An Ed-tech tragedy: UNESCO experts debate consequences of Covid-induced shift to tech in education

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the teaching-learning process from schools to educational technologies at a pace and scale that has no historical precedent, resulting in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences, UNESCO's education team has said in a report. The report titled "An-Edtech tragedy", also published as a book, examines the numerous adverse and unintended consequences of the shift to ed-tech.

It documents how technology-first solutions left a global majority of learners behind and details the many ways education was diminished even when technology was available and worked as intended.

The missed schooling is expected to reverberate for years, both personally for individuals and at the level of countries, regions and local communities.

Experts from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO's) Education team told PTI that the book extracts lessons and recommendations to ensure that technology facilitates, rather than subverts, efforts to ensure the universal provision of inclusive, equitable and human-centred public education.

"For millions of students, formal learning became fully dependent on technology -- whether on Internet-connected digital devices, televisions or radios. The massive uptake of educational technologies that could be used outside schools was anchored in a hard truth about disease transmission: strictly speaking, people are biohazards and technology used in isolation is not," the report said.

"So while schools were forced to close because they put large numbers of children and adults in close physical proximity, learners were asked to use technology because it accommodated social distancing and stay-at-home directives," it said.

The report stated that as technology-mediated education replaced face-to-face learning in schools as the locus of formal education, technology use was widely mandated by governments in line with commitments to make education compulsory.

Even families that had no previous experience with ed-tech or saw it as purely peripheral to school-based education commonly operated under the assumption that they needed to secure and use technology for educational purposes, the report observed.

"With a speed that few had anticipated, technology, rather than schools, became the primary interface for education," it added.

The experts noted that during the pandemic, students' academic progress was dramatically less than what would have been expected without school closures.

"This 'lost' education - along with the wider socio-emotional tolls of the pandemic - carried individual, familial, social and economic consequences, especially in contexts where the average years of school completion are already low."

In countries where learners typically complete only a few years of formal education, the COVID-19 disruption to schooling and failure or insufficiencies of ed-tech to provide alternatives translated into some students missing a sixth or more of their lifetime education, the report said.

"Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning.

"Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education's unique standing as a public good and human right," it said.

According to experts, automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences while technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning - in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis - had promised better outcomes.

"Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unravelled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries," the report said.

"The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests," it said.

Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo, the report added.