention conditions, students from least developed countries were able to earn certification at the same rate as students from more developed countries, closing the achievement gap.
To reduce costs that are significant to low-income students, several solutions have been found. I would like to address two of them: OpenStax College (OSC) and the Desmos Calculator, which are both beneficial to online and present students. OSC is a nonprofit organization based at Rice University to increase access to education through open libraries containing college textbooks and AP materials. Its institutional partnerships has grown from 40 institutions in 2012 to 1213 institutions by mid-June 2015. Textbooks for introductory college courses such as Algebra, Biology and Economics may cost more than $100 a semester, which results in a heavy burden for low-income college students. By reducing the cost to attend classes and accessing their materials, low-income students may have an additional incentive to pursue their studies. Another examples is the Desmos Calculator, an online free graphic calculator, which provides students a free needed tool for classes such as Statistics, Algebra and Calculus. Desmos is similar to Texas Instruments tools, which retails for $150. By having access to an online, free graphic calculator, low-income students may have an extra incentive to pursue their studies, especially because they also have to worry about functional laptop and smartphone costs.
To reach rural low-income areas in the United States, Coursera, an open online platform full of courses from universities around the world, has recently formed a partnership with Google to promote live events in rural spaces that will encourage adults to engage in online courses. In a conversation with our EdSurge summer cohort, Alexandra Urban (teaching and learning specialist at Coursera) has explained that such partnership seeks to increase access to higher education in rural cities in the United States. The project will promote conversations with local people to understand their needs and what they want to learn and will count with a “mobile team”, which will be responsible for creating downloadable mobile courses, since access to connectivity is often unreliable in rural spaces.
After observing such efforts, we may notice that edtech can reduce inequalities both in present and distance education. Edtech may be used to reduce the divide of access, but also to reduce the divide of usage, by providing technological solutions that allow students from the most diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to have meaningful edtech experiences.
What should we consider before developing equitable edtech tools?
If we want our edtech tools to reach all students and to help reduce the gap of access to education among different socioeconomic backgrounds, we must consider a few recommendations.
Firstly, bottom-up development is essential. We must co-design and co-implement edtech tools with learners. We should not develop a new tool for students, but with students. Your development team must contain people who have close relationships with the learners you would like to serve; otherwise, your social and cultural distance will reveal unconscious biases that may cause more educational inequality, instead of reducing it.
Secondly, we should involve the community in the process. Parents, families and, in some cases, the neighborhood, should be engaged in the development process in order to accompany and benefit from students’ use of edtech. TechGoesHome, for instance, is a project in the Boston Public Schools designed to help families learn tech skills and purchase a $50 laptop, with discounted internet options. In the project, parents of students in BPS take a computer literacy course taught at the child’s school and are able to buy a computer at the end of it. By improving tech access, the program provides not only child and parent tech literacy, but also increases home-school connections and takes edtech to a much broader social context.
Thirdly, we should consider interests that students bring from their own cultures and backgrounds. When learning communities are constituted by people from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, they sometimes become exclusionary. Before implementing an edtech solution, we should address the local cultural context and look for any exclusive interactions that may result in a hostile environment toward outsiders.
Lastly, we should always measure both positive and negative impacts of our initiatives. Comparing impact among learners from different background, geographical locations and communities may help us understand where social and cultural differences may increase access and usage divides. Once we identify such areas, we are then able to implement solutions like the ones I mentioned and to really use edtech to increase access and reduce inequalities.
References
Herold, B. (2018, June 20). Elite Private Schools Use Wide Range of Ed-Tech Strategies. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/03/25/elite-private-schools-use-wide-range-of.html
Jenkins, H. (2018, January 16). Ed Tech and Equity: An Interview with Justin Reich. Retrieved from http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2018/1/4/ed-tech-and-equity-an-interview-with-justin-reich
Kizilcec, R. F., Saltarelli, A. J., Reich, J., & Cohen, G. L. (2017). Closing global achievement gaps in MOOCs. Science, 355(6322), 251–252.
Pitt, R. (2015). Mainstreaming Open Textbooks: Educator Perspectives on the Impact of OpenStax College open textbooks. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning,16(4).
Reich, J., & Ito, M. (2017). From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies. Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, 5–18.
