Education - Issue #136: 21st Century Teaching & EdTech Turnover

The article offers a recap of the biggest and most popular edtech business stories of 2020. It covers the following:

- Instructure’s Future

- COVID’s Immediate Aftermath

- Race, Culture and Curriculum

- Funding, Wheeling and Dealing

- March of the Unicorns

A group of technology committees have sent a letter to US President-Elect Joe Biden and the head of his education transition team, requesting that Biden’s administration take actions to assure the quality and accessibility of education during the pandemic and to ensure that schools have adequate funding and resources. In addition to funding for state and local education offices, the letter asks for increased staffing at the US Office of Education Technology, which is currently operating with minimal staff, as well as expanded use of data-driven student assessments and professional development to ensure that teachers can properly use new education technology.

There has been a remarkable shift in the attitude towards the adoption of online as a mode for education and learning. Not only students as end-users, but also schools, colleges, and tuition centres are adopting tech-based learning solutions.

We set out to answer those questions over the past year, with a series of articles and interviews exploring what teaching in the 21st century looks like. Some show the nuances of the challenges of teaching with technology by telling stories of innovative professors, including how a water agency official who teaches an online community college course got started in creating open educational resources when her class was incorporated into a zero-cost textbook degree program. Others dive into research on the culture of teaching, like a talk with an anthropologist studying how professors react to (and sometimes resist) research on teaching practices.

What is the biggest challenge that colleges and universities face in working with ed-tech companies?

The real challenge that nonprofit universities face with for-profit ed-tech companies is turnover.

The overall attrition rate in the industry is 13.2 percent. Turnover at e-learning companies is somewhat better (11.6 percent) than in other sectors (gaming is 15.5 percent), but it is still high.