Abstract
Digital technology is frequently positioned as being central to the establishment of a ‘future focused’ education system that provides high quality student-focused learning opportunities and re-envisioned educational outcomes. While recognising the potential of technology, this paper explores some of the questions about its role in education and learning – in particular, how technology addresses issues of equity and social justice; what it means to design educational and learning experiences that are truly student-focused; and the potential for technology to dehumanise the learning process. The paper concludes with some considerations of how to integrate digital technology effectively into an education system.
The need to re-imagine
The re-imagining of any aspects of education or learning must be situated within the broader contexts of their operation. That is, we must consider the underlying reasons for this re-imagining, and question what we are doing and why we are doing it, and how the re-imagining will contribute to improvements in practice and to improved opportunities and outcomes for all learners.
Currently, education systems around the world are failing too many of our young people. In New Zealand, this failing is frequently conceptualised as a high quality/low equity education system. The data indicate that in New Zealand the impact of socio-economic status (SES) on learning outcomes is one of the largest in the OECD, with children from low SES families over-represented in the tail end of the achievement distribution. However, it is not only the low SES students and families that the education system in New Zealand is failing. Increasingly, the nation’s education system is also failing nearly all of its students by not preparing them adequately, or equip them with the knowledge, skills, beliefs or dispositions that they require, to be active, engaged and healthy participants in society and the economy.
The nature of jobs and employment is changing. The New Zealand Institute for Economic Research (NZIER and CAANZ, 2014) predicted that 46% of jobs in New Zealand were at risk of automation in the following two decades (i.e., to 2035). However, the McKinsey Global Institute (Mourshed et al., 2013) estimated that by 2020 there will be a global shortfall of 85 million high- and middle-skilled workers. While the role of education and schooling must extend beyond simply preparing young people for employment, it is also critical that young people are equipped with the knowledge and skills they require to enter the workforce, and that the education system is structured to support the journey from education to employment.
Changing social structures and evolving social issues are placing new demands on school systems. There is an increasing number of learners with unique learning needs, and an increasing demand for personalised learning opportunities. Changing family structures and the increasing diversity and multiplicity of worldviews are prompting a rethinking of current models of learning and the design of New Zealand’s school system.
Around the world, changing educational paradigms are redefining the design of schools and the learning opportunities they offer. The development of new pedagogical approaches is challenging the organisational structures of schools, including the division of roles, what it means to be a teacher and a learner, and how schools partner and engage with their communities. New findings emerging from educational and social science research, as well as the human sciences, are providing a deeper understanding of how we learn and how best to facilitate and structure educational opportunities. Underpinning these changing paradigms are technological advances, which have significant potential to disrupt education.
So, how can we respond to these changing forces? Gilbert suggested that: Change will not come from adding more ‘inputs’. These new inputs will just be ‘colonised’ to ‘old’ ways of thinking … System-wide change has to come from within the system, not from ‘top down’ initiatives designed to produce specific kinds of change, thought to be knowable in advance. We need within-system initiatives designed to produce more – and deeper – interactions between the system’s elements – people (teachers, students, school leaders, parents, policymakers, researchers, and so on) and their physical and intellectual environment/s. (Gilbert, 2015: 2)
Questioning technology
Digital technology is frequently positioned as being central to the establishment of a ‘future focused’ education system that provides high quality student-led learning opportunities and re-envisioned educational outcomes. However, learning – and here I refer in particular to school-level learning – must also be positioned within a broader sense of for what purpose we are educating: an empathy with, and deep understanding of, the perspectives, predicaments and lives of those involved are critical. Furthermore, while digital technology is important, it is essential that careful thought is given to the rhetoric employed when discussing digital technology in education. As Kellner warned: Technology itself does not necessarily improve teaching and learning, and will certainly not of itself overcome acute socioeconomic divisions. Indeed, without proper re-visioning for education and without adequate resources, pedagogy and educational practices, technology could be an obstacle or burden to genuine learning and will probably increase rather than overcome existing divisions of power, cultural capital, and wealth. (Kellner, 2004: 12)
Our research, however, has determined two key factors that can work to undermine this focus on the student as determiner of their learning. The first is that while MOOCs theoretically allow learners to shape their own learning, success still tends to be measured according to traditional outcome measures and metrics. Retention rates, completion and certification are still used as the key determinants of learning and quality. Despite a high proportion of MOOC participants stating that they do so for personal enjoyment and interest, rather than to complete a course, the measures of success continue to be driven by traditional outcomes.
A second potential limitation of learning in MOOCs is that the current open access model, which allows anyone to enrol, is challenged by a growing recognition that not everyone is adequately prepared, with the necessary autonomy, dispositions and skills, to engage fully in a MOOC (Littlejohn et al., 2016). The informal, largely self-directed nature of learning in MOOCs, and the lack of support or interpersonal connections during a course, means that, despite being open to anyone, learning opportunities are in reality restricted to those with the necessary knowledge and disposition to engage independently.
There is a risk that new learning opportunities, many of which are using digital technologies, and have an underlying mission to open up access to education and learning, often referred to as the ‘democratization’ of learning, are not successfully achieving this mission. Selwyn suggested that too frequently they continue to: Assume the norm of the ‘universal learner’ – someone who is self-motivated, well resourced, inherently sociable, altruistic, rich in time and good will, happy to experiment and able to fail with confidence. There is little consideration of differences between individuals and deviations from this norm. (Selwyn, 2016: 142–143)
Learning that is student-focused
So, what does it mean to design an education system and learning opportunities that are responsive both to the collective needs of society as well as to the needs, circumstances and lives of its individual students? How can we structure and shape teaching and learning? And what are the roles and responsibilities of educators in this?
Learning that is student-focused and student-oriented requires deep knowledge both of individual students and theories of how we learn. Integral to this is an understanding of the importance to learning of agency, self-efficacy, motivation and interest, and of how learning opportunities and contexts can be structured to support these learning dispositions. Students’ beliefs about their academic capabilities play an essential role in their motivation to achieve, while the ability to regulate learning behaviours and to adopt strategies and dispositions to facilitate this are critical to learning.
Illeris (2003) claimed that adults learn only what is meaningful to them and take only as much responsibility for their learning and development as they want or deem necessary. Furthermore, adults will not learn something in which they have no interest, or consider unimportant. The same is equally true for children and so we need to ensure that schools are constructing learning activities and learning contexts that are meaningful to the learners. To do so requires substantial knowledge of students’ backgrounds, prior learning, any learning challenges they face, and their interests. It is also requires strong pedagogical content knowledge and a high level understanding of the overarching learning journey, because interest in the absence of the necessary learning conditions will not nurture continued learning.
This means that the ways in which learning opportunities that are responsive to students are created will change depending on the context in which the learning is taking place and the content and subject matter that are the focus of the learning. For instance, to learn to read requires the development of specific knowledge and skills; furthermore, the development of this knowledge and these skills generally requires expert guidance and ongoing support. While the progression of learning steps required to learn to read is well-established in the research literature and in practice, it is possible to implement measures to make this process more responsive to individual learners – for instance, providing texts that are aligned with students’ interests, and ensuring that the best learning strategies are used, given a student’s stage of development and existing knowledge-base.
Digital technologies have the potential to accelerate our ability to construct a responsive, equitable education system. Equally, however, it has the potential to reinforce existing models, systems and inequities.
Selwyn suggested that when considering the role of digital technology in education it is essential that we adopt a critical stance, and ask ourselves the following questions: Just why should digital education be any more successful in overcoming educational inequality and disadvantage than previous interventions and reforms? Why should the latest digital education be capable of overcoming entrenched patterns of disparity and disadvantage? And, what is it that makes people believe that digital education will be different? (Selwyn, 2016: 30)
So where does this leave us?
It is essential to design learning opportunities and activities that are responsive to the individual student. To a certain extent, digital affordances can support this. For instance, learning analytics and so-called personalised learning systems are getting better at tracking what stage students have reached and the skills and knowledge they must build in order to continue to progress; however, they also take us only so far.
Personalised learning systems tend to be concerned primarily with delivering predetermined content to students, albeit in different sequences and various forms of presentation. The extent to which they are truly responsive to the whole learner is questionable. Furthermore, educational data systems only measure what can be easily measured, rather than what cannot be easily measured but is nevertheless important. We want to ensure we do not create what Biesta termed ‘normative validity’; that is, ‘whether we are indeed measuring what we value, or whether we are just measuring what we can easily measure and thus end up valuing what we [can] measure’ (Biesta, 2009: 35).
It is important to question our current dependence, at least at a policy level, on narrowly defined outcome measures and, in particular, the focus on numeracy and literacy outcomes and achievement in high stakes assessment. The emphasis on a narrow set of outcomes restricts the ability to have a truly responsive education system which meets the needs of all learners while also addressing the changing and challenging contexts in which we live. Broadening of education outcomes can support the development of an education system in which every child can succeed and there are high expectations for all students. Digital technologies, if employed judiciously, can play a substantial role in helping to achieve this.
An education system must respond to the wider world in which it, and its players, are situated. This is not only a question of ensuring that it equips students for employment, but also that it supports the development of well-rounded people who are critically engaged, civically minded and have strong moral and ethical compasses. There is much more that can be done to extend the boundaries of our schools, so that teaching and learning is more connected to the ‘real world’ and that there are opportunities for connecting schools, students and teachers with experts and contexts beyond the physical school environment. Digital technologies have the potential to facilitate this broadening of our understanding of schools and schooling.
Continually questioning and challenging the status quo in education is essential. There is certainly a need for a re-imagining of education, how we educate and for what we are educating. It is vital to question outmoded assumptions and routines if we seek the achieve more than just cosmetic change. However, in doing so it is critical that we take heed of the words of the American scholar, Frederick Hess: ‘when it comes to schooling, what usually matters is how things are done rather than whether they are done’ (Hess, 2017: 10).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.