6
The Role of Technology
The role of technology in educational experiences and ethical issues presented by rapidly evolving technological developments were the focus of a panel discussion. Panelists were asked to explore the complex issues raised by current and potential technological developments, the ways in which individuals and society can make informed decisions about technology’s use, and ways in which undergraduate STEM students can be helped to consider these issues throughout their education (see Box 6-1). Panelists were selected to provide perspectives from industry, government, and academia.
Michael Torrence of Motlow State Community College opened the panel discussion by explaining how he and colleagues are applying a concept they call TILT (teaching, innovation, learning, and training) to STEM education. They chose to use this approach in an attempt to increase the percentage of Tennesseans with postsecondary degrees or certifications to 55 percent by 2025. TILT is targeted at people who are between jobs or seeking new skills at a Community College. His institution also focuses on technology as a core component of students’ ability to become entrepreneurs, and sees entrepreneurship as particularly helpful to those from the state’s rural areas who want a good career but who do not want to leave their rural communities.
Schatz explained that the initiative she heads, Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), aims to modernize the way the United States and its international partners conduct digital and online training and education. ADL is a federal program housed under the Defense Human Resources Agency that serves the federal workforce and partners in industry and academia.
It aims to demonstrate the use of diverse kinds of technology to provide high-quality education, training, and informal learning.1 To achieve those goals ADL considers lessons from pedagogy, adult education, and other instructional approaches as important program components along with the technological tools.
In 2019, Schatz and her ADL colleagues worked with more than 85 professionals across industry, academia, K–12 education, government, and nonprofit organizations to identify what the future of learning, broadly defined, will look like. The resulting learning ecosystem developed from this effort leverages technology to create ubiquitous learning that blends all training and educational experiences and is driven by data. Data, said Schatz, makes learning experiences personalized and manageable, whether those experiences include training, education, workforce development, or informal learning. For this ecosystem to come to fruition, she explained, it will require new instructional techniques, challenges to governance and other types of policies, and an opening of the education aperture wide enough to admit the formal to informal learning spectrum and the individual to organizational/collective learning spectrum.
Mohan, whose nonprofit helps underserved people access digital services that improve their lives, predicted that the next 5 years will be exciting as the business models, public policies, and affordability of Internet services, as well as access to education, telemedicine, and other digital services become more democratized. He noted that students with access, updated
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1 Additional information is available at https://adlnet.gov/.
devices, and digital competency will have a clear advantage in the future workforce, which to him means that the education systems and supporting technologies need to be designed with the digitally underserved in mind, but they also need to be designed for use by everyone.
In the United States, some 42 million low-income and rural people do not have Internet access devices, software, or digital skills, said Mohan, and every day that situation leaves these Americans further behind in education, work, health care, and everyday life. “The COVID-19 pandemic conclusively showed that people who are not digitally prepared lose their education, their jobs, and even their lives because of digital inequities,” said Mohan, “and while society becomes more dependent on these digitalized Internet-connected services and opportunities, digitally underserved students, individuals, and families are left out of the decision-making process and technology that decide their status in our society.”
In her remarks, Jackson said that from her perspective in the health information industry, it is important to prepare students for jobs, but if STEM education does not want to suffer the same fate as home economics and shop classes in the K–12 environment, it is important to ensure that STEM remains relevant in American society, particularly in the lives of students who would benefit from a deep engagement in STEM. The way to start doing this, she said, is to “first start by understanding their interests and their needs and then leverage the data to let us know what they are actually interested in learning so that we can actually see transformational and traditional education have some form of fusion in the future.”
Following the panelists remarks, planning committee member Leanne Chukoskie asked the panelists to discuss ideas on how to build the educational infrastructure in a way that incorporates digital technologies, physical attributes, and social and cultural issues in a way that is effective, inclusive, equitable, and resilient. Torrence replied that the place to start is ensuring that everyone has access to both Internet connectivity and the hardware needed to use that connectivity. Doing so would benefit all levels of education from K–12 through graduate school. He noted that there are actually few areas in the country that do not have fiber-optic cable available, making the challenge one of connecting all households. He said the nation should be ashamed if it does not make these connections now, given the rate at which technology is becoming an intimate part of educational and economic success.
Schatz said she could not agree more with Jackson’s comments about the need for a fusion of traditional and transformational approaches, noting that the nation is on the cusp of having a learning ecosystem for the future. The technologies are available, she said, as are the different pathways of conveying knowledge and skills to those who need it most. There is also flexibility in terms of degrees, certificates, and microcredentials. Together,
these tools, along with data, can create lifelong, highly personalized learning trajectories that have the potential to produce greater equity. The one possible downside has to do with an individual’s data and who owns those data, the student or some company. Schatz said that if the issues of data privacy, interoperability, and sovereignty are resolved in a good way, the opportunities will exist to benefit all Americans. If done wrong, data could become an invisible shackle that people will struggle to understand, just as they do today with their social media data.
Jackson commented that the parallels between the issues confronting education and health information technology—the area in which she works—are “so profoundly shocking” that everyone needs to look at the path that health information technology has taken over the past 20 years in terms of influencing learners through social media and getting people of all ages and backgrounds familiar and more confident in technology. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act provides lessons that could serve as a foundation for how education could deal with privacy and data ownership.
Mohan stressed the importance of working with communities, not in spite of them. As an example, he was part of a steering group to develop a digital inclusion roadmap for low-income neighborhoods. One of the ideas that came out of this group was to put charging stations for electric vehicles in those neighborhoods, even though few people in those neighborhoods have an electric car. He advocated for getting neighborhood leaders involved in the planning activities, and what those leaders told the steering group was that the biggest problem they had with technology was that high school students could not get jobs because they could not type given that they were all using iPads. “We need to work with the communities in looking at cultural problems that they are solving and co-develop solutions with them,” said Mohan. Doing so will build trust and lead to higher rates of acceptance and adoption of technology, he added.
Reflecting on questions and comments made by symposium participants, Chukoskie noted the need to ensure that the use of technology in teaching is not implemented in ways that are detrimental to the identity of marginalized students. Related to that, she said there are dinosaurs in academia who are not necessarily thinking that way, and unfortunately, they comprise the majority of available educators in this generation. The question then becomes how academia can ensure that technology is lifting up marginalized students rather than keeping them in place. Jackson replied that the MIT Hackathon2 does this very well by using decentralized mentoring from multidisciplinary subject matter experts from many different places. She believes that higher education should do the same. She also said
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2 Additional information is available at https://hackmit.org/.
that there is a process by which instructors are disseminating information and students are applying it, and if educators use culturally competent mentors to apply information, then it should be possible to do both well and create not only greater support for technology but also greater adoption of it.
Speaking of dinosaurs, Mohan said they are also making decisions on broadband investments, and those decisions have prioritized expanding broadband access in rural areas while largely ignoring urban areas that are underserved digitally and largely populated by Black and brown Americans. Torrence stressed the need to break down the silos that exist in academia so that academic affairs, student success, and workforce development are working together to benefit students. He also noted the importance of developing staff and administrators, not just faculty, as culturally competent individuals. Schatz added that providing broadband access is not the end of the process, given there is a big difference between having access to information and getting it through quality pedagogy with good mentors and access to structured, coherent, well-designed courses. “I worry that if we forget about those aspects, we will simply shift from having a lack of equity in access to now a lack of equity in the coherence of the information that is available,” said Schatz.
Posing a question from a symposium participant, Chukoskie asked the panel to discuss the qualities of the future Internet. Mohan said the Federal Communications Commission defines broadband Internet as providing 25 megabits/second downloading and 3 megabits/second uploading, which he said is terrible. He proposed that 100 megabits/second in each direction should be standard so as to accommodate three people working or studying at home, all conducting Zoom meetings. He said that as he speaks to those who are designing the next generation of the Internet, he is seeing a lot of thought being pursued about ways to create an Internet that promotes student safety, curtails the spread of misinformation, and makes it easy to access good information and learn remotely. “It is hard to know exactly what can be done,” said Mohan, “because there are so many regulations in place and influence from Internet service providers that is preventing progress.” He also noted that the community broadband networks that are popping up across the country can have a big influence toward democratizing the Internet. Schatz commented that if the future Internet is designed correctly, it could create the possibility of having an “Internet of learning things” in which training and education technologies are able to communicate with one another thanks to interoperability.
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