Rich agile future of Ed Tech

Martha A KalninDiede, Director, Syracuse University

As an education professional, I have repeatedly asked myself what educators, especially those of us in the ed-tech space, have learned from the pandemic. I’m also a realist and looking at the future of higher educationgives me pause. Colleagues and I have ongoing conversations about what motivates people to remain in education and what pushes them to seek employment in an adjacent field or to walk away from education altogether. No easy answers exist, but I’d like to suggest a few key takeaways based on observations and preliminary results from a survey that colleagues and I conducted mid-pandemic and again just a month ago.

First, ed-tech adoption is no longer our challenge. We don’t need summer institutes, workshops, or in-service days to dazzle faculty with ways that new software will enhance their students’ learning and potentially make their courses easier to teach in a concerted effort to drive adoption. All our faculty have had to use a learning management system; all of them have had to use video conferencing software; all have adjusted (somewhat) to remote interactions between themselves, their students, their colleagues, and their administrators. Some like that kind of work and interaction so much that they don’t want to return to face-to-face work.As schools re-opened and in-person instruction resumed, students and faculty adapted to hybrid learning environments as various members of their learning communities responded to personal and professional needs. As a result, everyone continued to leverage various technologies as adaptive mechanisms to this evolving situation.Unfortunately, adoption and familiarity do not equal well designed, deliberate use of technologies to meet students’ learning needs, to keep them engaged, and to equip them for the roles they seek both during and following their academic careers.

Instructor adoption of and familiarity with technologies also does not address some of the fundamental challenges in education which will have significant ripple effects in the decades to follow 2020. Students, research clearly shows, have had significant learning losses (Kane 2022). Ameliorating these losses requires intensive work on the part of both learners and instructors; this kind of work also demands mental and emotional bandwidth, which is in somewhat short supply. For such work to succeed, it requires a relationship-rich environment, one that Felten and Lambert (2020) had already noted pre-pandemic is key to student learning and persistence. Already, research suggests that privileged students might be able to fill in the gaps, but less privileged students won’t. Taken together, what we now face is a challenge of motivating faculty to use technology intentionally for teaching and learning (Bruff2019; Darby & Lang 2019), while the scarcity of mental and emotional bandwidth continues to intrude on both faculty and student work (Verschelden 2017).Furthermore, the number of students available to seek higher education is already declining (Grawe2017), and students, families, and employers have begun to move from questioning the value of higher education (Lederman 2021) to posting positions that no longer require a four-year degree for employment (Swalec 2022).

Additionally, emerging research on faculty motivation for pursuing higher education as a career indicates that the systems in which faculty workcould do more to encourage intentional teaching excellence. Respondents to a survey on faculty motivation reported stress, fatigue, and burnout and desire for clear, regular communication, increased budgets, and a recognition of the time and energy that teaching involves. Faculty indicated that they continue to enjoy the intellectual stimulation of teaching and that their students give great effort to classes and learning (Pautz&Diede 2021).Still one of the findings is that the job faculty thought they were taking has changed significantly, and as calls for faculty to reach students who are “shell shocked” increase (McMurtrie 2022), many faculty and staff decide that they are ready to explore careers in adjacent fields like educational technology.

Given the new comfort of faculty with technologies and changes to teaching needs, the need to reach students in a variety of ways to accommodate their learning needs, and institutional budget cuts that leave positions vacant, those of us in educational technology spaces envision opportunities. Shortening time-to-degree might be one of the best changes on the horizon (Whitford 2021), asmight instructor focus on the quality of the learning experiencerather than the quantity of material covered (Gooblar 2021).Voices have arisen suggesting that teaching students how to learn (McGuire 2015) joined with learning embedded within the job and organizational structure itself is one future of work (Busteed 2022).Partnerships with secondary schools and institutions of higher education to provide industry-ready certificate programs documenting competencies and skills so that students have clear, less debt-laden pathways to gainful employment is another.Offering faculty development in small bites from experts collected in one place that instructors can access on their own time is an additional means of leveraging educational technology (OneHE.org). These possibilities and others indicate that educational technology has a rich, agile future.