Many of the claims made regarding innovation in online learning focus on technology, rather than the people being taught, or the pedagogies being used by teachers. In a world of shiny new platforms, tools, apps, hardware and software it can be difficult to find out whether they are actually meeting the needs and accommodating the learning preferences of real people.

Way back in 2014 (pp. 42-50), in a keynote conference speech Engaging flexible learning, Audrey Watters voiced concern about the imbalance between technology, pedagogy and people in discussions around educational innovation, noting ‘we do spend an inordinate amount of time in education and in education technology talking about things other than learning’.

Watters acknowledged that ‘we now find ourselves in an era of remarkable potential for education’, when ‘it’s a great time to be a learner thanks in no small part to new technologies’ which ‘offer us exciting opportunities for learning new things in new ways with new people’. However, she also observed that ‘much of this exuberance for learning [is] happening in informal settings, not in formal educational institutions’. The flexibility available to people learning informally, who take control of their own learning of topics that interest them, is not available to them in formal learning settings, she argued. One reason for this is that so often technology is the driver for innovation in education; not the people, not the pedagogy.

Watters proposed that the cause is ‘technology solutionism’ – ‘the growing power of the tech industry’, and an emphasis on education ‘as a market, as an ideology, as something to automate, something to “fix’’’.

She ended her keynote:

Learning – human learning – isn’t an algorithm. The problems we face surrounding education cannot be solved simply by technology…. Education is a human endeavor – profoundly human. We cannot, we should not automate these processes with teaching machines. Because we are tasked with teaching people after all.

In the steps that follow, you’ll look at one way for online educators to ensure that people, their learners, are at the centre of online teaching – the use of personas in learning design.

© The Open University