EdTech and the Cadence of Change

None of this minimizes the time and resources that technology projects themselves require. Where a technology team tasked with an aggressive project plan and lucky enough to have scaled-up resources appropriately might be able to compress a timeline, there are very explicit windows to successfully execute and deploy EdTech projects at scale. That means the technology is up but also that it is being used in a meaningful way. The launch windows for projects like the ones I am talking about are very tight, and missing one means waiting for the next academic orbit, a semester, or an entire academic year away. The move away from self-hosted solutions with long, resource-intensive update processes to cloud-based centralized models definitely improves things, but major UX changes and feature roll-outs still require thoughtful communication and training that take time.

There is a breathlessness about EdTech at times. The underlying technology is advancing radically, and for all of that structural lethargy, the student-user audience continuously replenishes itself with young, technology savvy users who reasonably expect to see technology meaningfully deployed in their academic experiences. The "digital natives" label has become useless and outdated in thinking about these groups. It is who they are, and we are well past that inflection point of thinking about that as some different or new. Their world, our world, is an environment of acceleration.

That said, even with in situ expectations about real-time data; immediate communication; and online collaboration, what gets lost is that most users by-and-large still operate following the same overarching calendars and traditional expectations. College students start their semesters or quarters in the fall, reviewing their syllabi at the start of the term. K12 students work within marking periods and semesters, preparing to take tests or work on projects based on when they've been scheduled. As much as students want to see their non-educational technology experiences mirrored in their classrooms, there is a fundamental expectation of technological and experiential stability and consistency between those familiar milestones of start and end.

We are already in a period of educational change driven by technology, some of it radical and long overdue. But with all of the palpable excitement about remaking this space with amazing tools and platforms and applications, the most successful endeavors may actually be the ones that help navigate around the massive gravitational pull of familiar, well-established structures instead of simply pretending they don't exist or hyperbolically wishing them away. We all get excited about what is new. In real, practical terms, though, incremental technologies that start to move the needle but that demonstrate a deep understanding of the realities of institutions, teachers, students, and administrative staff might be far more valuable and transformative.