Edtech journalist Audrey Watters has written much about the ‘myth’ of disruptive education and the narrative of an ‘education apocalypse’. In December 2017, she summarised the year’s edtech developments:

Some of the most oft-told tales in education in recent years have the following plot: the students all move from “brick-and-mortar” to “online.” It’s an inevitable move, or so the story goes.

Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn, for example, predicted in their 2008 book Disrupting Class that by 2019 half of all high school classes would be taught via the Internet. There was all that ink spilled circa 2010 that Khan Academy and “flipped learning” were going to “change the rules of education,” replacing in-class instruction with online videos watched as homework. And then there were MOOCs, of course, and all those predictions and all those promises about the end of college as we know it: “MOOCs make education borderless, gender-blind, race-blind, class-blind and bank account-blind” and similar fables.

It’s not simply that the predictions were wrong. (Although no, to be clear, we are not on track for half of high school classes to be online or for higher education to be replaced by Udacity, and no, MOOCs have not transformed higher ed into some magical meritocracy.)

Rather, it’s that the steady drumbeat of stories about the inevitability of online education has shaped the cultural imaginary. It has shaped the political imaginary. It has shaped the administrative imaginary – and that in turn has shaped how schools have built capacity (or much more likely outsourced capacity) and defined capacity altogether – notably in response to what’s been consistently framed as the challenge of access and the necessity of choice.

Online education, we’re still told, will be education’s disruptor. Online education, we’re also still told, will be its saviour.

Discussion

Reflect on what you know about how online education was used during the Covid lockdowns and how it has been used since then.

• Has online education been education’s saviour?
• Does it offer more desirable choices?
• Which innovations will really disrupt education in a lasting and positive way?
• Can innovation benefit some, while disadvantaging others?

Use the discussion area to share your thoughts and experiences with your fellow learners.

© The Open University / Audrey Watters (CC-BY)