In the future, students might dismiss stories about weather-related school closures as folklore.
The COVID-19 pandemic compelled us to experiment with edtech, but it’s still unclear whether attending school virtually with a laptop at the kitchen table offers the same benefits as being in a classroom. One recent study found that only 27% of schools asked teachers to monitor student attendance and 37% were required to do 1:1 check-ins on an ongoing basis.
Can education in a post-pandemic world become more accessible, asynchronous and persistent? Or will our digital divide deepen existing inequities in our educational system?
To consider the issue, four TechCrunch staffers looked at the future of edtech and remote learning:
- Devin Coldewey
- Natasha Mascarenhas
- Alex Wilhelm
- Danny Crichton
Devin Coldewey: Gaming will transform remote learning, but stigma must be addressed
When I was a kid, we played SimCity in computer class once we’d finished our typing lessons, five-paragraph essays and so on. I always thought I was pulling a fast one by zipping through the assignments and getting straight to building my city, but the truth is I was learning just as much with one as the other. The game fooled me into learning about city infrastructure, taxes and other civic concepts that I probably would have fallen asleep learning had I been reading about them.
As a preschool teacher I found myself on the other side of this phenomenon, finding ways to impart learning on my little charges without boring them — and they were easily bored. It was always better to learn by doing, but kids don’t do anything unless it’s fun.
The pandemic isn’t just affecting higher education; Fourth graders and middle school kids are being thrown for a loop as well — not to mention their teachers. Gaming has to be part of the solution.
Our education system has a sort of built-in fun-to-learning ratio that gets smaller as the years go on, because many of the tools we use to teach core concepts are dated and static. There are a few “edutainment” products if kids are lucky enough to have the iPads or laptops to use them on, but not enough, and they’re plainly of a lower order than the real games kids play all the time. When a kid’s hobby is playing something like Fortnite or Breath of the Wild, does an algebra worksheet dressed up like a 2002 Flash game really seem like anything more than work?
Educational games are stuck on the idea of adding fun to old methods of teaching instead of rethinking how learning can be accomplished outside of those methods. Yet the possibilities of teaching using remote presence and virtual worlds are staggering.
A simple and laudable example is Ubisoft’s educational mode, present in its last two Assassin’s Creed games set in ancient Egypt and classical Athens. For all that they came up short as AAA games, these astonishingly detailed sandboxes offer an entire college course’s worth of anthropology and history; in fact, a special nonviolent mode exists just for exploring those aspects of the game.
Imagine telling a classroom full of 14-year-olds that their assignment was to play Assassin’s Creed for an hour a day, find something interesting, look it up and write a paragraph about it. Or build a functioning rocket in Kerbal Space Program. Or finish a set of puzzles in The Witness and list the hidden rules that govern them. Or work with three other kids to build a model of the school in Minecraft or Roblox.
Right now, that’s practically unthinkable (outside a few forward-thinking classrooms), partly because the culture around gaming is weird, toxic and few people take the medium seriously for educational purposes. But if remote learning is going to be part of K-12 education from now on — and we’d better plan for that — we need to meet kids where they are, not try to contort them into a mold cast a century ago.
It’s difficult to visualize because “real” games aren’t built for education except as a secondary consideration. But virtual worlds are becoming venues for more than competition, and embracing that from first principles, by involving educators and students to see what is needed and how those needs can be met, will be a fruitful path for the industry to pursue.
Natasha Mascarenhas: Screen time isn’t Satan, but it’s not safe either
When the pandemic began, some parents set aside their woes about screen time. Depending on their situation, devices went from being distractions to portals to the outside world. In the education space, screen time became a tool instead of a curse. After all, teachers can’t tell kids not to text when they’re in the comfort of their own homes (I think).
I’m not a parent, but I talked to quite a few and they said screens have been a life saver since lockdowns began. One even started a company to make a TikTok for kids, which has grown 20x since June based on our last chat. Adoption isn’t just happening because it has to anymore, it’s happening because people want to learn online.
My worries begin when I think about the youngest students who now learn through screens. If you have a Twitter or Reddit account, you know that screens give an invisibility cloak to the ugliest trolls. I worry that kids will be targeted in new, scathing ways from bullies within their class, but it will be harder to track than ever before. Cyberbullying is not a new concept, but it will fester if a majority of our communications become digital.
I also worry that glamorizing screens as our fix-all solution could hurt the kids who need physical support for accountability and stability. Schools don’t just exist to teach. They are an emotional, physical and mental haven for kids who don’t have good home situations. Adding a screen and calling it a day puts these kids at an even greater risk.
So while remote learning might indeed work just fine in some cases, I don’t think we should be clambering to replace all schools with fancy Zoom calls and from-home instruction.
Alex Wilhelm: Zoom is a Band-Aid
I have several elementary school-aged nieces and nephews and also know a few parents whose children are about to head to university. Parents of younger kids are struggling more than the parents of older kids that I know, and the issues they are handling are different. But I think it’s fair to say that no parent of any child who was formerly in a traditional classroom environment — be it fifth grade or their first year of university — thinks things are going well today.
Conducting classes via Zoom was at best a Band-Aid. The pandemic rages on here in the U.S. and is unlikely to be brought under control by the scheduled start of the school year, which means local governments and parents will weigh worker productivity against community safety in several weeks.
I say all that to back into my main point: I don’t think the at-home education boom in online learning is going to stick. The notion that online schooling is chiefly a form of childcare for younger kids now seems more clearly evident than ever, and universities apparently are more like hotels than institutions of higher learning, with business models that hinge on charging insane amounts of money for in-person instruction — no parent wants to pay $50,000 a year for their kid to sit at home and watch Zoom.
So, what will the impact of online learning be for education? Perhaps a mini-boom in tooling that makes the situation for younger and older kids alike actually work. What we have now does not. In fact, all we’ve done is use a time-worn parenting hack (tablets) and decided that having fidgety kids watch people talk will substitute for the social and education environment of a classroom.
It would be a laughing matter if it wasn’t so bad for kids and so hard on parents. Without new tooling, this year will be an aberration that is corrected as soon as society can get to it. With new tools and services and methods we could see education wind up less focused on in-person instruction. But I’m not seeing those projects come out. Yet, at least.
It would be a real bummer if this forced use of edtech didn’t end up delivering new and better ways to teach. But aside from that, we’re going back to where we were because parents need a break and college at home sounds dreadful.
Danny Crichton: The high costs of free learning
Higher education has been a bubble. There are too many universities charging too many students exorbitant tuition to ever have been sustainable.
We have been talking about a bubble in this sector for years, but obviously with the outbreak of COVID-19, the pinhole that might have slowly deflated this bloated industry was replaced with a giant katana sword.
Enter the new holy grail of remote learning. With better communication technologies than ever before, universities are supposedly going to instantly find new markets online, bringing classes and curriculums into the digital world while salvaging their business models in the process.
Yet, there is a new bubble forming — one of expectations around the price and true cost of remote learning. The idea is that a combination of user scale (i.e., more students per class) and digital transmission will dramatically lower the cost of education, helping universities with their margin problems.
There’s just one problem: Online learning isn’t as cheap as many people in Silicon Valley seem to think it is.
Let’s just start with the basics of video production. Outside of a janky video shot with a MacBook camera that no student wants to suffer through for 90 minutes, it takes serious effort to produce quality instructional videos that keep audiences engaged. Decent production values require proper audio equipment, studio lighting, multiple cameras and crews, as well as editors and directors to make videos that keep students’ attention. All of that costs money, and universities are completely unequipped to produce this at scale.
Next, you get to distribution. Maybe you can dump videos on YouTube and count that as a “university.” In the real world though, there is an expectation that students can interact with an instructor and with each other to further their engagement with the material under discussion. How do you select, procure, manage and moderate these distribution platforms at scale for thousands of students across hundreds of classes and dozens of departments? That’s a whole new workforce that again, universities have to hire for.
Then you get to the more personalized aspects of education. Someone has to grade your software projects, critical essays and theses to provide the necessary feedback mechanisms to progress your knowledge. Despite the best intentions of AI researchers, the reality is that if you’re in college, your work should be judged by someone qualified in the field to assess it and provide feedback. Your underpaid grad student grading 20 papers a week on campus can’t suddenly scale to 1,000 students online.
Finally, outside of individual classes and courses, you need peer groups and advising to actually help you think through what you are learning and most importantly, why you are learning it. While college should be at least partially about acquiring quality skills, it’s also an opportunity to learn why we learn the skills that we do — the critical metacognition that separates a fully educated professional in a field from an amateur.
If you notice the thread across all these activities, it’s human labor: and a lot of it. A mathematician on campus needs a blackboard and some chalk to teach a room of students. In the digital world, now they need a producer, a director, camera crews, audio engineers, software engineers to integrate online platforms, technical support staff to handle the inevitable issues, moderators to manage online forums and the list goes on.
Far from lowering the cost of education, online education comparable to in-person courses are often more expensive.
So why the love of remote learning?
There are plenty of reasons to get excited — novel pedagogical methods to teaching material, perhaps faster feedback loops, and wider access to more courses. Cost though isn’t one of them. Don’t underestimate the expense it takes to produce online classes and hold the standards on quality. Until we have artificial general intelligence (AGI), instruction is going to be a human-centered endeavor — and it takes a lot more human effort online than in-person.
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