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Reflections

So how do we start to reclaim and change our digital education futures in the face of the continued ‘unbundling’ of education practices and the marketisation of education?

A recent UNESCO report (2021) suggests the idea of a social contract for HE, which requires the need for urgent institutional change based around the fact that;

Education systems have wrongly instilled a belief that short-term prerogatives and comforts are more important than longer-term sustainability. They have emphasised values of individual success, national competition and economic development, to the detriment of solidarity, understanding our interdependencies, and caring for each other and the planet.

UNESCO report (2021, p33)

As proctoring technologies become more sophisticated, I would concur that education is faced with entirely new possibilities. Without encouraging further research to investigate how and to what degree these technologies are being used and understood by users, we place ourselves in a precarious situation. Bayne (2019) advises that a move to a more anonymised assessment model holds value for students and that it would effectively temper the advances of proctoring technologies. In addition, its ‘use-value for peer review, anonymised assessment or teaching evaluation’ would promote trust between teacher/student (Bayne, S. et al., 2019 p.107)

I would agree that reframing assessments away from traditional summative assessments to quantify students’ performance is one attractive option when considering our digital education future.

Selwyn (2021) echoes this sentiment when introducing the ‘Ed-tech within limits’ mindset. Discussing how focusing on a collective good practice for educators or institutions may result in a ‘Reconfiguring Ed-tech practices’ (Selwyn, 2021, p.504).

Proctoring technologies may still hold a place, but the need for further critical discourse concerning the adoption of their use for assessment is necessary to guard against a future where neoliberal instrumentalism and datafication of education are the norms.

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References

Bayne, S. et al. (2019) ‘The social value of anonymity on campus: a study of the decline of Yik Yak’, Learning, Media and Technology, 44(2), pp. 92–107 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2019.1583672

Selwyn, N. (2021) ‘Ed-Tech Within Limits: Anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis’, E-Learning and Digital Media, 18(5), pp. 496–510. doi:10.1177/20427530211022951. 

UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education. UNESCO Futures of Education report – Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707.locale=en. 2021

Digital Futures for Education by s1064867 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

 

 

 

Mar 27, 2022