Across decades of investment in tools such as LMSs, MOOCs, Covid-era online learning, and now generative AI, the United States edtech ecosystem has built infrastructure for tracking and assessing students, teachers, and schools. This investment has not met its promise of providing educators and students with the knowledge to support learning throughout students’ academic lives. Through a series of focus groups with K12 teachers, administrators, and edtech providers [1], the dynamics of the failure of a mutually beneficial use of knowledge commons and potential alternative futures were previously explored and findings will be described.
The US edtech ecosystems’ stakeholders, including private high-tech and edtech companies, local, state, and national government, school systems and their employees, and families, have misaligned motivators, power differentials, and a lack of incentives to align better. Edtech tools are commonly designed to surveil both teachers and students who have limited access to knowledge derived from walled gardens of corporate and sometimes governmental data. The US has limited privacy and security regulation while corporate governance is driven more by market forces than lifelong learning goals. The private walled gardens are designed to sell products such as software, devices, and data itself, rather than benefit students directly. Meanwhile, commercial research incentivizes product-driven evaluation over deeper learning questions and limits external researchers’ contributions. Edtech tools’ cognitivist approach to measuring student progress may provide insights into short-term improvements, rarer insights across a given school year, and limited to no information across years. The cognitivist orientation has limited or no data on student motivation and interests or the classroom environment, and limited capacity to support creative or less structured lessons. Based on previous focus group findings, several alternative approaches will be described including codesign with school experts as necessary approaches to sustainable design of digital infrastructure, shared access (and not necessarily ownership) to data across walled gardens, and changes to regulation that both incentivize and require change.
1. Sylvan, E. et al. (2023). Empowering Students in a Datafied World: Adult Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Digital Self-Determination in the U.S. K12 Environment. In the International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ISLS). Montreal, Canada.
