Why didn’t the shift to remote learning bring about significant transformations in teaching and learning? 

 

Predictions of imminent transformation are among the most reliable refrains in the history of education technology. In 1913, for example, Thomas Edison told an interviewer, “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years” (Smith, 1913). Ten years later, when his prediction had failed to come to pass, he stuck to his position, but with an expanded window of time: “I think motion pictures have just started and it is my opinion that in 20 years children will be taught through pictures and not through textbooks” (Associated Press, 1923). 

One hundred years after Edison, education technology evangelists have persisted in arguing that we are on the cusp of a profound transformation in schooling. In 2008, the late Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, wrote a book called Disrupting Class in which he predicted that by 2019 half of all secondary school courses would be replaced by adaptive online learning where “the cost will be one-third of today’s costs, and the courses will be much better” (Christensen, Johnson, & Horn, 2008). Salman Khan from Khan Academy gave a 2011 TED Talk called “Let’s use video to reinvent education,” in which he imagined students learning core math concepts at their own pace at individual computer terminals, while teachers gathered small groups of students for remediation, projects, or other enrichment. The 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra (2016) went further and argued that all of these schools and courses were unnecessary, and that “groups of children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves.” 

Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic blighted the world, and more than 1.6 billion learners had their schooling interrupted. Parents everywhere, clinging to their very last shred of sanity, report that, in fact, children with laptops cannot learn anything by themselves, and can’t even go more than about five blessed minutes without needing a snack or help with a password. While a small group of students have thrived under the independence of remote learning (Gilman, 2020), for most students and families the results have ranged from disappointing to disastrous. It’s not just that technology failed to transform educational systems; when the world needed it most, the latest and greatest education technologies haven’t done much to invigorate emergency remote learning. 

The uses and limitations of educational technology  

As schools have transitioned to remote and hybrid learning, they have made only sparing use of emerging technologies like adaptative tutors, open online courses, virtual reality, or artificial intelligence. Mostly, schools have adopted two of our oldest digital education technologies: learning management systems and video conferencing. 

Learning management systems — like Google Classroom, Canvas, Moodle, and others — were theorized in the 1960s and 1970s, commercialized in the 1990s, and made open source in the 2000s (Reich, 2020). Although they have all kinds of features, such as calendars, quizzes, and forums, they basically just let teachers and students pass documents back and forth, making them the digital equivalent of the folder with one side labeled “bring home” and the other side labeled “send to school” that elementary school students are supposed to keep in their backpacks.  

Video conferencing, which was called video telephony when it was introduced in the 1930s, allows people at a distance to talk in turns with the speaker and other listeners appearing onscreen. This may sound an awful lot like the basic conditions of an in-person conversation, but as just about everyone in the networked world now knows, video communication does not allow for seamless group interaction. Teaching through Zoom is like teaching through a keyhole: With some awkward straining, you can sort of see and hear what’s happening on the other side, but it’s not really conducive to meaningful conversation.  

The appeal of conducting class in a reasonably familiar way has won out over bold visions to reimagine online teaching and learning.

During the pandemic, the primary virtue of these two technologies has been that they allow teachers to partially replicate the typical routines of in-person classrooms. Teachers can shout lectures through the video keyhole, respond to student questions in the Zoom chat, and collect worksheets through the learning management system, and thus create a Kabuki theatre version of a school day. However, for the vast majority of teachers, students, and families, this digital facsimile of school is woefully inadequate. For most students, it’s boring and uninspiring, and for most teachers, it’s frustrating and unrewarding. But in spite of these faults, the appeal of conducting class in a reasonably familiar way has won out over bold visions to reimagine online teaching and learning. School reformers like to say that we should never let a crisis go to waste, but a global pandemic turns out to a tough time to reinvent education. 

Ed tech isn’t as useful as promised 

Evangelists for education technology tend to describe their inventions as akin to Swiss army knives, capable of serving numerous functions and solving a myriad of problems. But, in truth, they more closely resemble a scattered pile of mismatched tools. Many are useful for specific tasks, but the whole collection adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Experienced instructional designers can create powerful experiences using these tools, but remote classrooms relying primarily on a learning management system and video conferencing cannot support the range of interactions that are possible in a classroom with a human teacher who has access to chairs, desks, paper, blackboards, and a cart of laptops.  

Of course, it is possible to add more apps to a suite of remote learning tools to allow them to serve more purposes and support a greater variety of teacher-student interactions — and most schools have done so. Many, for example, have adopted some kind of gamified adaptive math tutor, like DreamBox, STMath, ASSISTments, or Khan Academy, which researchers have found to be helpful for many students (Steenbergen-Hu & Cooper, 2013). However, even these tools for mathematics learning, which stand out among learning apps for their relatively strong evidence of effectiveness, don’t work equally well for everybody, in every situation. In a home learning context, for example, they appear to work better for students who have a high interest in math, high levels of parental support, or a tendency to respond positively to the extrinsic rewards of points, stickers, and so forth. And, of course, they are much less useful to students without sufficient internet access, trying to use them with the engine running in a McDonald’s parking lot.  

The apps available now (and most likely for the next few generations) are helpful for some students, in some parts of the curriculum, but not others.

Further, while these math apps have their uses, they don’t effectively teach the entire content of mathematics. It’s possible that in some domains, such as helping students visualize and manipulate representations of place value, they might actually be more effective than typical teacher instruction. But mathematics also requires the capacity to explain one’s reasoning in oral and written language, and these apps typically provide little to no learning value in this crucial domain. Since there exist no automated assessment tools that can provide meaningful feedback on student responses in natural language, technology simply cannot provide this sort of support in science, social studies, literature, persuasive writing, and many other subjects where students learn to reason from evidence. Millions of dollars and many brilliant researchers have tackled this assessment challenge for decades, but, for all of our breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence, computers won’t be able to give much useful feedback on many of the most common tasks that teachers assign in classrooms — at least not for the foreseeable future. In short, the apps available now (and most likely for the next few generations) are helpful for some students, in some parts of the curriculum, but not others. Far from serving as Swiss army knives, they enable us only to tighten a few of the bolts that hold together our immensely varied and complex machinery of education.  

In addition, while some learning apps may be valuable, every new app or tool comes with overhead costs. And every app that a school adds to its suite of online tools means one more password for students to forget, one more login for families to keep track of, and one more technology platform for teachers to master. 

In April and May of 2020, my colleagues and I interviewed 40 teachers across the country about their experiences teaching during the pandemic (Reich et al., 2020), and one of the most common concerns during these early stages of emergency remote instruction was that schools were sending students home with too many apps and routines, often a different set for each of their classes. Many schools, wisely, have refined their online suite to include a much smaller number of tools, but even so, teachers and students continue to juggle various tools and platforms. At this point, well-vetted data about the typical online suite are not available, but many schools appear to be using a learning management system, a video conferencing tool, a math app, a reading content app (like Newsela or Epic), and a system for students to record and submit short videos, like Flipgrid or Explain Everything.  

If we had 50 amazing learning technologies (and I certainly couldn’t come up with 50 tools that I could enthusiastically endorse for schools), schools wouldn’t be able to provide the training, integration, and support to make it possible to use them all. In effect, remote learning must depend on a narrow suite of tools with specific uses and many limitations — deployed with minimal training and practice during a pandemic, and such a suite of tools is nowhere close to being as versatile as a competent teacher working with students in a classroom.  

Teaching with tech isn’t easy 

Another limitation of remote instruction in particular, and teaching with technology in general, is the long-term, developmental process required to do it well. In the 1980s, Judith Sandholtz led a team of researchers studying the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project, where classrooms received the latest personal computers, the first classroom networks, and next-generation tools like printers, scanners, and videodisc players. (Sandholtz, Ringstaff, & Dwyer, 1997). What they found 40 years ago still holds true today: It takes time, even for master teachers, to get to be good at teaching with technology. At first, teachers tend to use new technologies to extend existing practices. Only with time, practice, experimentation, and support do they move on to more novel applications.  

Thus, every technology solution is also a human capital problem: New education technology tools are only as powerful as the communities that support their use. If you had asked me in January 2020 how long it would take for teachers to become good at doing one new thing with technology, I would have said that it depends on the context, but the research suggests that it takes about 40 hours of professional development, along with coaching and practice, typically spaced over a period of months, for teachers to become proficient with a new teaching technique (Darling-Hammond, Hyler, & Gardner, 2017). It’s hardly surprising, then, that as teachers have been asked to reinvent schooling for a remote environment, their default approach has been to reproduce, as best they can, their familiar classroom routines.  

I’ve been inspired to see the creative ways in which teachers have tried to maintain those routines online. For example, to encourage more class participation during videoconferences, some teachers have taken to putting a sticker on their own face every time a new student joins the discussion (Kindelan, 2020). By the end of class, the teacher’s face is covered in stickers, and learning and hilarity ensue.   

While such practices testify to teachers’ capacity to make the best of new technologies and invent new instructional routines, they haven’t led to any major breakthroughs in technology-mediated learning, as far as I’ve seen. During the pandemic, nobody has figured out a genuinely new and more successful way to provide remote instruction, one that might be replicated across the country. Rather, what we’ve seen are individual teachers coming up with clever ways (e.g., putting stickers on their faces) to solve specific teaching problems and sand down some of the rough edges of online learning. I interpret that as a promising sign. Because so many teachers have made these kinds of efforts to experiment and adapt over the last several months, I’m confident that when we take stock of the education our schools provided in the fall of 2020, we’ll see a noticeable improvement upon the spring of 2020, with steady improvement throughout the current school year. And while that sort of slow progress may be frustrating, it tells a new and more realistic story about the promise of educational technology than the stories we usually tell ourselves. 

A slow, but steady path 

In The Charisma Machine, her wonderful study of the One Laptop Per Child Program, the anthropologist Morgan Ames (2019) coins the term charismatic technology to describe the breathless promises that have often been made about the disruptive power of new tools to sweep away the past and usher in a radically different and dramatically better future. Let’s hope that the pandemic has soured people on such charismatic salesmanship, and that vendors will find it much more difficult to persuade educators of the transformative potential of the latest digital device.  

As an alternative to the charismatic approach, Ames offers the metaphor of “tinkering,” drawn from the title of David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s (1995) book Tinkering Toward Utopia. Advocates of tinkering recognize that improving teaching and learning is a long, arduous process that requires not a single big leap forward but, rather, the making of a great many small steps.  

Technology can help make this journey go a little more quickly. It may not be ideal to teach via email and Zoom meetings, but it’s better than calling students on the phone and mailing them packets of materials. And for all of the ways that math tutoring apps fall short of providing a comprehensive mathematics education, they can make positive contributions to student learning, both during the pandemic and after. 

If today’s ed tech amounts to a hodgepodge of tools, rather than an all-purpose Swiss army knife, that’s no reason for despair. If technology isn’t transformative, that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful. If we adopt a tinkerer’s mindset, then we can learn important lessons from the pandemic.  

First, the pandemic should remind us that to use technology effectively, teachers need intensive support and extensive practice. They cannot take advantage of new tools and platforms without meaningful opportunities for professional development and coaching. For that matter, they may not be able to use those tools well unless school leaders also tinker with the curriculum, schedules, assessments, and every other part of the system. Technology won’t improve our schools, but improving our schools may pave the way for powerful uses of technology.  

The second lesson is darker: This may not be the only global pandemic that today’s children have to endure. As humans reengineer the geochemistry of the planet to be inhospitable to human civilization, climate scientists predict that there will be more disease outbreaks, more floods, more fires, more unbreathable air, and more extreme weather events (U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2018). We have no choice but to become better prepared for events that require a sudden shift to remote schooling. 

The good news is that millions of teachers have come up with new teaching tricks and classroom routines, and tens of millions of students have deepened their skills in technology-mediated communication and self-regulated learning. These are valuable assets, and our schools can and should build on them, continuing the process of learning how to teach, learn, and use our digital tools more effectively.    

References 

Ames, M. (2019). The charisma machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  

Associated Press. (1923, May 15). Edison predicts film will replace teacher, books. Virginia Chronicle. 

Christensen, C.M., Johnson, C.W., & Horn, M.B. (2008). Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. 

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M.E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute. 

Gilman, A. (2020, October 3). Remote learning has been a disaster for many students. But some kids have thrived. Hechinger Report. 

Kahn, S. (2011, March). Let’s use video to reinvent education. TED. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTFEUsudhfs. 

Kindelan, K. (2020, December 10). Why teachers are putting stickers on their faces during remote learning. Good Morning America 

Mitra, S. (2016). The future of learning. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Learning at Scale Conference. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. 

Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can’t transform education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 

Reich, J., Buttimer, C.J., Coleman, D., Colwell, R.D., Faruqi, F., & Larke, L.R. (2020, July 22). What’s lost, what’s left, what’s next: Lessons learned from the lived experiences of teachers during the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Teaching Systems Lab. 

Sandholtz, J.H., Ringstaff, C., & Dwyer, D.C. (1997). Teaching with technology: Creating student-centered classrooms. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. 

Smith, F.J. (July 9, 1913). The evolution of the motion picture: VI – Looking into the future with Thomas A. Edison. New York Dramatic Mirror, p. 24. (as analyzed in https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/02/15/books-obsolete) 

Steenbergen-Hu, S. & Cooper, H. (2013). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems on K–12 students’ mathematical learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105 (4), 970.  

Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995) Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

U.S. Global Change Research Program. (2018) Impacts, risks, and adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II. Washington, DC. Author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Justin Reich

JUSTIN REICH is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab and the author of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education .