Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Alan Sien Wei Hshieh

Students don’t need our 2018 tech buzzwords.

I recently had the privilege of attending the Varkey Foundation’s Global Skills and Education Forum (GESF) in Dubai. This year’s 2018 event focused on what the classroom will look like in 2030 and brought in not just educators, but tech startups and entrepreneurs. Rooms, and literally, a souk, were packed with start-up pitch ideas, with everything from Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab’s educational VR experiences to a booth where GESF delegates could try to fly a drone by strapping a sensors to their heads. (Disclaimer: I have worked with VHIL the Varkey Foundation.)

Edtech has come a long way, and tech-based organizations have made great strides in making education accessible to everyone. Khan Academy produces quality educational content that is available to everyone with internet access. Similarly, YouTube channels such as The Physics Girl and Veritasium take science out of the arguably boring confines of textbooks. The Merrell Twin’s Project Upgrade, aims to encourage girls to take an interest in STEM (an effort I support so much that I will forgive their usage of Comic Sans).

I am impressed by the efforts that I saw at GESF. I am also encouraged that the development of these projects in edtech are well intentioned. However, as I continue to to hear pitches of how current tech buzzwords AR/VR, machine learning, and blockchain are going to revolutionize education, I’ve noticed a crescendo in how gimmicky edtech is becoming.

We’re putting the tech ahead of the education.

The hype.

Around 2015, during peak Chromebook season, Dell released a Chromebook with a built-in, external “activity light” that users can turn on instead of raising their hands. This was a deeply promoted feature. While Chromebooks have certainly become ubiquitous in American classrooms — being cheap and easy to administer — this was not a useful innovation. Certainly, raising a hand isn’t what prevents many students from participating. (I understand that some of these technologies may have very significant accessibility benefits, but this was not the developer and/or marketers’ goal.)

Back at my alma mater circa 2011, many of our classrooms were endowed with SMART boards. These weren’t cheap, but our university happens to be richer than most. Students could write and interact with items on a whiteboard. The whiteboard contents could then be captured and emailed using a series of awkward key-presses. Often, we had trouble getting the board started up, or the emails wouldn’t actually go through. In the end, we attempted to use the board once, and then reverted back to just writing on “dumb” whiteboards and taking pictures of what we had drawn.

Cue 2018, where the the current ML, AI, AR, VR, and blockchain hype is hitting edtech in a significant way. It’s great that students might be able to view museum exhibits in VR that they would otherwise need to see in 2D. It’s similarly great that AR can provide students with more immersive experiences and blockchain can help schools with data administration. But, are these improvements that much better than the status quo? Not yet. In 2018, VR experiences aren’t that much richer than 2D ones, and AR experiences still just show 3D models overlaid on a 2D camera viewfinder. Teacher’s also have bigger problems than learning how to manage data using blockchain.

Basically every innovation goes through the hype cycle: A technology is first hyped to the extreme, resulting in extraneous applications and inflated expectations. This results in a “trough of disillusionment” where people are tired of gimmicks. Finally, once the hype dies down, developers and designers are enlightened to actual, useful applications for a technology. Sadly, in the case of edtech, going through the trough of disillusionment will impact our students, teachers, and schools — and that’s not okay.

In 2018, we are at the peak of the Gartner hype cycle for technologies like AI and blockchain.

Technology is expensive.

The Chromebook has become nearly ubiquitous in American schools. However, as of 2018, a cheap Chromebook will still cost over 250USD per unit. For some teachers, 250 dollars might be the quarterly spending budget for an entire class.

Things get more ridiculous when we look at technologies that are still climbing towards the peak of inflated expectations. Getting a full VR setup with HTC Vive can easily cost over 750USD. Getting a computer that can drive the hardware adds another ~1500USD. Add in administration and certification costs, and getting students into a bus to visit a museum in real life might be cheaper. Even for relatively well-financed K-12 education systems such as Norway’s, this cost-to-benefit ratio is a hard pill to swallow.

For technology to truly help students and teachers, the addressing of needs must significantly outweigh its costs. Giving students internet access and technological skills are worthy benefits. Viewing a museum on an Oculus Rift versus via a web browser — not so much. With the costs of technology, it’s not reasonable to expect schools to be early adopters. Encouraging education systems to adopt expensive, hyped technologies often causes more harm than good.

Technology needs administration.

Laptops and tablets generally have a shorter life cycle than traditional books. Not only do devices break down more quickly, devices also need to be repeatedly charged, reset, and centrally administered. Even getting rid of old or broken devices requires administration. As a result, many schools have hired IT teams to keep these devices in shape.

Google has done a fairly good job at making Chromebooks easy to administer. Devices tend to be fairly durable, come with Google Apps for Education and admin software, and don’t require years of IT experience to use. Apple School Manager similarly provides IT with a centralized dashboard to organize students and staff and interface with SIS systems. (Disclaimer: I am employed by Apple, and this write-up contains my own opinions only.)

Many efforts in edtech are less concerned with ease of administration. Drones are still easy to break and student privacy remains hard to secure. Video content is hard to stream on a school router. Administration becomes much more difficult when we start talking AI, AR, VR, drones, and blockchain. IT professionals need to learn about these new technologies in order to administer them, and teachers who are unfamiliar with them will need more IT support. A teacher who knows how to reset an iPad might not know how to debug self-executing transactions or fix flimsy controllers. When we talk about bringing these new technologies to classrooms, they need to be deeply reliable and easy to administer. Otherwise, they just become gimmicks.

Technology needs content.

Content is king. A book without words isn’t very educational.

Thankfully, there is a lot of content in the world of edtech. Stanford, MIT, and many other institutions offer course content through iTunes. Documentaries are easily accessible through Netflix and YouTube. Building quality content takes time and effort, and technology provides a great venue.

The problem comes when technology goes from the venue to the star of the show. After all, most teachers aren’t concerned with the inner-workings of an Oculus Rift, but the content and experiences that it can display. Too many edtech startups and projects in 2018 are constructing on building a great book. They forget that it’s the content that matters.

VR apps tend to still be shallow, showing simple 3D models or 360 degree views with messy UIs that could be easily viewed (albeit arguably less immersively) on a 2D screen. Public speaking training apps like Speech Center VR are far from realistic. Proponents of drones in education say that they can teach kids about kinesthetic cartography, the physics of flight, and respecting privacy, as well as encourage outdoor exercise, but the similar educational content is achievable with much cheaper, reliable alternatives such as, well, a kite or a football. AI is similar. Outside of students learning about how AI itself works and its ethical ramifications, AIs cannot yet teach better than a human teacher can. Until these technologies provide content (and enough of it), to significantly outweigh their costs, their implementation in schools won’t positively impact students and teachers.

After the hype.

The tech industry hasn’t been this buzz-filled in a while. 2018 brings unprecedented excitement for technologies like AR, VR, AI, ML, and blockchain. There are great applications for these technologies in schools, but the timing needs to be right. These technologies are still prone to gimmicks: too expensive, too difficult to maintain, and too shallow to be implemented in schools. Asking and encouraging education programs to join in the hype is asking them to incur heavy costs for undefined, potentially impractical benefits. Our teachers and students end up paying the price.

hshieh.com | @chunggukpanda

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Edtech must not be a gimmick. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Edtech must not be a gimmick.

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