Building trust in digital learning

A year of coro­n­avirus lock­downs has fuelled the use of dig­i­tal learn­ing around the world. School clo­sures forced pupils, par­ents and teach­ers to adopt edtech en masse; a mad scram­ble for resources ensued. In the UK alone, BBC Bite­size has expe­ri­enced an aver­age of five mil­lion unique vis­i­tors a week, while on the Edtech Impact web­site, which aims to help teach­ers find edtech resources, almost 1,500 solu­tions are avail­able. 

“It’s the biggest use cycle of edtech we’ve seen in his­to­ry,” says Ty God­dard, chair­man of strate­gic body Edtech UK. “There has been an explo­sion of good­will and free resources. But to be hon­est teach­ers have felt bom­bard­ed. It’s been a bit of a mine­field to make sense of what to use.” 

The last 12 months has been a peri­od of mass exper­i­men­ta­tion, with many edu­ca­tors, both at school and at home hav­ing to eval­u­ate an over­whelm­ing choice of dig­i­tal tools at short notice. “I wor­ry that some wide­ly adopt­ed approach­es to learn­ing dur­ing the last year have not been as good for chil­dren as they might have been,” says Jon Smith, chief exec­u­tive of edu­ca­tion plat­form Pob­ble.

In an age when any­one can post teach­ing mate­r­i­al online and make claims about stu­dent results, it’s raised ques­tions about qual­i­ty and stan­dards. Not all dig­i­tal offer­ings are cre­at­ed equal­ly. 

“The uni­ver­sal issue has also been a lack of con­sis­ten­cy. It was an impos­si­ble task for edu­ca­tors and fam­i­lies to adapt to the chal­lenges of home school­ing in a uni­fied way; it’s cre­at­ed enor­mous vari­abil­i­ty. Some schools had struc­tures and set-ups that allowed them to be clear about which tools and prod­ucts to use, while oth­ers were more reac­tive,” says Mur­ray Mor­ri­son, chief exec­u­tive of online learn­ing plat­form Tas­so­mai.  

“Many prod­ucts schools look to buy make com­pelling claims and look flashy and impres­sive. Every­one is busy and it’s all too easy to take some­thing on with­out dig­ging deep­er.”

On the plus side, the sheer length of the remote learn­ing lock­down peri­ods have allowed many edu­ca­tors to test dri­ve a vari­ety of dig­i­tal solu­tions and work out what works for them and what doesn’t. Teach­ers are now a lot more con­fi­dent using tech­nol­o­gy, they’re more dis­cern­ing and have been able to col­lect more evi­dence and feed­back on the tools they’re deploy­ing.  

“It’s very like­ly that many will want to con­tin­ue with the tech tools that worked out well, espe­cial­ly those that are designed both for class­room and remote learn­ing,” says Pete Read, chief exec­u­tive of Per­sona Edu­ca­tion. “Schools will only invest in tools that help them to meet their objec­tives, whether set by Ofst­ed, the Inde­pen­dent School Inspec­torate or their own school improve­ment plan.”

New era of edtech evidence

While word of mouth and adopt­ing best prac­tice from oth­er schools has helped edu­ca­tors nav­i­gate the past year, there are now calls for more evi­dence on what real­ly works when it comes to dig­i­tal learn­ing, espe­cial­ly with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of con­tent, tools and claims, with a low bar to entry into this mar­ket. 

“I want schools to demand more rig­or­ous proof from edtech com­pa­nies; there is the will. Our own research has found more than three quar­ters of teach­ers and school lead­ers want to see clear proof edtech works,” says Dan Sand­hu, chief exec­u­tive of Sparx. 

“The most com­mon­ly cit­ed bench­mark of evi­dence offered by edtech com­pa­nies is cus­tomer quotes and school case stud­ies. These pro­vide help­ful insight, but they’re not enough to help a school to make an informed deci­sion about whether an edtech solu­tion will help their learn­ers to make more progress.”    

This is why the Edtech Evi­dence Group was found­ed a year ago by a small group of lead­ing edtech com­pa­nies, which believed there need­ed to be a step-change in the lev­el of proof around dig­i­tal solu­tions. The aim is to encour­age the indus­try to pro­vide clear­er and bet­ter evi­dence about prod­ucts. In the process this will help schools eval­u­ate providers and enable them to ask the right ques­tions. 

“As a co-founder of the group, we want to demon­strate to oth­er com­pa­nies the impor­tance of trans­par­ent­ly shar­ing impact evi­dence and to help push each oth­er for increased trans­paren­cy and evi­dence col­lec­tion,” explains Michael For­shaw, chief exec­u­tive of Edtech Impact. 

Need for contextual learning

Cer­tain­ly, every ven­dor in the mar­ket is look­ing to build their evi­dence base. It’s the secret sauce in the dig­i­tal trade. “Schools are using the evi­dence that‘s avail­able. But the chal­lenge is how thin some of that evi­dence is,” says Matt Hood, prin­ci­pal at Oak Nation­al Acad­e­my, set up last year to sup­port remote learn­ing.

But com­pil­ing huge datasets is an issue in an indus­try where it’s dif­fi­cult for com­pa­nies to scale up and many are star­tups. Evi­dence has played sec­ond fid­dle, when many promis­ing providers are just try­ing to inno­vate, sell and mar­ket prod­ucts. 

“Evi­dence is also a thorny con­cept in edu­ca­tion, com­pared to fields like med­i­cine. It means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. I believe schools must be grant­ed auton­o­my to define their own edu­ca­tion­al objec­tives and to then demand of edtech providers that they demon­strate how their offer­ing sup­ports their goals,” says Junaid Mubeen, direc­tor of edu­ca­tion at Whizz Edu­ca­tion.

“We do need stan­dards to fil­ter the del­uge of con­tent out there, but they must not be mono­lith­ic. ‘What works’ must be cou­pled with ‘in what con­text?’ to ensure it’s mean­ing­ful.”

Every­one agrees edtech in the UK should be cel­e­brat­ed. There’s a great deal of inno­va­tion in the mar­ket, with many solu­tions cre­at­ed by teach­ers and par­ents turned entre­pre­neurs look­ing to improve children’s edu­ca­tion. 

Now schools are return­ing to the class­room, these tools aren’t dis­ap­pear­ing and are com­ple­ment­ing teach­ing. Hope­ful­ly, edtech will super­charge catch-up for pupils who have strug­gled over the past year.   

“Some­thing has def­i­nite­ly changed. It’s clear more peo­ple see edu­ca­tion as less bricks and mor­tar and now more any­where, any­time,” Sharon Hague, senior vice pres­i­dent of schools at Pear­son, con­cludes.