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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

(www.afterbabel.com)
346 points obscurette | 1 comments | 12 Nov 24 14:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.314s | source
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donatj ◴[12 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42116365[source]▶
I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.

We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.

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1. _rm ◴[13 Nov 24 01:39 UTC] No.42122043[source]▶
Yes the problem isn't so much ed-tech, which by the way we all use everytime we Google or ChatGPT how to do something.

The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.

The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.

If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.

But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.