Ed tech’s failure during the pandemic, and what comes after 

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.”