Education Policy Imaginary and Crises: The Case of EdTech and the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

Crises manifest in diverse ways and among the various effects that ensue, educational provisioning is impacted. Crises may result in significant shifts in how education figures in the policy imaginary. The COVID-19 crisis marks one such moment that decisively shaped the education policy imaginary. EdTech came to be seen as a global solution enabling education to continue in an uninterrupted manner. This new imaginary is distinct from the pre-pandemic models (that sought to integrate digital technologies into education in a phased manner) in that EdTech can be packaged, personalised, platformed and made available to consumers at their convenience and capacity to pay for devices and resources. The note thus tracks the emergence during the COVID-19 crisis of an education policy imaginary that is built around EdTech and argues for the need to critically review it, given how such policy responses can and do reveal and exacerbate the existing inequities in education.

Introduction

Crises can manifest in different ways. And they emerge at different points. Some are protracted whilst others are short-term. Some are driven by natural events and disasters such as the tsunami of 2004 or the spread of zoonotic viruses such as the COVID-19 pandemic, whilst others derive from the action of humans such as war and conflict. Further, crises can displace other significant events, as seen for instance in how concerns about COVID-19 pushed aside issues raised by groups protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in India or the Black Lives Matter protest in the USA or calls in South Africa for the decolonisation of education. Drivers of crises are multiple and interconnected. As argued by Sayed et al. (2021), the COVID-19 pandemic is a result of various crises which are in turn connected to environmental encroachment and development trajectory choices. The COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis, damaged lives and livelihoods and interrupted the provision of social services. It undermined social, political and economic stability, thereby necessitating policy response at national and international levels. The policy response to the COVID-19 crisis for mitigating and dealing with its immediate effects set in motion patterns and actions for future.

Education Policy Imaginary and Crises

A curious aspect of our times is that a state of crisis comes to be definitively recognised as one when an international or a national policy proclaims it as such. Without the recognition that policy bestows on a situation or an issue, a problem scenario or disruption is regarded as ephemeral at best or ‘non-existent’ at worst. For example, stark levels of inequality within and between countries are rarely mentioned as crisis. In education, infrastructural deficits, teacher shortage, lack of student access to quality education, and inequities and discriminatory practices within educational systems have rarely been regarded as crises by policy-makers. Increasingly, it is policy that names a crisis, marks its existence, shapes the understanding as well as the experience around it and purportedly provides a plan of action in response to mitigate its effects. In doing so, policy imaginary and policy responses are influenced by various group interests, albeit unequally. In this note, through the example of EdTech’s dominance during the COVID-19 crisis, we highlight how policy imaginary can be captured by certain groups and how certain approaches and ideas are presented as the only available solution. Klein (2007) refers to this process as ‘Shock Doctrine’ whereby crises are used to present certain neo-liberal alternatives as the only possible solution to remedy the state of anomie and dysfunction.

In the years before the pandemic hit the globe in February 2020, the biggest crisis within education was identified as a ‘learning crisis’. A 2019 article on the World Bank website highlighted the problem, as reflected in its title, ‘The education crisis: Being in school is not the same as learning’ (World Bank, 2019). The web article drew attention to an issue that has concerned policy makers in recent decades: that in many countries of the Global South, children do not acquire age-appropriate learning although they attend school on a regular basis. However, this concern took on a new dimension during the COVID-19 lockdown. The trepidation of ‘learning loss’ because children were not attending schools became an all-pervasive one for which a solution had to be found. In their article entitled, ‘Crisis and disruptions: Educational reflections, (re)imaginations and (re)vitalisation’, Sayed et al. (2021) focus on learning loss as one of the three sets of images and imaginings that were predominant in the discourse surrounding education during the COVID-19 crisis which in turn shaped the policy imaginary. The trope of learning loss enabled the discourse with regard to the other two sets of interconnected images/imaginings: about building back better and relying on techno-educational resources.

Further, the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified certain effects of government policy-making approaches and choices. One such policy effect in education has been what can be considered as policy displacement. Prior to COVID-19, education had been called to account by the Black Lives Matter movement and the call for decolonisation in the Global South. Such protests argued for critical interrogation of the nature, purpose and form of education. Yet during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, governments muted their response to such issues, moving them to the peripheries of the education discourse (Ahmed et al., 2021; John et al., 2021). Crises then offer a government the possibility of foreclosing the space for difficult and important conversations about education, and instead, choosing solutions that are in most cases techno-rational.

During and after crises, policy choices and decisions are often made unilaterally by governments justified by the need for an emergency response, with minimal engagement of key personnel and stakeholders. In education, strategies were set in place in India and South Africa after the COVID-19 pandemic with minimal attention to teachers’ views. The blind faith in technology-driven education solutions is an exemplar of ‘techno-education in which the door is flung open for large education companies and the growing intensification of educational corporatisation to control the architecture of the education enterprise and take ownership of content’ (Sayed et al., 2021, p. 15).

The COVID-19 Crisis and EdTech Dominance

As a response to the COVID-19 crisis, educational institutions across the globe turned to internet-based EdTech platforms for solutions. For education systems of countries like India with internet penetration at a mere 8% of households, the online shift forged a digital divide excluding students from remote geographical locations and marginalised backgrounds (Kundu, 2020). Online modalities in school and higher education, even where accessible, were poor substitutes, with low participation and little engagement (Chandran et al., 2021; Ramchand et al., 2023). Learning as delivery of content through EdTech affordances displaced fundamental notions of learning as a human experience. Techno-education was hailed as an advent of 4IR in South Africa, delegitimising sociality and student wellbeing, facets integral to schooling. Racialised fault lines in provisioning techno-education lay exposed in South Africa, as 67% of the country’s schools that are no-fee schools serving poor black communities came to a ‘virtual standstill’ due to the absence of devices or internet connectivity. Meanwhile, affluent schools transitioned to a combination of online, face-to-face and blended forms of learning drawing social and material capital from public as well as privatised spaces (Sayed et al., 2021). Effects of these exclusions become increasingly evident as students and teachers returned to campuses, with extensive COVID related health and mental health issues and economic distress that are best addressed at structural rather than individual levels.

Nonetheless, policy choices during the pandemic have successfully created an imaginary of education as an activity that can continue uninterrupted online through EdTech. This new imaginary of EdTech is distinct from the pre-pandemic models in that it can be packaged, personalised, platformed and made available to consumers at their convenience and capacity to pay for devices and resources. Learning loss from school closures, purported to cause an earning loss of $21trillion worldwide, serves to further justify EdTech interventions to mitigate the crisis (Haßler et al., 2020; World Bank, 2022). This imaginary of crisis and EdTech as a solution explains the exponential growth of Edtech during the pandemic, garnering a market value of $6 billion in 2022 with a projected growth of 30% by 2026 (Global Data, 2022). These figures affirm Edtech’s capture of the policy imaginary as a solution to educational challenges.

The takeover by EdTech in ensuring personalised pedagogies has consumed the policy imaginary with important educational consequences that require critical attention for several reasons. First, although digital technologies integrated with Information and Communication Technologies in Education (ICTE) can improve student engagement and learning (NCERT, 2012), they are displaced by technocentric EdTech models as efficient solutions that provide both the structure and substance of educational input (Burch & Miglani, 2018). Second, EdTech models present themselves as approaches which do not require qualified well-trained teachers to deliver education, thereby appealing to governments seeking to reduce teacher cost and overcoming the perceived teacher stranglehold of the education service. Data-driven systems with adaptive and individualised approaches are aggressively marketed as solutions for low-income areas, as a way to reduce burden on government investment for schools and teachers (Kasinathan & Dasarathy, 2022; Miglani & Burch, 2019). Recasting educational issues as individual problems allows EdTech to be proffered as an effective remedy. For instance, out-of-school children are deemed ‘incompatible’ with the ‘rigid’ demands of schooling and can benefit from cost-effective, high-quality EdTech interventions (Haßler et al., 2020; Patnaik, 2023). Third, Edtech models premised on narrow behaviourist models of pedagogy amenable to algorithms written by computer programmes are now pitched as the most efficient modality of lifelong learning. Rapid adoption of such AI-based curricula and automated grading systems are advocated for students and teachers alike (UNESCO, 2022).

Need for Reviewing the EdTech Policy Imaginary

The quick and predatory solutions of EdTech witnessed in many contexts reveal a lack of foresight and inept planning for disasters and emergencies as evident in the pandemic. The danger of EdTech as an under regulated field has led to major concerns about data privacy and the vulnerability of low-income groups to the targeted marketing strategies of EdTech companies (Kasinathan & Dasarathy, 2022). In this context, we argue that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic as emblematic of crises in general reveals that default policymaking often results in policy solutions such as those we have written about which post-crisis act as a drag on progressive equity-focused education reforms. Yet, crises can also engender new possibilities. Referring specifically to the COVID-19 crisis, Soudien and Harvey (2021, p. 170) contend, ‘The value of the crisis, we argue, is that for the first time in almost the whole of the history of mass education, stakeholders in the learning process intuited those new approaches needed to be developed for facilitating the making of deeply just and equitable learning regimes, methodologies, styles, and practices’. To this end, we propose a set of inter related responses to crises temporally and in future.

Education solutions for crises must be part of system-wide reform and underpinned by a commitment to the right of education as a public good. In the case of EdTech as an educational solution, which has been the focus of our note, it must be tightly regulated and cannot proceed as a vehicle for the private sector colonisation of the education public space.

Foreground equity in education policymaking during crises and in particular the needs of the impoverished and marginalised. This requires recognition of the short-term profit-driven approaches to educational change and reform, redistribution of resources such as technology, and representation of all stakeholders, particularly those most affected—our teachers and learners.

The above are ideas offered as possibilities for dialogue about what an equitable and quality education system might look like during and after crises.