COVID was to EdTech as The Fukushima Nuclear event was to Japanese Robotics -- the
one big event where all hands were needed on deck and the decades of investment came up...lacking.
In the case of Fukushima - getting entry and information on the inside of the reactor core eventually required U.S. developed robots, built for much more challenging and pragmatic environments.
With EdTech, for decades we knew that it was a backup option to solid in-classroom, instructor led, education. AFAIK, measured outcomes on non-traditional learning have nearly always lagged the classroom. But more and more institutions were turning to it because, quite frankly, its cheaper -- with student flexibility as the trailing, but strongly upsold, benefit.
The 100%, digital, EdTech event that was COVID has forced a reckoning. We finally have, at massive scale, real data (and not small or unusual situations) that comprehensively shows the tech either isn't ready, or never will be.
I personally don't understand why this seems to be such a surprise. Ever since I went through school, there was an attempt to shove technogadgets into classrooms that offered very minimal educational value over a teacher using their judgment, training, and experience to work with a student to learn a topic.
There's a part in this article that I think is the key problem:
> What he found was equal parts surprising and predictable: nearly everything has a positive impact on student learning.
I remember a specific "training" I received years ago as an adult. The instructor put each student through a comprehensive skills assessment. Then the students spent 8 weeks in a room with the resources we should have used for learning -- books, video, software, and so on -- but without any instruction of any kind. At the end of the 8 weeks we were all assessed again and voila! nearly all students had shown progress. Great success! and the instructor was free to continue doing next to nothing and doomscrolling Facebook most of the day in his best job ever. Providing no education whatsoever, but just access to resources, had a demonstrated positive outcome.
A lot of EdTech falls into this same sort of bullshit pile. It doesn't really do anything in particular, but will sometimes show the promise of improvement. Fingers are pointed to improperly trained educators, or lack of time with the technogadget, or some other reason other than the tech when searching for what's holding the tech back. What the deployers of EdTech are really measuring is not educational outcomes, but improvements to the bottom-line. If they were really focused on education, then EdTech would only be used where it should a learning effect at least as great as classroom instruction. But we know it generally doesn't, and yet here it is in our classrooms.
Source: Developed adult learning curriculum in advanced technical areas and delivered material to over 2,000 students who were required to have had at least an undergraduate degree and significant other job-specific training as prerequisites. Was also a "cursed" gifted kid in K-12.