[New Release] The Future of Untact Education

[Asia Economy Reporter Donghyun Choi] EduTech, which seemed capable of providing the best educational content to more students more easily and quickly, is it fulfilling its role during the COVID-19 pandemic? In the 'With Corona' era, where non-face-to-face education has become the norm, EduTech is revealing its darker side in educational settings. What are the core issues of EduTech that the untact (contactless) era has missed? Why can't technology alone transform the classroom? The new book "The Future of Untact Education" is a clear evaluation report by an MIT professor on innovative educational technologies that emerged after the pandemic. It corrects the public's excessive expectations and fascination with EduTech.

The wave of EduTech that rushed into classrooms without preparation alongside the pandemic has, contrary to expectations, created a worrying phenomenon of unprecedented academic achievement gaps. However, the trend of combining education and technology cannot be stopped or reversed. Teachers, students, and parents who must conduct remote classes using tools like Zoom after COVID-19 have now reached a point where they must understand EduTech's blind spots themselves. The advice from Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, who has deeply researched the achievements and limitations of educational technology through direct conversations with teachers, students, parents, and education professionals worldwide, is therefore even more urgent for us.

Justin Reich is an EduTech researcher who has consistently attempted to correct the public's expectations and interest in educational 'innovation.' To resolve the dilemmas and limitations EduTech faces, he examines the methods tried so far from multiple perspectives of stakeholders such as teachers, parents, students, and education system researchers, and thoroughly outlines concrete methodologies EduTech should attempt post-pandemic. This book, which clearly analyzes over 20 years of EduTech history research, helps select and implement teaching methods and learning technologies suitable for the untact era.

Over the past decade, as 'technological optimism' has loudly made claims about education, people have come to believe that a single elementary school teacher can remotely teach 20 six-year-old students simultaneously in 'large-scale learning.' However, Justin Reich candidly reveals the report card of the latest educational technologies known as educational 'innovation' in this book. The New York Times designated 2012, well before the pandemic, as the year of online open courses 'MOOC (Massive Open Online Course),' and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have poured massive funds into conducting large-scale learning like MOOCs in the poorest elementary schools and elite universities. Now, looking back over the unprecedented spread of untact education in the past decade-plus, why are teachers exhausted and students alienated?

Author Justin Reich does not hide the fact that there is no online educational technology that provides world-class education at low cost worldwide while meeting national ideals and needs. Even looking at educational technologies like MOOCs, their purpose is not to enable educationally marginalized groups to receive higher education but to target students who can already learn independently and have stable financial status. Although researchers worldwide are striving to remove the learning barriers of MOOCs that prolong and entrench inequality, little is known publicly about the blind spots of learning through MOOCs. Now that public expectations that EduTech will improve learning outcomes are widespread, Justin Reich's research deserves attention to ensure fairness in this perspective. This book comprehensively covers the core issues of EduTech missed by the untact era and clearly presents its limitations and achievements.

In the 2000s and 2010s, there were technology-driven education experts dreaming of a complete transformation of the education system. These EduTech advocates claimed that new technologies could bring significant changes to existing education systems through the rhetoric of 'disruptive innovation.' However, most of the innovations promised by EduTech advocates during the first two decades of the 21st century ended incomplete, and rich discourses of skepticism criticizing them emerged. Justin Reich is a tinkerer who neither leans toward EduTech advocates nor skeptics but accepts the critics' views as a check on unrealistic optimism about EduTech while supporting the optimism that EduTech can improve teaching methods and learning efficacy.

Why can't education be transformed by technology alone? The author views the education system as a political institution where various stakeholders?including teachers, students, families, school boards, communities, and governments?negotiate. Injecting innovative 'technology' into the physical space of the classroom within the complex 'education ecosystem' involving multiple actors does not instantly bring educational innovation. The author closely examines the path educational technology has taken, focusing on problems education technology has failed to solve over the past 20 years, such as school care issues, humanities questions that automated grading cannot assess, and educational inequality problems that worsen with increased use of EduTech. He clearly states that technology alone cannot 'innovate' the education system but can only promote its 'change.' For change, attention must be paid not only to new educational technologies but also to the actors and environments that make up the education ecosystem. This book, which presents a balanced perspective on EduTech and suggests ways to effectively complement existing learning systems, is a must-read for teachers, students, parents, and education stakeholders who lead the use of EduTech.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.