Edtech that helps teachers beats Edtech that replaces them

VSOVID-19 FORCED Ten years of digital transformation in schools will take place in one month, says John Martin, the former head of Sanoma Learning, an education technology (edtech) company. Teachers suddenly became more willing to use technology because the alternative was not to teach. Much of this technology will remain while students return to class this term. But experience has refined the real usefulness of edtech.

School closures have also forced entrepreneurs to face a hard truth: few are interested in completely disrupting the classroom. For decades, innovators envisioned a future without traditional learning. MOOCs (massive open online courses), like Udacity and Coursera, were meant to replace in-person learning. Teachers and school administrators feared technologists would seek to replace them. Before the pandemic, most American schools were reluctant to adopt the technology, says Jean Hammond, co-founder of LearnLaunch Accelerator, a startup program. “A lot of cool and amazing little things would come. But because… schools had not been trained to adopt new technologies, change was very slow.

Tech entrepreneurs “put technology before ed” before the pandemic, says Martin. The innovators have since realized that their technology should help classroom teachers rather than attempt to suppress them, he explains. Much of the $ 2.2 billion in venture and private equity raised in 2020 is being invested for this purpose.

Teacher training is one example of what this means in practice. Traditional teacher training is limited. “When teachers learn, they listen to people talk about teaching and they talk to each other about teaching. They very rarely teach things, ”explains Justin Reich of the Teaching Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If you look at how nurses are trained, how therapists are trained, how clergy are trained, they practice what they do all the time.”

This is starting to change. Researchers from the University of Virginia (UVA) train their education students using virtual reality simulators created by Mursion, a technology company. Student teachers experience several virtual practice scenarios such as parent-teacher conference, small group teaching, and large group teaching. A digital puppet master plays the role of parent and students behind the scenes, but the developers predict that the program will eventually become automated. The technology is currently in use at more than 50 US colleges.

Sarah Kiscaden, trainee teacher at UVA, is satisfied with the experience. “If we didn’t have this simulator, we would learn everything in class every day, then we would expect to keep everything in our brain and apply everything at the same time, the next day in our schools. And I think that’s a much less realistic expectation than if you are taught a skill, and you practice it and internalize it. Simulators also ease the pressure of teaching in front of children for the first time.

Artificial intelligence could also play a role in teacher training. Researchers from UVA and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute use machine learning, a process by which a computer learns to perform a task by analyzing examples, to assess videos of teachers in action. Currently, teachers receive feedback from their human colleagues, often administrators, who come to the classroom, observe a lesson, and grade the teacher. The researchers hope to eventually use machine learning to automatically grade teachers, which will make the current feedback process more frequent, more precise, and less time-consuming.

Barriers remain for edtech, despite the path traced by the pandemic. Ms. Hammond explains that outdated regulations can limit innovation in the classroom. Some state standards are rigid, even specifying the number of hours that must be spent in a classroom. Edtech is also unusual in that the end users are often not the buyers.

The buyer can be the school district, the user can be the teacher, and the real user is the learner. “It’s very difficult to bring the learner’s voice into the mix of things,” explains Ms. Hammond. And the purchase usually only takes place once per school year. Tyler Borek, co-founder of Literably, an edtech startup, says this offers fewer opportunities for iteration. Yet much of the technology used during the pandemic – classroom devices, apps for parents to track their child’s progress, and more. – is here to stay.â– 

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the title “Robot masters”