Equity issues in e-learning trends in higher educations
So in session 3 of ED403, we were looking at e-learning trends in higher education, including things like BYOD, augmented and virtual reality, learning analytics and e-assessments. These are important and fascinating developments, which will impact on not only formal education processes, but also human learning more broadly. The sociologist and educator in me are in particular interested in the way these new innovations reproduce and challenge existing inequalities of access and outcome, and how we can reduce the former and enhance the latter. This is what I would like to reflect on further in this post.
A shared equity issue with all of these new innovations is that of access to equipment and data that is affordable, and speed of internet access. This is obviously a major issue. Universities and governments need to address this at the level of investing in the required infrastructure and equipment. USP's programme of giving tablets to first-year students at USP is an important initiative in terms of providing access to equipment, but the affordable data and speed issues need to be addressed for these tablets to facilitate e-learning. In terms of what we can do as individual educators in our online learning environments: I have been thinking about the fact that internet service providers in the Pacific are selling packages that give certain apps free usage (facebook, wikipedia, etc). If students are buying these data packages, then perhaps we need to move our e-learning to the platforms that are 'cheaper' or free (in terms of cost of data usage). In this case, it would be important for us as educators and the institution to not see facebook e.g. as a distraction but a legitimate site of learning and creating learning communities. And perhaps USP can negotiate with Pacific internet service providers to create cheaper or free usage of moodle in relation to data packages? Or create student discounts for data usage in general? Societies and universities have done things like this for public transport use, food services, movie services--why not do this for internet services for students, given the centrality of this in learning practices now?
The latter point is something important to keep in mind--sociological research has shown that as technological innovations occur, what are basic needs shift and I think we need to as educators advocate for these kinds of changes that support equity in education.
There is also a larger issue of equity with these technologies and trends in e-learning: The longer 'we' in the peripheries of world society wait to participate in these technologies, the more their content (and functionalities) will benefit and be directed towards wealthier and privileged centers. This has important implications for the type of knowledge that will be inform machine learning and AI (which is already being shown to be biased towards English, white, western ideas), the type of information we can use easily through open access features (which are already more biased towards western examples), and the skills with which our students (and us) enter and operate in the market place/knowledge economy. Collaboration and partnerships with communities in similar contexts (remote, indigenous, global south, etc) are crucial to develop solutions to these equity issues that are relevant and that allow 'us' to not be in the margins of these trends, but in the center or even leading them. The type of in-house solutions that are evolving at USP in relation to apps, learning analytics are a great example of this and we need to participate and support this further--but we need these to be context specific not only in terms of data demand and speed but also in terms of content.
A shared equity issue with all of these new innovations is that of access to equipment and data that is affordable, and speed of internet access. This is obviously a major issue. Universities and governments need to address this at the level of investing in the required infrastructure and equipment. USP's programme of giving tablets to first-year students at USP is an important initiative in terms of providing access to equipment, but the affordable data and speed issues need to be addressed for these tablets to facilitate e-learning. In terms of what we can do as individual educators in our online learning environments: I have been thinking about the fact that internet service providers in the Pacific are selling packages that give certain apps free usage (facebook, wikipedia, etc). If students are buying these data packages, then perhaps we need to move our e-learning to the platforms that are 'cheaper' or free (in terms of cost of data usage). In this case, it would be important for us as educators and the institution to not see facebook e.g. as a distraction but a legitimate site of learning and creating learning communities. And perhaps USP can negotiate with Pacific internet service providers to create cheaper or free usage of moodle in relation to data packages? Or create student discounts for data usage in general? Societies and universities have done things like this for public transport use, food services, movie services--why not do this for internet services for students, given the centrality of this in learning practices now?
The latter point is something important to keep in mind--sociological research has shown that as technological innovations occur, what are basic needs shift and I think we need to as educators advocate for these kinds of changes that support equity in education.
There is also a larger issue of equity with these technologies and trends in e-learning: The longer 'we' in the peripheries of world society wait to participate in these technologies, the more their content (and functionalities) will benefit and be directed towards wealthier and privileged centers. This has important implications for the type of knowledge that will be inform machine learning and AI (which is already being shown to be biased towards English, white, western ideas), the type of information we can use easily through open access features (which are already more biased towards western examples), and the skills with which our students (and us) enter and operate in the market place/knowledge economy. Collaboration and partnerships with communities in similar contexts (remote, indigenous, global south, etc) are crucial to develop solutions to these equity issues that are relevant and that allow 'us' to not be in the margins of these trends, but in the center or even leading them. The type of in-house solutions that are evolving at USP in relation to apps, learning analytics are a great example of this and we need to participate and support this further--but we need these to be context specific not only in terms of data demand and speed but also in terms of content.
Fully agree with you on shared equity. The idea to negotiate with internet providers on moodle free internet data package (like they do for FB etc) is also good, though this would mean that USP will need to negotiate with all its 12 member countries - again that too would be a matter of equity for our students across the region, isn't it? As educators we need to devise appropriate technological solution which will not create a digital divide.
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