Written by: Niels Kerssens
When COVID-19 forced Dutch primary schools to close on March 16th 2020, educational technologies (edtech) provided an emergency service for fixing an acute switch to home schooling. In weeks’ time, primary and secondary schools massively started using global and local edtech platforms to support online learning. Forced to instantly realize home education, choices for edtech have, arguably, more easily been motivated in terms of ‘whatever works’ rather than aspiring to pedagogical and social values of education. Yet digitizing public education is much too important a decision to be rushed through. Education is a public good, driven by public values and interests. Hastily reforming education by employing edtech as an instrumental solution, without any regard for educational values, risks challenging education as a public good and might have long-term consequences for how public education is practiced.
In the last couple of months, we have been swamped with reporting on edtech as a solution for solving some of education’s most pressing challenges. Moreover, we have witnessed how technology companies, international and local, treated the crisis as a commercial opportunity to increase their market share. Commercial platforms of the private edtech industry will continue to expand speedily across public education systems. With technical platforms emerging as centralising powers in classrooms, public schools risk relinquishing control over the interpretation of its public function to platform providers. This short ‘think piece’ aims to provide schools with a counter-perspective, which emphasizes that now more so than ever before schools will have a great need for value-frameworks to conduct the inevitable reforms of digitisation in accordance with the collective interests and desires of the field.
Edtech as instrumental solution
The pandemic crisis thrusted a belief in edtech as an instrumental solution to yet another acute problem facing the educational domain: how to realize home education quickly and efficiently. Such an instrumental belief is not unique to this crisis, but another example of a long-established and dominant way of framing the agential power of edtech. Dutch education is no exception here. In the past few years edtech platforms—including learning tracking systems, digital classrooms, adaptive learning platforms, and learning analytics—have unquestionably been embedded in Dutch public education as tools for personalising education and solutions for solving some of its most pressing problems (eg. administrative workloads). Yet while edtech platforms have deeply penetrated the pedagogies and organisation of Dutch classrooms, integrating with the everyday practices and routines of students and teachers, little or no concern has been raised about their impact on educational practices and values.
In the Netherlands, emphasis invariably lies on the question: what can technology do to improve the quality of education? Platform powers are interpreted in instrumental ways. Narratives of edtech empowering teachers prevail. Platform dashboards, for instance, are promoted as tools enabling educators to take full ownership of educational processes and outcomes. Of course, platform data, visualized through dashboards, provide powerful tools for teachers to steer learning processes and improve learning performance. Adaptive learning platforms and cross-curricular dashboards make use of learning analytics— data analysis applied to a student's learning and development process— which provide teachers with detailed insight into a pupil's progress, making it much easier for tutors to tailor the learning process to the needs of the individual child.
Yet embracing platforms as powerful tools should not prevent educators from asking critical questions. The question that is hardly, if at all, asked is: what does technology do to students and teachers? This issue is becoming increasingly urgent now that edtech —fueled by data, automated through algorithms, organised by interfaces, and driven by commercial business models— increasingly penetrates the core of the classroom, and the organization and direction of the learning process shifts from teachers to online environments. When platforms become centralizing powers organizing classrooms, so do the mechanisms by which they govern the interactions with their users. Yet by neglecting this question, digital platforms are implemented indiscriminately; as if they were neutral instruments that simply register ‘what is happening’. As such, they seem to fall outside any discussion about values. And that is precisely the wrong assumption: educational platform technologies are no neutral reflections of a social reality, but a translation, grounded in particular values, which shape public education and the interpretation and organization of its public character.
Edtech as a risk for public values
Platforms steer towards particular social practices rooted in particular sets of values: as mediators they set the conditions for how interactions with users in classrooms are established. In other words, these systems are not just harmless teaching aids, they guide the pedagogical and didactic actions of teachers and the interaction between student and teacher. Datafication— converting social actions and behaviours into measurable data —forms such a powerful steering mechanism of platforms. Systematically monitoring and tracking the social and cognitive development of pupils renders their performance visible (dashboards) and analyzable. This enables personalisation of learning processes, yet might also direct teachers towards a continuous focus on maximizing the performance of their students.
In the Netherlands, datafication reinforces and enacts result-oriented education policy typical for new public management. Such policy aims at making schools work systematically and purposefully to maximize the performance of its students. In support of this policy, schools have been legally obliged since 2013 to use a learning management system. Obliging these systems by law forms a precondition for the normalization, and uncritical acceptation, of platform-based datafication practices. Ruled by law, and reinforced and steered by platform-mechanisms, tracking and monitoring students to maximize results have emerged as part and parcel of everyday classroom practices. Learning management systems, for that matter, are important actors in organizing public education in terms of economic values (e.g. efficiency, productivity) rather than social, pedagogical and didactic values.
While student performance is rendered visible, these political and ideological foundations of educational platforms remain invisible. It is therefore extremely important to uncover values encoded into, and enforced by, edtech so as to demonstrate that they do not automatically serve the interests of schools, and might undermine its core values. Public values of education are values that give direction to the organization of education we consider so important that their organization and operationalization deserves collective care, such as privacy, autonomy, inclusion, and equality. At the classroom level, this also concerns ‘smaller’ pedagogical values that guide the actions of teachers and students, such as the professional autonomy of teachers, meaningful human contact between teacher and student, and the creation of an environment in which students can practice and fail without being tracked.
Organizing classrooms around datafication risks challenging some of these values. In the digital learning environment students cannot ‘turn themselves off’ for a while, so that they can practice without being monitored and tracked. And constant surveillance can also lead to fear of failure. For teachers, on the other hand, the operation of learning analytics, driven by complex and non-transparent algorithms, is not always easy to understand. After all, the algorithms with which the student data of individual performances and (cognitive) processes are processed are a kind of black box that is not visible on teacher dashboards: tutors have little insight into how they have come about. And so they don't know which values are being weighed in those algorithmic calculations. In doing so, they are giving away part of their control over the content and organization of their education. This raises questions about who or what is in control: the dashboard or the teacher?
Value-based digitisation
If schools value teacher autonomy, then they should think of ways to enact this social value as a powerful steering mechanism for designing and using data-driven platform technologies. COVID-19 has accelerated the uptake of commercial edtech platforms without little or no debate about their impact on such educational values. Critical attention to the impact of platformisation and datafication on the organization of the public character of primary education is, therefore, urgently needed. While social and pedagogical values are usually widely discussed among teachers and with school boards, corona-driven digitisation, on the other hand, seems to have occurred completely outside any discussion of values. These values can and should not be outsourced to digital platforms or the commercial companies that develop them. However, due to the hasted short-term fixes type of crisis-digitisation this did happen. To ensure implementations of edtech are value-driven, not led solely by technology interests, it is now all the more important for schools to acknowledge that digitisation of education is not a tech-issue, but a social and public issue that requires direction from the educational field.
Schools are ultimately responsible for implementing edtech, and therefore for weighing up the values and principles that underlie them. In addition to debating instrumental questions about what edtech systems technically can and should ideally do, schools should also address questions about why and how they want to use systems, for what purpose, and, importantly, to substantiate which values. For example, should teachers have control over the data platforms produce and aggregate? Do we want teachers who act as supervisors or teachers who play a more fundamental role in guiding the learning process? Should data about student learning and behaviour be leading in assessing the student? Do we attach importance to meaningful human contact established through one-to-one contact between teacher and student? Should there be room for students to practice without being registered, measured, and analysed?
Each of these issues concerns a weighing of educational values. These are not fixed in advance. Schools and teachers play an essential role in articulating these kinds of questions and considerations before choosing to use a particular type of educational technology. But too improve the capacity of public values as steer for digitisation, it is key that schools articulate them collectively. In other words, formulating a value-framework for responsible digitisation should occur under the auspices of the public education sector, and not be a responsibility of individual schools. Together, schools are much better able to counterbalance the power of the edtech industry. Collectively formulated sets of values can subsequently be formalized in practical tools and principles for governing the public dimension of education in processes of digitisation. For example, they can inform the design of decision aids as helpful tools supporting educational professionals in addressing and debating potential values at stake. Or, they can be translated into sets of preferred design principles for educational technologies. By specifying design principles collectively, they can function as a leverage to force edtech companies to develop systems with value for the entire field of public education.
Timing is of utmost importance for collectively articulating a value-framework, as COVID-19 has, arguably, started a period of fast-moving digital reform of public education and we risk completely outsourcing the interpretation of its public character to the commercial tech-industry. Although a collective effort, values prioritized by educational professionals, schools, boards, and entire education sectors, will differ per national context, level and approach to education. This means that value-frameworks are always products of particular contexts, hence their development is locally situated. Nonetheless, they all function to address a common problem which transcends local boundaries: safeguarding education as a public good in times of platformisation. Neither putting a full stop to digitisation of classrooms, nor excluding large tech platforms from education, forms a viable solution to this problem. What schools can do is take control over the terms and conditions driving digitisation. COVID-19 functioned as a catalyst for a rapid reform of public education by digital platforms. Let's seize this moment to also use the pandemic as a catalyst for strengthening public governance of edtech.
Bio:
Niels Kerssens holds a Ph.D in media studies and is assistant professor at the department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University, where he leads the special interest group Platformisation of Education. His research investigates the impact of Educational platform Technologies (edtech) on public values of learning and teaching.