Michael Wu

Technology and Education -- Rough

Middle
Introduction
Technology is an essential part of our life. Nearly all our tasks, from work to life, relies on
technologies that might not exist merely two decades ago. ​Malcolm X​ once said “Education is
the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today”. There’s no
doubt that the influence of technology on our daily life would be only greater. It becomes
critically important to include technology in education, allowing students to understand and learn
how to best utilize those new technologies to help them thrive in the future.

In this paper, I will first examine the need for integrating education and technology.
Then, I will survey and list some existing integrations. Lastly, I will focus on pointing out
problems and issues surrounding EdTech and proposing some possible solutions.

The Need for the Integration

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment of computer and
information technology occupation is projected to grow 13 percent from 2016 to 2026, faster
than the average for all occupations.” The Bureau added that “These occupations are projected
to add about 557,100 new jobs. Demand for these workers will stem from greater emphasis on
cloud computing, the collection and storage of big data, and information security.” It is clear that
the demand for information technology related job is growing rapidly -- accompanying the rise of
the mobile devices, IoTs, and the information era. With the abundance of data that companies
are now able to collect, there needs to be programmers who make applications that collect
those data, scientists who organize and provide the insightful analysis and feedback, and
eventually software teams that update and
maintain the infrastructure. According to
Battery Ventures, “we are still in the early
innings of the software revolution”. Today,
our software industry has yet to reach one
trillion. However, by 2030, it will be. And as
we can see from the diagram that the
growth is exponential -- the growth is
steeper as time goes on. Therefore, it is
essential to expose the use of technology
to our next generation as soon as possible to give them a better chance in grasping the
opportunities offered in this exponential growth.

Current Integrations
Fortunately, integration between technology and education is already ongoing. In fact it
is a very profitable and mature industry. With the maturity of Web 2.0 technologies, online
course provider such as Coursera began to emerge. Coursera is one of the most popular
platform where classes from world renowned professors and schools are offered to the public
either for free or charged, and they even offer scholarship to help those who cannot afford the
tuition. Coursera is a great way to decentralize education -- it allows students to learn beyond
the regular classroom setting. I have personally taken a business course called Leading People
and Team taught by the Dean of the Ross School of Business from the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor. The course was one of the best experience I’ve ever had. One of the benefit of
taking that course is that it was very self-paced. They offer many small lecture videos,
explaining the concepts, and at the end of each module, they will provide a quiz to solidify your
theoretical understanding. And then at every unit, there will be an assignment where I was
required to interview someone who has industry experience about their opinion on the
theoretical concepts. The flexible course schedule allowed me to balance my online course with
real-life course work. And it really helps me to add in to the conversation during my regular
course work. I remember during the English class back in High School, we had to do a
presentation on what is leadership. And I was able to directly reference some detailed examples
from the online course, and my teacher was really amazed.
Furthermore, this online platform help to decentralize education. With this online
platform, students no longer need to physically go to classrooms, which helps to alleviate the
pressure on public school enrollment. It also provides education to the general public at a lower
cost, which means an increase in the average education level. According to the ​National Center
for Education Statistic​, “in fall 2015, there were 5,954,121 students enrolled in any distance
education courses at degree-granting
postsecondary institution.” Also, the
statistic that the NCES gathered
showed that there are 14.4 percent of
students who are enrolled in
exclusively distance education
course(s). These statistic demonstrate
that students began to accept
online coursework. The approval of
these online courses by the
degree granting institutions shows
that these courses will actually teach students useful skills, just as they will acquire in a physical
classroom setting.
 At the same time, there are many tools developed for teachers to help them provide
better teaching experience, such as Gradescope, Sawyer, and Canvas by Instructure.
Gradescope is especially popular among the UC Berkeley STEM classes. It is developed by
Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer science professor, along with other students. The purpose
of this program is to help professors and teachers assistants to provide more specific feedback.
For instance, it allows individual question scoring and commenting, and it provides regrade
option. These features allow students to better understand where did they got wrong and able to
communicate with the graders with ease through the regrade request. Also, Gradescope will
compute statistic automatically for each assignment to allow the instructors to keep track of the
quality of understand. Sawyer is more geared toward elementary students. It facilitate the
communication between teacher and parents, and allow parents to keep track of their children’s
progress and teacher’s comment in a class. It is very useful in terms of parental engagement in
early education. Last but not least, Canvas is a really popular tool among both secondary and
higher education. It is a great web software that allows instructors for classroom management,
assignment distribution, and grade release. It allows the concept of a “hybrid” class where
students can be in class half of the time and complete assignments online. These technologies
are all dedicated to provide a better teaching experience for the teachers -- teachers no longer
have to worry about the nuances of classroom details or making announcement in-class, or
even grading. This extra time allowed the instructors to dedicate more of their time in developing
the curriculum and to provide one-on-one feedback for their students.

Problems with EdTech

Education Technology is relatively a new industry, and coming with its novelty and
potential profitability are a lot of problems. Those problems ranges from the correct utilization of
the technology to the social impact that the technology brought. I have separated those
problems into mainly three categories -- Data Privacy, Distraction, and Cost. In the following
sections, I will point out the problems, and provide suggestions for ways of mitigations.

Data Privacy
Imagine you are a senior in high school, applying for some of the top, elite college in the
country. And in April, you found out that you got accepted into none of your schools, not even
target schools. You are very confused -- you’ve got good grades, decent extracurriculars, and
you worked hard on your cover letter. You’ve demonstrated the qualities that those colleges are
looking for, yet you got into none of them. You wonder -- why? What makes me a disqualified
candidate? Eventually you found out that on your school record, there’s a line saying that you
were in a fight in your freshman year, and got a discipline mark. However, you learned your
lesson and became a model student there after. Despite the fact that you have changed,
colleges still see that record, and decided to go with other candidates.
Intelligent and creative use of data in education is the driving force behind efforts to use
digital curricula and personalized learning assessments. Data can be used in many different
ways to understand individual student’s strength and weakness and thus provide a better,
personalized education. However, with these data also came ​potential problems​, especially
regarding the data privacy for the students. There are 3 major problems relating to data privacy.
Much of the new technologies that classrooms are using nowadays are from edtech
startups. Unfortunately, according to TheTechEdvocate.org, ​“EdTech investors are far less
interested in student data privacy protection than other benefits edtech has to offer.​​”
Therefore, some edtech entrepreneurs reported that the rules around data privacy protection
tend to choke innovation and prevent companies from being genuinely creative. In order to
bootstrap products efficiently, they focused on development rather than slowing down and put
priority on privacy. Furthermore, since startups perceived that investors did not seem to show a
“meaningful interest” in student data privacy protection, priority is really not on the top of the
to-do lists for startups. (​EdWeek MarketBrief​) It is easy to understand why, even the
entrepreneurs wanted, privacy cannot be on the top of the to-do list -- they are trying really hard
to get the company off the ground, and focusing on a issue that wouldn’t bring them short term
reward doesn’t really help them when they barely trying to get the company to survive the next
day. Therefore, the solution of this problem really has to start from the investors. Investors
should have rubrics or other strategies that clearly states the privacy concerns they want to look
for in their portfolio companies. This will give startups incentives to do better on privacy
concerns and furthermore would mutually help the investors by helping them to build a
reputation of “investing in responsible, ethical companies.”

There is also no one set of clearly defined rule defining student privacy exists.
This means that edtech can collect everything on student form binary number logins to student
ID numbers. Data collection and storage requirements are driven by federal, state, and local
levels. These laws are not always consistent nor are comprehensive. (​thejournal.com​) The lack
of consistent rules allowed much grey space for the startups to define their own policies, leading
to disputes such as who has ownership to the data or who has access to the data. And very
often parents, and schools often are not at the same page in terms of data privacy concerns.
For example, if a company claims no ownership of the data but asserts that they can have
access and few restriction over sharing it, then it is no different than having the data.
CommonSense.org provided a list of findings: “
- A majority of applications and services use ​Default Encryption​ of information for
login and account creation.
- A majority of applications and services disclosed an​ Effective Date​ or version
number of their policies.
- A majority of applications and services disclosed that they do not rent, lease,
trade, or ​Sell Data​, but many are non-transparent.
- A majority of applications and services are non-transparent or explicitly allow
Third-party Marketing​.
- A majority of applications and services are non-transparent or explicitly allow
Traditional Advertising​.
 - A roughly equivalent percentage of applications and services have either
non-transparent, better, or worse practices about ​Behavioral Advertising​.
- A majority of applications and services are non-transparent or explicitly allow
Third-party Tracking​.
- A majority of applications and services are non-transparent or explicitly ​Track
Users​ across other websites.
- A majority of applications and services are non-transparent about creating ​Ad
Profiles​.
- A majority of applications and services are non-transparent or explicitly allow the
onward ​Transfer of Data​.”
Therefore, it is essential to define explicitly define policies regarding to what edtech can do with
the information that they have to protect against invasion of privacy.

Lack of clearly defined policy ties into the problem generated when an edtech startup
has transferred ownership. ​Selling or purchasing an edtech startup may or may not mean
selling student data collected so far. ​When selling a ed-tech company, student data may or
may not be part of the deal. And that is often even without notification of the data originator(the
students) or their guardians. As Barbara Kurshan wrote in her article ​The elephant in the room
with EdTech Data Privacy​, the student data management system PowerSchool changed hands
three times in 16 years, and had difficulty in maintaining students’ data privacy. The
PowerSchool system tracks student data in a number of areas ranging from attendance to
behavioral misconduct to performance on academics. It was first bought by Apple, then
Pearson, then Vista Equity Partners. This high ownership turnover rate lead to high data
leakage possibility for its users, and thus weakened protection around its student data. Another
example is GAFE, or Google App for Education. GAFE just hit 110 million users; it is very
popular among teachers, and school administrators. Some schools even put their entire
information on a single GAFE account. This leads to two problems. One, putting all the
information together means that it is more prone to hacker attack. And also it allows Google to
mine data from students, and Google makes 90% of its profit from selling ads and collecting
user data. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation ​just sued Google​ for mining data from G
Suite for Education users who use core services outside of G Suite for Education -- contrary to
their user license agreements. And the data that G Suite collected includes sensitive information
such as name, email address, telephone number, device information, and IP address. I propose
that the solution for this issue is to enforce state or federal level policy regarding informations
that can be transferred during an ownership transfer. Also, there should be regulations that
demand transparency of such transfer so that students, schools, and other stakeholders in this
transaction are all clear on what exactly are being bought or sold.
Distraction
Although technology is reshaping the format of education, there are significant problems
with the ways that we are implementing technology into education, which may instead lead to
some negative consequences such as​ being distracted, misguided by wrong information,
and cheating.
It is very common that when teachers said to turn on the computer, and open a certain
Google Document, the students turn the computers on and went to check their Facebook.
Another example would be teachers start to lecturing, and student were typing frantically on
their computers, trying to type down whatever the teacher said while at the same time trying to
digest the new knowledge. Cal State Dominguez Hill’s ​researchers​ said that young students are
more confident in multitasking and do it more often. However, ​the ability to multitask is a
myth​​. There are more research showing that our brain tend to focus on one thing by shutting
out others. Furthermore, more and more researches are indicating “that multitasking with media
during learning (in class or at home) can negatively affect academic outcomes.” Multitask is not
how our brain is wired, and we should not encourage our next generation to do so. On the other
hand, many teachers misused classroom technologies such as IClicker. In Nicole Dobo’s “​Do
classroom clickers improve learning? It depends​” article, she addressed the correct way and the
existing ways that teachers use iClicker. IClicker is a modern tool that is supposed to increase
student engagement. However, teachers mostly use it as a quiz tool where they ask students
specific questions. A research paper concluded that “Clickers can promote fact retention but
impede conceptual understanding.” Therefore it is very important to incorporate activities that
involve students in active inquiry and problem-solving. Asking questions that require students to
ponder on their own is more valuable than asking a factual question that essentially is just
memorizing data. ​Therefore, sometimes, technologies can mislead students to memorize
facts instead of truly understand the concepts.​​ The method to mitigate this is to provide
appropriate teacher’s training to make sure that technologies are incorporated in a supportive
fashion that incentivize more creative thinking.

Another major distraction is the fake news that one can find online.​​ With the
speeding development of technology, the websites owners wanted traffic and higher rankings
on the search engine. Many information has been copied from one website to another without
checking its authenticity. Thus, learners are misguided by the wrong information available on
the website. Some of the biggest platform of fake news are Facebook and Twitter. And
surprisingly, ​62% of American​ reported that they got their news on social media. There are so
many fake news sites that there is even a ​Wikipedia ​page about it, listing out the known ones,
trying to remind people to not trust the information there.
On the other hand, teachers are asking students to type up their essays. Students are
encouraged to cite online sources, and naturally, students would go online and find information,
in which the most common way is to directly google the keywords that the students are
interested in writing about. According to Joseph Finkelstein, an SEO expert, “the articles[on the
fake news sites] themselves are just stuffed with high-trending, low competition keywords.”
What that means is that fake news have higher priority in terms of search ranking, therefore the
first several links that shows up during a search might not be completely accurate. As one
teacher said​ “Pupils often mistake spoof news sites for real news, or presume anything
President Trump has said must be fact.” It is really hard for students to identify what is an
opinion and what is fact. Especially in this rapidly evolving internet era, information come and go
really fast and it would be hard for students to target the most unbiased information to cite.
Furthermore, a ​NASUWT ​survey found that around 62% of teachers said that they were aware
of pupils sharing inappropriate sexual content, with as many as one in six of them in primary
school age. Exposing students to the internet too early can easily mislead the children who has
yet to develop a solid view of the world.