Sunday Posts

  Let’s start with a broad definition of education technology: When Jan Comenius was using vernacular medium and illustrations to teach a foreign language in the Seventeenth century (his Gate of the Tongue unlocked came out in 1631) , he was using the new technology of print and an educational idea (learning through illustrated textbooks) to create a new form of education.   However, such a definition of technology would also narrow down what we could call Education Technology (Edtech, as it is fashionably called). C ontemporary Edtech is a catch-all phrase for any technology used within the educational context. Duolingo, which employs an app to offer a new, gamified, approach to language learning , will be clubbed together with some boring classroom management software in the same   category. Instead, it makes more sense to define education technology to include such applications of scientific knowledge to further educational goals, rather than any piece of machinery or...

I have been, admittedly, a constant sceptic of the inflated valuations of online higher education companies.  Part of the reason is practical: Most online education companies focus much more on sales than creating sustainable institutional structures, looking to create an educational sub-prime. Their aim is often to 'uberise' - commoditise the inherent trust and respect that make an educational community work. That focus on scale, without a proportional attention on the outcome, makes an irresponsible business. Indeed, the Chinese government has recently stepped in to make this precise point. But there are also other reasons why I think these edtech valuations are frothy and unsustainable. I think the investors misunderstand the nature of education, particularly higher education, and therefore, their estimates about the prospect of online higher ed are wildly wrong. The pandemic was an aberration, when people were forced to stay home; as we return to normal, online education wi...

    There is a certain presumption that after the pandemic, edtech is the future of education. Which edtech, I ask. If that's puzzling, that would be ironic. There is a disconnect if we assume that after the pandemic, there will be no business-as-usual, but at the same time, expect the edtech to be business-as-usual.  The pandemic has normalised edtech but also exposed it. The lame excuses about its limitations have been forcefully discounted but its true limitations have been seen and felt. Therefore, as the societies emerge from the pandemic and settle into new ways of doing things, edtech, like everything else, has to change itself.  I have followed the chatter about what comes after, and picked up three key shifts in the conversation: 1. Pedagogy-market fit : The most interesting speculation I came across is that this is time for edtech entrepreneurs to look for 'pedagogy market fit' ( See here ). Indeed, this is old hat, what went on in the guises of instruction...

  For this post, I owe a debt of gratitude to a fellow-traveller who connected through this blog and introduced me to Bloom's 2-Sigma problem . Serendipitous as it was, the conversation led me to think of my own quest in a new light and, to reframe the Human+Tech network proposition with a new sense of purpose. It was no longer a solution searching for a problem; instead, there was a clear goal and even a metric against which we can measure the efficacy of our intervention. For me, this is also a great way to move beyond the false binary (as described in an earlier post - Human+Tech in Education ) of human vs tech in education. While I celebrated the possibilities of technology - my entire career was about deploying new technologies - I always resisted the logic of automation: I do not think that the technologies can replace the human in education. Instead, I see Edtech's big - and sole - role as one of augmentation, one like the mobile phone that can carry human voice across t...

Future becomes obsolete, but it happens at a uneven pace.  A wise man once said that in history, 'in years, weeks happen, and then in weeks, years happen'. But, the same wise man - Lenin, as it happened to be - thought he could see the future and shape it. As it turned out, the future didn't behave. This should serve as a cautionary tale for today's Gurus, confidently peering into the future. Our ideas and our expectations, shaped by the slow years, proved completely inadequate now. And, besides, the prediction business does real harm: If the predictions become forceful enough (or are forced on others, as in Russia), it makes us run in directions we shouldn't and makes us ignore stuff that we should be paying attention to. What's happening right now in Higher Education is a clear, time-compressed example of ideas (and predictions) out of sync with reality. Only six months ago we thought the future of Higher Ed was digital. Six months on, there are only a few tru...

I work at the technology-education interface. Most of my day is spent in thinking about how to use technology to expand access to education and to enhance our capabilities to educate.  Sometimes, I look at the other side of the equation: How education may help spread the use of technology and enable more people to benefit from new technology. An early convert to the Internet, I rarely thought about an education to confront technology.  Until recently, that is. But I am increasingly uneasy about what technology does. It's quite clear what Facebook can do, and often does: Shape our daily lives and make us dance to the tune of some shadowy master! WhatsApp can take over our every waking moment and drown us in hate-filled cacophony. Google can box us into echo chambers of our queries. Then there are others, like Oracle, who thrives on an empire built around our data. For me, it looks like a prison of mirrors, where our every little move is observed, repeated and studied eternally,...

When someone asks what I do, I like to say I work on Education Innovation. This sounds vague enough to give me two advantages: Most conversations end there, and only the interested, and interesting, progress. I get an opportunity to make the point that I am in Education, but play no part in the current multi-billion dollar 'industry', that gigantic factory of human processing; rather, I slog in the twilight zone of impossible transformation, hoping that another, fairer and better, way is possible. And, then, I am hit with the question: 'So, EdTech, eh?' At this point, it becomes a choice how boring I want to be. Imagine this moment as one when the Party gets going and other people are already engaged in more interesting conversations about money, cars, holidays and other things that fascinate men. I am about to hide in the quiet corner where no one can find me to pull me to the Dance Floor. This is usually the worst sort of moment to try make my point that Educati...

I hope some people will agree with me if I say EdTech is over-rated. It's a nifty term, much broader than the older, nerdy, E-Learning; it is also a conscious claim to affinity with its famous and richer cousin, FinTech. What one gets to hear in the EdTech conference circuit is boasts about how many millions companies are raising, which is really meaningless in a world of loose monetary policy and inflated private valuations. The other most common refrain is how Educators don't get EdTech, which really means that this may be a set of characters in search of a play. Most of its boldest claims - Clouds of Schools, Self-directed Learners, Universal Access - remain forever in future, and only companies dealing with boring stuff - compliance training, video content, Learning Management System etc - make any money.  However, the overselling of EdTech creates bigger problems than sub-prime investment and pointless conferences. It crowds out the conversation about Education Innov...

Education will be transformed by technology, but not until the technologists have fully appreciated the Culture question. This is EdTech's blind spot. Culture is 'soft' - it is hard to capture in a spreadsheet - and yet Education is a 'cultural activity', deeply embedded in the society that surrounds the learner and constantly informed by its history. Tech, on the other hand, at least in its modern, global, incarnation, wants to be culture agnostic: Its quest for scale is intricately linked to its ability to operate culture blind. The EdTech businesses fail to account for culture for more reasons than just its inherent claim for scale. They also assume technology is used in an uniform way, despite all evidence on the contrary. The users almost always adapt technology to their own purpose, rather than changing their habits to suit what the technologists originally intended, but such ideas are not welcome in technology circles addicted to the idea of 'ha...

EdTech was one of the fancy terms that took hold in the last decade. It succeeded 'e-Learning', which started the journey around the time of 'e-Commerce', but failed to get a second life in the Web 2.0 world. The reason for e-Learning's failure and e-Commerce's resilience is perhaps instructive: Despite the bold claims, there were no Amazon or eBay of e-Learning. EdTech gave a new lease of life to the idea of technology-delivered learning. EdTech stuck, and terms like mLearning did not go anywhere, partly because of its scope - it embraced everything - and partly because of fashion, and its more successful cousin, FinTech. However, the question now is whether EdTech would be able to succeed like FinTech, whose impact is genuinely visible (as is e-Commerce's), or would it have the same fate as e-Learning, an unmourned passing away? Technology Industry and its investors are adept at making up terms and cooking up market sizes. The reason they make up...

Conversations about Education Innovation is often about entitlements, who gets what. The conversations about EdTech plays along these lines too - either you are for EdTech or you are against it. Indeed, the technology vendors claim that this is all win-win, but from the point of view of poor adjunct, whose private time is invaded and paid time is cut, this picture is more difficult to see. And, since the very people who are to implement the technology seems to lose out from its success, the gap between rhetoric and reality of EdTech remains quite wide. One could observe this tension in most technology debate. From taxi drivers chasing Uber cars out of airports and hotel owners lobbying for stricter regulations to keep AirBNB out, there is a battle going on in different sectors and professions. The usual narrative, one that plays out in mainstream media, is to shrug it off - isn't it inevitable that technology is going to eat the world - and carry on. There has always been win...

One promise of EdTech that gets talked about is about its ability to reduce the cost of education delivery, and thereby, expanding access. This is a powerful notion that drives many business plans and policy decisions. Information Technology has changed a lot of things, but changing the lives of the poor is where it becomes truly transformational. The quest for efficiency and better management have impacted healthcare significantly, and enhanced its impact and extended its reach. We have seen similar transformational change in Banking and Retail. This is the model we now expect EdTech to follow. Already, we know something about its impact. When I was with NIIT, I saw first-hand the impact of The Hole-in-the-Wall experiment that Professor Sugata Mitra, now a TED fellow, carried out. One big outcome of this was to put an end to the patronising notions about the intellectual capacities of the poor that we all secretly held. This idea of making a computer available, unsupervised,...