On workload and tech

Part two in a series that aims to answer the question of whether edtech really serves teachers

My brain after triplicate data entries

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In this follow-up instalment to my interview with Sam, I explained that a lot of teachers complain that tech adds to their workload rather than alleviates it. We do things in triplicate, in legacy systems. And student data is a growing imperative. I asked, can we expect machine learning or the like to step in to improve our work lives?

I wouldn’t be holding my breath – not because some of the challenges aren’t solvable by new technologies, but mostly because of the reasons given in my answer in yesterday’s post. The sector is under-valued, and as long as that is the case there will be a lack of technology investment.

This could be changed by some truly long-term thinking about how society organises education and the reckoning that education is currently facing with regards to teacher shortages may force that thinking to emerge.

On whether the tech actually works

I do think the teacher complaint is actually somewhat misdirected though. The technology is supposed to support processes, and for the most part it does that just fine. The benefit of digitisation isn’t necessarily always seen at the point of (teacher) input, but I think it is always worth querying why a process is in place to understand why it is causing pain. The recent couple of decades have seen an increasing focus on regulation and compliance across all sectors, and with it an increase in the need for data-capture and reporting. The approach to this can potentially be highly automated, integrated and optimised for data re-use, but more often than not in education it simply isn’t. Again, teachers' time isn’t well valued. But more than this, I get the impression that a lot of process exists for no good discernible reason at all, and there is little time or inclination to audit and remove outdated processes when adding new ones.

Allegorically, the “new system” is always “great” and will “fix everything”, but it isn’t and it doesn’t, because nobody was really truly paying attention because they didn’t know what to look out for, or they didn’t have the time, or the vendor lied, and now it’s too late because “we already paid for it”. Then the process owner leaves, and then it “has always been done that way”. And there you are, and now you have to do things twice, thrice, four times over in as many different systems.

This story is not unique to education, it’s just less likely to be remediated. That’s because the pressure to optimise isn’t there. In a “normal” business context, things start to break at some point with success and scale and one's hand is forced, to optimise or die. A single school doesn’t ever scale-up to millions of users - the productivity losses just aren’t dire enough to force change. This is partly “teachers are cheap” again, but it’s also just the nature of how schools have almost always organised themselves (in Western societies at least) into a bunch of unique small-businesses with no shared economy of scale outside of public education departments.

On a better future

Schools would be better places if new technology processes had mandatory trial periods, sunset clauses, and implementation thresholds that measured and required real productivity gains before they are implemented. Education departments should do the same before imposing new requirements on schools too. Schools could also take a cue from the broader business world, who often write their own regulatory frameworks: schools could be more on the front-foot here if they could find the bandwidth to organise effectively on these matters. Maybe they do, but given that they get their marching orders via media outlets so regularly I’m not sure it’s working. Schools could also look to coordinate administrative functions more effectively across schools and try to achieve economies of scale where it didn’t disrupt their competitive activities like enrolments. Or perhaps more radically, if schools were for-profit maybe teacher productivity issues would garner more attention.

More broadly speaking there is a chance that some technology advancements in areas outside education provide some knock-on or transferable technology solutions to the sector. The stars could align for that sort of thing to happen, but more comprehensively impactful technologies like general artificial-intelligence are very likely many decades or lifetimes away.

I guess that all sounds pretty depressing, but perhaps some hope can be derived from the notion that fundamentally the root of these problems aren’t technology problems, and the means to effect change are all within territory which is well-trodden by the sector. These are regulatory problems, organisational problems, political problems, and labour problems. The education sector has the ability to change the way it utilises technology via innovations that have nothing to do with technology and the technology should be subservient to that change.