Edtech for SDG4? Not without OER!

Blogpost on the occasion of the publication of the GEM report 2023 on education and technology entitled Technology in education, a tool on whose terms?

Halfway point for SDGs

It is timely to see this GEM report with a focus on education technology (edtech) come out this week. It provides an overview of potentials and challenges of harnessing technology to provide learning opportunities for all, as envisaged by SDG 4. It is timely, because we are already in the lead up to the SDG Summit in September, which sets out its starting point as follows: “Despite the setbacks and reversals in progress to date, the transformation envisioned by the 2030 Agenda remains both possible and essential. But this requires a surge of commitment from all stakeholders from across all sectors.” Digital technology and how it is applied (digital transformation) has been identified as a key accelerator towards this goal. 

Edtech is the new fintech

But on reflection, if we review the discussions around technology in education over the past five years, we will see a real mix between techno-solutionism, techno-antipathy and efforts to find a critical mid-group, where criticisms are taken seriously, but the potential of digital transformation is built upon. 

During this period, the requirements of Covid prevention measures led to a lot of experimentation and quick implementations of solutions from which we have been able to learn. We have also seen a huge growth in the edtech market. In February 2022, one of the search terms trending strongly on google was “edtech is the new fintech”. And we saw the edtech giant BYJU become a major sponsor of the Fifa World Cup. In 2023, this Indian multinational edtech company has a market value of around 5 billion USD and claims to have enrolled 150 million students. But more generally, following a strong growth phase during the pandemic, market analysts predict a strong consolidation phase and more regulation as the edtech sector matures.

Key policy issues in open educational resources

Background document. GEM 2023 Janssen, Ben, Schuwer, Robert, Orr, Dominic

In this blog, I would like to hone in on the GEM chapter on access to content, as Ben Janssen, Robert Schuwer and I wrote the background paper to this. In our paper, we paid particular attention to open educational resources (OER), with the aim to support the argument that OER can play a significant role in improving access to high-quality and relevant content and learning experiences. 

Digital learning and walled gardens

Digitalisation has helped, as platforms have become the new distribution centres for learning materials, and learning management systems (LMS) and learning experience platforms have provided scalable learning environments, which support individual learning pathways, augmenting or substituting for missing formal education settings. 

The GEM report highlights various aspects of access to content and content delivery, but here I would like to briefly develop the argument for the role of OER in edtech. We should start by recognising that during the 21st century, digitalisation of learning has both helped and hindered getting learners the high quality learning experiences they need. 

But digitalisation has hindered access where platforms have created so-called “walled gardens”, where only those logged in have access to this content and their learning achievements are locked into a specific platform. With these characteristics, they have replicated some of the limitations of access to learning found in formal education and/or used the mechanics of the private sector to create scarcity of opportunities, which require learners to pay for access (including, where access to learning is free: paying for certification). 

Digitalisation has also hindered the potential for better access where these platforms only promote self-paced learning of preconfigured learning materials that have not been adapted to the needs or the context of different learner groups. This is a product-centred approach to learning and does not provide sufficient space for adaptation and co-creation of the learning experience through interactive elements like face-to-face sessions and peer exchange.

Context is the “kingdom”

So, let’s link these problems to the question of access to content. We might reference the popular slogan from digital marketing – “if content is king, context is the kingdom” – and adapt it to our domain of learning. This reminds us that access to high quality learning will only be achieved through better distribution channels for materials (open access) and the opportunity to adapt and localise these materials to the needs and context of the learners (reuse and adapt). These are two key characteristics of OER. So, we believe that good digital learning requires content to be licensed and supported as OER. That is why we concluded our report with the statement: “OER can and should be leveraged to ensure that learners, instructors, employers and the whole of society can play their part in achieving effective learning environments for all.”

When we wrote the report in the summer of 2022, although there were discussions on AI, it was not until the launch of ChatGPT (or as students call it “Chatty”) on 30 November 2022 that the possibilities of AI for content creation and adaptation really became clear. It is very interesting to think that reuse and adaptation of existing course materials to new contexts could become extremely simple in the coming year or so – but this will take much longer to reach the mainstream, especially if we are thinking globally and focussed on the fact that SDG 4 is a relevant goal for all countries, but especially for those in the Global South. (And we don’t have the space here to go into the challenges and social issues of using large language models, e.g. the ethical concerns that they built on extractive labour market practices.)

But another problem that the field of OER has suffered is that even if there is great content, there remains the challenge of finding it for teachers and for learners – and for this to really be successful, the search should not be limited to individual platforms, but reach across the web. The more natural interfaces around Chatty and similar tools allow us to search using common language (and increasingly: in any language) is likely to help here in the near future. This is being called the move from navigation to discoverability. 

Enabling structures

In the end, all of this is still dependent on good policies and regulations which encourage the development and use of OER (including supporting open education practices in formal learning settings) and the need for discoverability tools being available beyond the individual market-focussed strategies of edtech companies. But these policies do not have to be called “OER policies”. We devote a whole chapter to this issue, as we find it important to emphasise OER and indeed good quality openly accessible content can be achieved by embedding this requirement into a variety of different types of policies. To find out more about this, check out the accompanying blogpost from Rob Schuwer and Ben Janssen.  

*image: context by Nithinan Tatah from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)