In the study material for this week, there were a couple of videos of presentations given by Nick Robinson and Laurie Harrison from ELTjam. They were about how ELT should respond to the EdTech revolution. EdTech can be described as the use of technology to enhance education and includes digital hardware such as tablets and phones, software apps, platforms such as skype and Twitter, IWBs and ebooks. The idea is that these resources can ‘promote, support and extend a student’s ability to learn’.
Bill gates (the Khan academy), George Lucas (Edutopia), Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all part of the EdTech landscape. Platforms such as Duolingo and Voxy specialise in languages and English respectively.
An idea that permeates the movement is that traditional education is stuck in the past in some way and ‘ripe for disruption’.
According to Harrison, the four characteristics of the EdTech revolution are as follows:
- Money – There seems to be a lot of this being thrown at EdTech. According to the Guardian, celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher have invested in Duolingo who in 2015 had received $38.3m of venture capital.
- Disruption – This idea of changing something old.
- Grassroots entrepreneurship- Teachers are getting on board and developing apps and websites.
- Polarisation and controversy – There are two competing views of EdTech. One is that it will benefit learners the other is that it seeks to profit from them.
They go on to describe a scale of controversy where at one end there is the undisputed benefit of the internet as a resource and at other we have ideas such as adaptive learning, Big Data and automated content creation which understandably, teachers may fear as it has the potential to make them redundant.
In his blog, Philip Kerr gives an excellent summary of adaptive learning and big data. Briefly, adaptive learning refers to software that analyses a student’s output and then customises educational content accordingly. Simple examples of this include the spaced repetition memory trainers such as Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. More complex models incorporate ‘big data’. This is software which keeps complex personal files that can be converted into ‘actionable insights’, in other words, the results of data-driven analytics which can then be acted on. Businesses have been using analytics for a long time. Whenever a website such as Amazon suggests products based on your buying patterns, it is using ‘big data’.
ELT Jam’s message is that rather than resisting or surrendering, ELT should engage with the EdTech movement and steer it in the right direction. In particular, publishing needs to stand up to the EdTech companies who view the publishers as a target for disruption. According to Harrison, publishers need to become more EdTech: They need to look outside ELT publishing, find out who their competitors are, understand how tech companies work, work with established EdTech companies, seek out interesting start-ups, and bring their ELT expertise to EdTech.
This last point is probably the most relevant and reassuring to ELT. While EdTech companies’ strengths lie in the technology, design, and user experience of their products, their pedagogical principles can be somewhat lacking. Take for example Duolingo. Based on the grammar-translation method, the sentences can be a little out of context. In a seminar, a fellow student showed me an example of a Duolingo sentence on her phone that needed translating, it read: I am a penguin.
Other EdTech companies fare better with regard to methodology. Voxy, for example, was built on the principles of task-based teaching. Beginning with a needs analysis, it incorporates authentic online content, one-to-one tutoring and group classes as part of its programme.
The platform Newsmart is a collaboration between ELTJam and Newscorp designed to help its users improve their business English. Learners read Wall Street Journal articles and then practise their grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.
Nick Robinson then goes on to talk about how some schools are embracing the movement:
EF have launched their own online English school, called English Town, where you can learn English for one month for £1. After a needs analysis the learner has access to ‘hundreds of hours of interactive study material’ and online conversation classes with live teachers and small groups of students that start every hour.
FutureLearn, a British councils site, regularly delivers MOOCs (massive online open courses), with more than 100,000 learners taking part without charge.
Robinson also reports a blurring of lines between publishers and language schools. On the one hand, you have Pearson acquiring a group of Brazilian language schools and ‘positioning themselves as the complete language solutions provider’: Students can go to their school, use their content, take their exams and get their accreditation, which isn’t that unusual when you think of Cambridge and Oxford University. Then, on the other hand, you have language schools abandoning published materials altogether and creating their own content, which of course has the advantage of being tailored to the needs of the learners.
Finally, they encourage teachers to engage with EdTech. They believe teachers have the potential to come up with ideas for interesting products and suggest reading The lean startup by Eric Ries (now a’ movement‘), which explains how to get a business of the ground before spending money. A teacher to successfully do this is Mike Boil, who after teaching himself code in three months, set up Easy Tweets ,which teaches English through Twitter.
While I was browsing all the websites mentioned in the talk, it made me think that learning a language really involves communicating with other people, ideally face-to-face, in order to benefit from non-linguistic clues to meaning. Some of the sites listed above such as Voxy and English Town, provide online instruction and opportunities for conversation. However, these sites are not free. So what cost-free sites can learners use that have a webcam facility? A brief search uncovered the following sites:
The idea behind this site is that you meet up with native speakers living in your area. Failing that, you can also chat to people online, using the site’s own software, skype or Google Hangouts. It is free to use, although you can by the authors a drink.
This is another site where you can chat to people with the same interests for free.
Finally, this site allows you talk to other learners if you sign up for a premium account.
So will I be resisting, surrendering, or engaging? It is true that student numbers in Brighton have fallen drastically since I went on maternity leave. Last autumn, at the school where I used to work, five teachers were having to share one class, so only worked one day a week. As many teachers in our industry have to accept zero hours contracts, this doesn’t bode well. So where are the students? Have they all signed up to MOOCs? As traditional teaching positions become more scarce, perhaps a sensible option would be to find work online. Call it surrendering, engaging or simply surviving.