Startup Digest Education - Issue #110 - EdTech in the Post-Pandemic Era

Some institutions plan to mitigate COVID-19 risks with shortened calendars and caps on class size, while others, like The California State University, say they’ll deliver most of this fall’s instruction online. Whichever route colleges take, higher education appears poised to quicken the pace of cloud adoption, both to support near-term activity and to increase agility to withstand future challenges.

There are three actions that venture capitalists, foundations and other education funders should take to help close the digital divide.

1. Education funders must invest in gap-closing edtech solutions.

2. Education funders must ensure that these gap-closing edtech solutions are inclusive.

3. Education funders must ensure that leadership at their own organization is diverse.

A study by MIT professors shows that there is probably no easy, silver-bullet questionnaire that can be asked at the beginning of any online course to improve the student completion rate, as some learning scientists had hoped. Learning scientists need to pay more attention to context when they test various teaching methods, while teachers and developers should make small changes to systems over time that would gradually improve online learning.

The EdTech migration started before the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic forced school districts across the country to jump into remote learning almost overnight. As a result, cloud-based EdTech became a replacement for classroom learning rather than a tool used to enhance it.

In the chaos of the moment, the quick shift to EdTech tools for classroom learning and other school functions created cybersecurity and student data privacy challenges. New SaaS apps were connected to school Google accounts without proper vetting or sanctioning.