Charting an Engaging Path Forward for Technology Enabled Education
From Mackenzie Hird
For many educators, Technology Enabled Education (TEE) holds great promise to deliver high quality lessons at low prices (perhaps even free) all over the world. Today, however, even high quality examples of TEE are routinely criticized for poor pedagogical practices that aren’t particularly engaging for students.

To dig deeper into this criticism, I attended a lecture a week ago by Michelene Chi from Arizona State University in which she presented her research on student engagement in their classroom lessons. She has defined four classifications for how students can be observed to be engaged:

Passive – Learners are receiving instruction, and paying attention to that instruction, but not doing anything else overtly i.e. listening to a lecture without taking notes or watching a video or demonstration. This engagement typically results in minimal understanding of the material.

Active – Learners are using actions reinforce their understanding i.e. copying a solution from the board, highlighting important keywords or repeating definitions. This engagement typically results in a shallow understanding of the material.

Constructive – Learners are generating information beyond what was presented in the lesson i.e. drawing a concept map, elaborating on notes, posing questions or forming hypotheses. This engagement typically results in a deeper understanding of the material that might transfer.

Interactive – Learners are engaged with another learner through dialog i.e. explaining jointly with a peer, arguing with a peer and building on each other’s contributions. This engagement typically results in an understanding of the material that might generate new ideas.

These definitions are only what observers can outwardly see and might not convey all of the cognitive processes of learners: a passive learner could be constructing knowledge in their head and simply not showing outward signs. However, Chi and her colleagues, after an extensive literature review and their own research, have found ample support that learning results are

Interactive > Constructive > Active > Passive

This is not to say that students cannot learn significant amounts while passively listening to a lecture. However, if all other factors were equal, students would achieve even more understanding when they were more deeply engaged. Indeed, much of a teacher’s in-class time is spent trying to increase student engagement from passive or active to constructive by prompting them to ask questions or generate hypotheses.

Much of the TEE content today focuses on producing online videos that teachers can use to supplement their own instruction, usually at home as a part of a flipped classroom. Many of these resources are incredibly high quality, but most students will be passively watching (perhaps with some engaged actively taking notes). This relatively low engagement level is not a criticism of most TEE providers; it is remarkable to see such deep student learning for students who are passively viewing the material. Think about how much better TEE could be if they adopted new pedagogies or modes of delivery that might increase student engagement, and thus learning.

Though students using TEE can currently move from passive to active by taking notes they are not prompted by the teacher in the same way they are in the classroom. TEE developers could introduce a note-taking and annotation features into their resources so that students could create their own notes, including key selections of video or audio resources. Khan Academy has recently taken a step in this direction for its computer science videos where users can stop videos and change the code itself to deepen their own learning.

Using TEE to engage students constructively will be a larger challenge. Developers will have to guide learners into precarious situations where they are not simply lectured at and thus have the freedom to construct their own understanding, while still providing enough information for every learner to fully understand the material. Educational games, if complex enough, might be able to bring learners into situations where learners are nudged into engaging constructively with the material.

Finally, novel uses of TEE can interactively engage students and produce a very deep understanding of the material. Many developers have realized that incorporating the classroom experience into online materials has unique opportunities to have students engage one another in a discussion guided by the teacher. In-class blended learning approaches, such as BLOSSOMS, are able to effectively harness the other students by passing back and forth between video sections and in-class interactive activities. Further, students in many classrooms have begun blogging about topics in science and using collaborative editing, such as Google Drive, to interact with one another outside of the classroom.

Moving Technology Enabled Education away from the current model of passive engagement will be a challenge. Developers will likely have to invest more time in each module instead of simply recording a short video. However, if students have experienced such great learning gains already from only passive engagement, then the future of TEE really is quite exciting once we can engage learners more deeply.

Mackenzie Hird is a Masters student in the Technology and Policy Program at MIT and a research assistant in the MIT Education-as-a-Complex-System Group.

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