How EdTech Doesn't Always Prioritize Education

As children return to classrooms after the summer holidays, calls for better educational technologies are growing louder across U.S. and European schools. Parents, teachers, and researchers agree: apps and platforms that misuse children’s data and trick them with manipulative features should be banned. Post-pandemic online teaching cannot continue with EdTech which converts kids’ clicks into dollars.

The commercial side of EdTech

EdTech is offered to schools with a mission to freely advance children's education, but EdTech is also a big industry (estimated at USD 101.64 billion in 2022). The survival of EdTech companies in a profit-driven market has led many developers to accelerate their prototypes for rapid scale-up without proper quality checks. With no global EdTech quality standards in place, we have ended up with more than 200,000 “educational” apps, many of which have little to do with education.

Indeed, the most popular apps used by U.S. children contain manipulative design features that lure children into meaningless games and purchases. What is worse, when compared to paid apps, free apps have even more distracting entertainment features. With an increasing app gap between families who know and can mediate children's digital learning and those that can't, bad and cheap EdTech might disadvantage children from lower-resource backgrounds.

Studies from European researchers reveal further gaps. Analysis of Android Google Play apps used by Greek children found that the apps fail to meet children’s developmental needs. Most popular digital books downloaded by Turkish, Dutch, Hungarian, and Greek parents are not age-appropriate and do not promote children’s language skills.

Data violations

The sobering report from Human Watch shows that during Covid, governments in 49 countries endorsed EdTech that directly violated children’s privacy. In the middle of the summer holidays, the Danish Data Protection Authority found data transfer risks with Google Workspace, and, as a result, Google Chromebooks were banned from Danish primary schools.

Spanish authorities created their own alternative—a learning platform similar to Google's but developed by Spanish designers. The press release quotes the Barcelona mayor’s explicit desire to crack down on the Google and Microsoft oligarchy in Spanish schools.

Neither teachers nor parents want commercial EdTech. When given the choice, teachers select apps described with educational benchmarks. Teachers favor apps that are evidence-based. Parents, too, want apps and e-books that reflect their cultural values and store children’s data in local clouds. They select apps that reflect researchers' criteria for good educational apps.

Researchers have been calling for more evidence-based, educational educational technologies for decades. The global EdTech efficacy movement is part of efforts to integrate science into EdTech's DNA. As documented by the EdTech Efficacy Research Academic Symposium, the lack of scientific evidence in EdTech products marketed to schools is a result of a complex structural problem that requires a comprehensive solution.

EdTech solutions

The first step is to stop the use of EdTech that violates children's rights. In the aftermath of the pandemic, national legislations designed to specifically protect children’s data. In the U.K., the government instituted The Children’s Code, and in the U.S. lawmakers proposed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Evidence-based EdTech got traction among international investors and national school procurement teams, and some companies have begun to incorporate research findings into their EdTech software. That educational technology should be based on learning principles seems to be a globally shared sentiment. Such evidence-based, truly “educational” EdTech is projected to pave the way to Metaverse. The transition period won’t be easy but we can look forward to EdTech with data privacy and research evidence by design.