Why Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
(And How We're Missing It)
When people say technology will never revolutionize Education, I believe we must either disagree about what it means to revolutionize an industry or disagree about the impact that technology can have.
The last time I heard this was from a talk given by, the Youtuber behind Veritasium, Derek Muller. I should quickly acknowledge that Veritasium makes some of the best entertaining educational content on Youtube that I have seen, period. I am impressed by how much one Youtuber has democratized physics understanding.
But I am not impressed that Muller declared in his talk that technology will never revolutionize Education. I don’t just say that because I am building in this space. Many teachers and school administrators would agree with Muller. There have been many waves of technology that have promised to upend the system but none were successful at this goal.
But what if we don’t all have the same understanding of what it means to revolutionize an Industry? what if we haven’t appreciated the impact technology has already had on Education?
What Does 'Revolutionize' Mean Anyway?
We criticize past technologies for not upending Education but we seem to be picky about how we set the bar. Since 2000, some industries have been said to have been revolutionized by the internet and mobile devices.
Retail was supposedly revolutionized by eCommerce, but i still have many friends who buy most of their clothing items in person. Media was supposedly revolutionized by streaming and on demand content, but I still went to see the movie Sinners last weekend with a friend who was going for the fourth time. Transportation was upended by the Uber and Lyft, but I still use public transportation nearly every day and i never choose ride share options for multi hour journeys.
All these sectors underwent significant change even if they were not wholly revolutionized. Maybe something similar happened with Education?
In the 80s, TVs were supposed to beam an expert into every classroom while baby sitters sit back and watch but that didn’t succeed at scale because of the interactive nature of learning. The 90s promised revolution of Education through interactivity on computers but that also didn’t upend the industry.
The most recent craze of the 2010’s was MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses like Coursera, Edx, Udacity. The typically slow moving bureaucratic higher institutions spent immense resources on converting classes to online formats and even erecting departments just for churning out MOOCs. These did not succeed in democratizing access to quality education either.
While these technologies failed on their promise, they were more impactful than memory might suggest, though. Take MOOCs for example.
MOOCs do work really well, just only for the more self-managing learners who already have a high school or undergraduate level education. Not to mention that most courses in my undergraduate education had a lot of MOOC like aspects with pre recorded modules, corresponding activity sets, as well as self-pacing.
In reality, technology has transformed Education in ways that are quite subtle and profound. A great example is a technology older than all the ones I’ve mentioned — Optical Character Recognition.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
OCR was not initially used in Education. After its early invention in 1914 by Emanuel Goldberg, it took a few decades before the technology got good enough to be used to decode mailing addresses in the Post office system.
Eventually, this technology transformed the classroom without ever entering it. Standardized testing and other large scale assessments had been growing in popularity specifically because of their benefit of assigning a reliable standardized score.
However, they had a bottleneck. It took so many labour hours to manually grade all those questions. So when OCR got good enough along with Scanners and Computers, it made sense to automate all that grading.
The somewhat unexpected result, was that these tests were significantly optimized for OCR which thrives on bubble style selections. This increased the number of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) and True/False Questions (TFQs) while reducing the number of essays, diagrams and free responses.
The awesome thing that happened next is teachers began giving out more assessments, since they could be graded faster. While students don’t love more tests, the pedagogy is unequivocal about the impact of retrieval practice on learning. Testing students more often was a sweeping horizontal benefit. A benefit so big, you could argue it revolutionized Education!
The not so awesome thing that followed was that teachers then began changing the way they taught to be more tailored to the kinds of exams students were going to face – “Teaching to the test.” This, in turn, swayed students to also prioritize skills that would benefit them on these assessments especially memorization and recognition. I mean, I love a good acronym, but teachers stopped focusing on skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity which are more difficult to test on MCQs or TFQs.
When I look back on the influence of OCRs its hard to ignore the magnitude of the impact. Teachers tested students a lot more. They changed how they taught. And students changed how they learned.
The AI age
Here are three lessons we can take from the impact of OCR technology on Education as AI transforms society.
First, is that a technology that significantly affects many sectors of society (OCR affected our mail, banking, retail, security and identity systems) is likely to also transform Education. OCR did not directly help students learn.
It sped up other processes (grading) which freed teachers to apply more pedagogical theories (increased testing.) AI will coexist with, and enhance, rather than entirely replace teachers. It will improve lesson planning, provide feedback, and aggregate data which are all secondary to the lecture experience.
Second, we know that AI can be the redemption for OCR. Before OCR, the main forms of assessments were oral. Student were individually and privately evaluated by a teacher or publicly evaluated collectively in the form of a presentation. This was terribly time consuming, hence the embrace of OCR and the MCQs and TFQs.
AI can reclaim some lost ground. That could mean more free response questions on SATs, WASSCEs, or IGCSEs. Or engaging critical thinking in the oral defense of possibly AI-generated essays. Or even new assessments with open-ended submission formats, focused on the feedback and learning process.
Third, we know that the negative impact OCR had on learning was subtle and profound. But had they been armed with information and opportunity, teachers would have prioritized teaching soft skills, digital literacy, and creativity.
This means we must be deliberate in this AI moment. In fact, we must not go “oh shucks, I guess AI will never revolutionize education” as Muller’s words might suggest. Instead, we, builders, teachers, and administrators, need to be ready for the immense impact AI will have. We must ensure our philosophies, decisions, and actions with AI prioritize students for the changing world they are graduating into.