Fri, Jan 29, 2021 page9

• Could the pandemic make digital learning the new normal?

  British schools have embraced remote classes in the past year and some see benefits in virtual learning, but others fear the impact on disadvantaged children and privatization by stealth

  • By Nic Fleming / The Guardian
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  History is likely to record that British teachers were better prepared for COVID-19 than government ministers.

  With cases rising in Europe, 14 schools in England had already closed their gates by the end of February last year. When senior staff at Barham Primary School began drawing up contingency plans on Feb. 26, they realized they needed to up their use of technology.

  They decided to upload work daily to ClassDojo, a popular app they were already using to communicate with parents. The problem was some parents, many of whom do not speak English as a first language, did not have the app.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  When, three weeks later, it was announced that UK schools would close to most pupils with just two days’ notice, the school staff, especially the Gujarati, Tamil and Hindi speakers, took to the playground, digital devices in hand, to help parents get connected.

  “We decided ClassDojo was a non-negotiable,” said Laura Alexander, a senior leader at the school and nursery in Wembley, London, attended by 930 children aged three to 11. “Every single parent had to be on there so we could communicate with them and get work to the children.”

  Ensuring they could distribute work remotely was just the first of many challenges staff at the school faced as they turned toward greater reliance on education technology, or edtech, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They were, of course, far from alone.

  By April, the pandemic had forced almost 1.6 billion students out of their schools and universities worldwide, putting many of their teachers on a steep edtech learning curve. With UK schools having closed to the majority of pupils again on Jan. 5, teachers are back to providing mostly remote lessons.

  For some, the resulting global edtech boom is long overdue.

  Andreas Schleicher, head of education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has described the pandemic as creating “a great moment” for learning. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in May last year questioned why physical classrooms still exist at all, as he announced that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates would help rethink education in the state.

  However, skeptics say that a “digital divide” further widens existing attainment gaps and inequalities faced by disadvantaged children. Others say schools are ill-equipped to protect their pupils’ data, and that the growing role of commercial interests both within state education and through a booming direct-to-consumer edtech market amounts to privatization by stealth.

  At the end of March last year, with such short notice of the shutdown, most UK schools turned to their existing digital tools to help their pupils continue learning. For some this meant simply uploading links to worksheets on school Web sites, while others gave live lessons via videoconferencing.

  It did not take long for problems to emerge.

  “We were putting work on ClassDojo, but the children couldn’t send me back the work, so they weren’t getting the feedback they need,” Alexander said.

  The school during the summer holiday began transitioning to Google Classroom, as a more interactive remote learning tool, and set up face-to-face lessons via Google Meet for those unable to return to school or who were self-isolating.

  Before the pandemic, Google had already gained a dominant position in many UK schools by providing its edtech tools free or at low cost. In the first month of the pandemic, the number of active users of Google Classroom doubled to 100 million.

  The British government has helped facilitate technology companies’ expansion in education. In late April last year, it announced a scheme to provide free technical support and training in Google and Microsoft education digital tools.

  More than 6,500 primary and secondary schools in England — more than one-quarter — signed up. Since then, about 2.4 million new user accounts have been created for the two platforms.

  Google in April last year donated 4,000 Chromebooks and 100,000 Wi-Fi hotspots for students in rural areas of California for home learning.

  Critics like the writer Naomi Klein say that the technology giants were quick to see COVID-19 as an opportunity to accelerate their ambitions in education. In June last year, for example, Microsoft published a position paper titled “Education Reimagined.”

  “The fallout from COVID-19, continuing advances in digital technology, and intensifying pent-up demand for student-centered learning have combined to present an unprecedented opportunity to transform education across whole systems,” it began.

  So will schools continue their digitally enhanced approach when the pandemic is over? Investors certainly think so.

  Global venture capital investment in edtech more than doubled from US$7 billion in 2019 to a record US$16.1 billion last year, according to market intelligence consultancy HolonIQ.

  Others also believe the shift will be permanent.

  “COVID has given an impetus to schools to adopt, roll out and use more of the functionality of edtech tools,” said Hannah Owen of the Nesta innovation foundation. “It’s likely, and optimal, that we’ll move to blended models, where remote and digital platforms support in-person classroom teaching, and contribute to minimizing teacher workload.”

  Many school leaders are concerned that more tech-based teaching might add to the relative advantages already enjoyed by wealthier pupils.

  Research by the Sutton Trust found that 30 percent of middle-class pupils were doing live or recorded online lessons at least once per school day, compared with 16 percent of working-class pupils. Those at private schools were more than twice as likely to do so than those at state schools.

  Teachers at Barham Primary School provide paper-based home learning packs for the average of three or four pupils per class that do not have digital access.

  “Most of the children have the tech in some form, but it might be using dad’s mobile phone before he goes to work, or on a flat screen TV in the living room,” said Karen Giles, headteacher at Barham, where many pupils live in multiple occupancy homes. “The lack of equity in this situation means that those children who are without are more disadvantaged, and children with advantages are more advantaged. I’m determined to close that gap.”

  Giles tried to do that partly by taking up the British government’s offer of help.

  The British Department for Education says that it has provided more than 800,000 laptops and tablets for disadvantaged pupils in response to the pandemic. Barham’s allocation of 20 was cut to just six when the department changed its provision criteria in October last year.

  The Sutton Trust earlier this month reported that just 10 percent of teachers in England said that all their pupils had adequate access to electronic devices and the Internet.

  However, the digital divide is not just about whether pupils have devices. Children whose parents do not have the skills or time to help them use online platforms, and troubleshoot when needed, are also at risk of falling behind.

  One study found that schools with more disadvantaged pupils narrowed the gap in usage of online mathematics platforms with those in affluent areas during lockdown, but achieved lower levels of student engagement.

  “Teachers are quite adept at looking out at the classroom and quickly assessing who has got it and who has questions,” said Audrey Watters, a US journalist who has been covering edtech since 2010. “That’s a lot harder to do with videoconferencing software or digital worksheets.”

  However, others believe that teachers could use digital tools to better identify who most needs their help.

  “Used well, learning analytics and big data can help teachers see in a new way how those different students learn differently, and to engage with them differently,” Schleicher said.

  Privacy campaigners are concerned that teachers, never mind parents and children, are unable to keep track of what edtech companies are doing with the data. When schools sign the G Suite for Education Agreement, for example, they agree that Google makes “commercially reasonable changes” to their terms and conditions “from time to time.”

  “The terms and conditions for many of these products are pages long, hard to follow, change frequently, and schools don’t send them to parents anyway,” said Jen Persson of the campaign group Defend Digital Me. “So it’s very hard to understand how Google or anyone else processes a child’s data.”

  The Washington-based International Digital Accountability Council in September last year reported that 79 of 123 edtech apps it examined shared user data with third parties. That could include names, e-mail addresses, location data and device Ids.

  It found, for example, that the popular language learning app Duolingo was sharing user IDs with outside parties, including Facebook.

  Schleicher dismissed such fears.

  “When you watch Netflix you contribute to the data systems and that will help with customization. That’s how big data works. I don’t think we should put education in a different box,” he said.

  Edtech companies, both large and small, have seen major growth in users thanks to COVID-19. Critics fear this could lead to the erosion of some core principles of state provision.

  “If we understand privatization as the provision by the private sector of services traditionally provided by the state, then during the pandemic, a vast part of schooling in the UK has been privatized,” said Ben Williamson, an education researcher at the University of Edinburgh. “Getting into schools, at very large scale, positions Google, Microsoft and others to keep rolling out their new model of ever-more digital schooling, based on data analytics, artificial intelligence and automated, adaptive functions.”

  Williamson is not alone in warning that the pandemic is driving a form of stealth privatization.

  “Once schools become dependent on the tech giants’ systems for teaching in class, homework, management and communications, and once a certain threshold is reached in the number of schools they operate in, then the state delivery of education becomes entirely dependent on private companies,” Persson said.

  While edtech has many critics, there are also plenty who highlight potential benefits.

  Bukky Yusuf is a senior leader and science lead at Edith Kay School, an independent secondary in Brent, London, which specializes in special educational needs provision.

  She was concerned about switching to greater edtech use because many of her pupils thrive through active, hands-on engagement, but she was pleasantly surprised, saying it helped students engage better, gain more control over their learning and work in ways that suited their needs.

  “A virtual learning setup also helped minimize anxieties for some, as they had options about when and how they could engage, through video, audio or a chat feature,” Yusuf said.

  Having organized their own digital training sessions, staff at Barham Primary School said that they now feel better prepared to teach remotely.

  Teachers have found that combining traditional classroom and online teaching has increased parental engagement, enhanced pupils’ computer skills and improved monitoring of teaching standards.

  “We’re forever changed,” Alexander said. “Blended learning works for both staff and children. Sometimes on Google Classroom, you see a child saying: ‘I’m not sure how to do that,’ and then you see a trail of children saying: ‘Try this, try that, I did this.’ Five minutes later, you go on as class teacher and they’ve sorted it out themselves.”

  Those voicing concerns said that they are not against digital tools per se, rather they question the growing role of those with financial interests in edtech in determining how they are used and in shaping the way schools are run.

  “Big-tech billionaires have an oversized influence in shaping education policy,” Watters said. “Some of these companies pay very, very low taxes, and their responsibilities are to start contributing properly in taxes, not to provide free Chromebooks. We need schools to be more about what the public wants and not what edtech companies want them to look like.”
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