The Transformative Potential of Edtech - A Conversation with Carla Aerts

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

An easy trap for edtech companies to fall into is that they're trying to retrofit too much, but technologically retrofitting is never a really good idea because you're not really transforming. And then again, the technology starts to be used for the sake of the technology rather than for the kind of transformative power the technology can bring.

Welcome back. It was such a pleasure today to be able to speak to Carla Arts. Carla is an edtech expert and somewhat of a polymath. She started her career in the performing arts before moving into the digital domain. For many years, Carla managed international transformation programs and innovation initiatives for education publishers. She was Global Digital Director of Education for Cambridge University Press and Director of Futures at University College London's Institute of Education. There she led the mentoring and training of 250 edtech startups. This summer, Carla launched the Refracted Inter- and Transdisciplinary Learning Community in order to facilitate essential dialogue and knowledge sharing from education experts as well as experts from across the domains. And you can hear her speak more about this in the podcast. Prior to this, Carla also set up and ran the Tomorrow Institute, and she runs the Next Billion Edtech Prize, for startups working in resource-poor contexts. And she was instrumental in the workshop that led to the publication of the World Economic Forum report, Generation AI. You can find Carla on the social media handles in the show notes, and I would really encourage you to continue the dialogue with this wonderful person and passionate educator.

Hi, Carla.

Hello.

Great, perfect. So to start with, on your bio, I like this term that you give yourself, a futures of learning versatilist. It's even quite tricky to say, but versatilist. But I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about what that means to you in terms of how you see your role in education.

Yeah, definitely. So I consider myself a versatilist, partly because I—

That's a better way to say it.

It's easier that way.

Nice, I like it.

Yeah, so a versatilist because I sort of feel that, you know, education is too stuck in its silos. And what I'm trying to do, and actually have been trying to do all the way through my career, even when I wasn't focusing on education, was connecting different dots and making connections and building bridges between those connections. So rather than sticking in the vertical, I sort of tend to draw the horizontals across because I also believe that the way the world is changing, we do need more of that sort of versatile approach to how we, we look at things. And what really strikes me in education, and especially through the work that I've done over the past couple of years, is how everybody involved in education is stuck in their specialty or in their silo. And I think that's one of the reasons that education is finding it so hard to break out of its shell. So you have the policymakers deciding on education policy. Yes, they're informed by academics. Yes, they might be informed by school leaders, but the conversation isn't wide enough, I think, and also not maybe applied enough. So what I've been trying to do in my recent work at the Tomorrow Institute is exactly that, is trying to kind of galvanize the conversation and the dialogue between those different stakeholders in the education space. So the way I've done that and the way I'm hoping I can continue doing that, because the institute is winding down, is through private and public events. And obviously in the COVID-19 world, our have to reframe how I do that.

Sure.

But engaging those stakeholders, and just to give you a couple of examples, I organized two private conferences in the past 18 months or so. One was on personalized learning, one was on how kids learn, but again it involved academics who were also involved in sort of technology development, it involved technology companies, edtech players, school leaders, teachers, learners, ministers, policymakers, you know, the whole spectrum, and obviously research and pedagogy experts. So the whole gamut really of education specialties, also including kind of what I call incumbents, you know, the publishers and more traditional companies. So what I'm trying to do is build these circular dialogues where people actually start to understand far more from one another what what it's all about. So one of the big problems for EdTech, for instance, is that, okay, in a lot of countries they're constantly butting up against the systemic approach to education and they can't kind of get in there because, you know, the system doesn't allow it, or the way that the schools purchase and procure is very discreet and it varies from country to country, it can vary from region to region, so it's all a bit of a nightmare to be honest. And, you know, policymakers do need to engage far more more with learning technologies and how we learn than they may have done to date. Because if we want to change education for the better, these are the big questions that it needs to answer. And of course, they're difficult questions. And I'm not saying that the work I do is in any way going to change that, but at least I'm trying to help kind of broker that conversation.

Yeah.

And you've used these terms, human-machine collaboration pedagogies, in some of your work, which I like the idea of trying to bring together a pedagogy around the integration between the human and the machine somehow. So I wonder if you could just say a bit more about that.

Sure. First of all, I have to own up to being a bit of a magpie because I stole the term from some friends of mine in Israel who run an edtech acceleration program and have a big edtech initiative there called Mindset. So they invited me to a hackathon last September where we actually focused on that relationship and we try and come up with product concepts around that human-machine pedagogy approach. But very interested in that because obviously the kind of machine part of life or in life is becoming more ubiquitous whether we like it or not.

Yeah, of course.

Phones are full of machine learning, everything, you know, we do on the internet is supported by machine learning. And in some cases, you know, more intelligent AI, and it's happening already in education and it's going to continue to grow because the kind of complexity of education challenges that need to be addressed, especially again after COVID, I think will necessitate this kind of growth. But what I miss quite often, and I do miss it in a lot of edtech as well, is actually that kind of strong pedagogical approach to how we see that relationship. And what that means and how we scaffold learning because a lot of the time the technologies are driven by engineering rather than by pedagogical and learning understanding and educational neuroscience understanding. Even if people claim it's there, it's quite often quite scam. And it's that whole complexity of bringing those disciplines together and what that means to scaffolding a really good learning and teaching experience for both sides because it's complex for the teachers as well and what what does that actually consist of and what does that mean? And how can that kind of enhance what we do? Because there's no point in doing this if it's not going to augment or enable something that we're currently not very good at doing.

Yeah, exactly. Looking at the needs of the students, the needs of the teachers in real terms in the classroom or, you know, in whatever environment they're learning in and then building the concept around that.

Exactly. And unless we do that, than we're using technology for the sake of technology.

And do you find the edtech companies very engaged with that conversation?

It depends. I mean, you know, I certainly wouldn't want to generalize. I think they're getting far more engaged with the conversation than they were even like 2.5, 3 years ago.

Yeah.

Because they are starting to see the importance.

Yeah.

And I certainly have seen a huge evolution in how people think about edtech, because when I first got got involved in it, you know, it was usually either kids who had a really good idea because they thought school was horrible and they thought they were education experts because they went to school and they had some engineering or digital acumen. And we all went to school, but, you know, not many of us can call ourselves education experts or learning experts. So there was a lot of that going on. And then also looking at an engineering approach to solving a problem. It always made me laugh when I was talking to edtech startups and they would come to me and talk about their product and their approach. And usually they would walk into the room and they'd go like, "Carla, we're going to solve the education problem." Of course. And I would kind of scratch my head and go like, "Yeah, can you just highlight which education problem that is?" And so they would look at me and it's like, "No, no, no, we're solving the education problem." I love it. Exactly. I sometimes still get it, but the conversation is definitely moving on and is moving on quite swiftly.

Yeah, good. I watched an interesting talk by Adam Pizzoni, who created Yammer back in the day and then wanted to go into edtech, and the talk was about the idea that rather than going in with a fixed idea of what the problem is that you're going to go and solve, actually the best thing to do is go into the environment and the system as it is and just learn, you know, just to watch and observe and learn and then really see where are the pain points in the system for the teachers or for the students. And they are big complex problems when you really start looking at them. And I mean, the one he alighted on was timetabling, you know, and how timetabling and scheduling could really transform education from within if you can really do something about flexible and adaptive timetabling. But it was that the initial approach of not thinking you've got all the answers just because you've come up with a good idea.

Yeah, and the other issue there, I think, which is also a bit of an easy trap for edtech companies to fall into, because obviously they want to be able to be accepted in a current and existing system, is that they're trying to retrofit too much. Yeah, but technologically retrofitting is never a really good idea because you're not really transforming. And then again, the technology starts being used for the sake of the technology rather than for the kind of transformative power the technology can bring.

Yeah.

Because it should always be seen as a supporting or enabling aspect, not the driver of it.

Yeah.

And so I think that's one of the biggest problems in terms of how people actually perceive and handle technology in the classroom, because it's still very much retrofitted.

Yeah.

And then it becomes easily quite clunky. Because actually for a teacher to have to look at dashboards and then take, you know, you need to do this assignment, you need to do another assignment, it's much slower than the teacher going like, you, you, you, and you do this, and you and you do that. And the teacher has got much better peripheral vision that way. So there are lots of kind of user issues and practice issues that still need to be resolved.

Absolutely.

But I'm sure we can resolve them. I just think that we need to be careful not to try to do too much within each kind of solution, but at the same time also not fragmenting it so much that teachers have to engage with 25 tools in one.

Yeah, right. I was interested in what you were saying about the siloing, because not only is the siloing happening at the level of the policy or the edtech or academic conversation, but you also get the siloing happening obviously within schools in terms of specialization and disciplines. And I was wondering, you've written about transdisciplinary knowledge at the level of the classroom and the work that students are doing. Where do you see the role of transdisciplinary knowledge playing a part in breaking down some of those walls between the silos of disciplines?

Yes, and again, it's a very interesting question because of course you do need to have some domain-specific knowledge to be able to go transdisciplinary. You know, there are people who say, let's scrap everything, you know, not have a domain-specific curriculum, not have a curriculum at all, not focus on domain-specific knowledge, you can all find all of that stuff on Google. I think that is a really difficult approach because if you haven't got some appreciation of the domain and an understanding of the domain, okay, you might not want to write 50 equations, but you need to understand what the principles are, otherwise you can't apply it. And so it's kind of getting to a mode of learning where you definitely have an insight into different domains, but then also how do these domains relate to one another. For instance, there are maths teachers who look at music or who look at paintings or look at, you know, sculpture or Greek temples to explain maths. So it's that kind of thing, you know, these principles have been applied here and here and here, but also, you know, what does that then mean for an artist because an artist might not be thinking about the maths at all, and there's no reason why they should be, but they might get through kind of mixing that up, they might get an appreciation of what maths is actually doing. Colour theory, for instance, or appreciating colours and mixing colours, you could reduce all that to maths, or it could be maths-informed. The word reducing is not the best one. Those views of the different ways in which we interact with the world and what we do in the world kind of bringing that together. And I think there's definitely more room in schools to do it. There are some schools that do quite a lot of problem-solving projects, and that's, for me, that's only one side of things because a lot of that time the problem-solving projects focus on computational thinking, and that's not enough. There needs to be something else as well. In a way, when you look at an early years class, you know, a group of kids. This happened organically, you know, totally organically. It's how can we use some of those principles in further primary and secondary education? How can we get the kids also to understand each other better in those disciplines? Because quite often a kid that's very good at maths will be labeled, 'Oh, you're very good at maths,' or, 'You're not very good at art,' or, 'You're not very good at languages,' so therefore you can't really communicate very well with those other kids. Well, that's nonsense because we're all good at lots of things and some of us are better at some things and it's kind of making sure that we sort of remove some of these boxes, I think, and you become a bit deterministic about yourself and your own abilities or potential, whereas if you look at what are the workplaces demanding or complaining about when they get graduates coming into the workplace or postgraduates, all very well, they've got a lot of knowledge, but they don't know how to apply it and they don't know how to talk to one another because they are all in their own boxes. And it's that kind of skill set because we will need it more and more, and the complexity of the world will need those skill sets to work together. Which is why I love the Francis Crick Institute, although it's very much focused on life sciences, but the way that institute is constructed is that the different disciplines in the life sciences they've actually got to walk through each other's areas before they can get a cup of tea, in a manner of speaking, so that they actually have to see what the other teams and disciplines are doing and get that conversation brokered. And I think, you know, if you look at the situation the world is in now, that's exactly the kind of conversation we're gonna need because it's about protective equipment, it's about vaccines, it's about testing, and unless that's somewhat joined up and okay, you know, you might have different disciplines in microbiology or molecular engineering that gets involved in this, but it's those kind of minds need to work together to come up with some of these.

Of course, yeah, and with geopolitics and cultural factors, there's a lot of voices in that conversation, right?

Yes, absolutely. And then, you know, we've got some very big ethical questions coming up, and unless people have got insights or some understanding of each other's disciplines, we will not be in a position to even look at those questions because we'll be not joining up the dots. So I think that's sort of where I'm coming from, having more of an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary way of approaching learning.

Yeah, interesting. It almost comes back to what you were saying about yourself in terms of the dots and then the connections and the bridges, because if you don't know what the dots are, you can't make the connections and build the bridges. So it's moving past this kind of false dichotomy of knowledge and skills, but actually, you know, of course we need all of it, but we need many voices in the conversation to make the connections between all of those. And, you know, we need to be doing that for students as well. And I also, I like what you're saying about the early years stuff, because I think that's so true that there's so much interesting, innovative, and really progressive stuff happening in the early years. And then Somehow it just gets lost more and more as you go further up the age range of education.

So yeah, it's quite interesting too, you know, when you look at how kids draw, small kids, and their drawings are, you know, we might not understand them, they sort of seem totally random to us, but they're totally creative and they're totally their own imagination. And the minute they go to school all of that sort of starts dying down because they have to start drawing straight lines. And it's that kind of approach to education that I think we need to get rid of because yes, we need to know how to draw a straight line and some kids like drawing straight lines so they should be able to draw straight lines. But you know, children who don't like drawing straight lines should not be forced to to, you know, it's like a little girl I knew, she drew trees beautifully, but they were always black and had black leaves. And another little girl in her class said, "Your trees are not trees, they've got black leaves." And she said, "No, no, no, my trees have black leaves." So, you know, they are trees, they just have black leaves. Yeah, and it's those skill sets and aptitudes that we should you know, harbour and nurture in learners because we'll be far the better for it.

Yeah, and there's an openness in that, isn't there, that we want to retain rather than going straight for according to these criteria you are incorrect, a tree has these colours and if it doesn't fit the assessment rubric then clearly it's wrong and inevitably there's some closing down of imagination and of possibility when you start doing that.

Yes, exactly.

Interesting.

It's kind of the magic, I think, lies into combining that with obviously the kind of domain knowledge level that you need to know.

One of the other things that I know you've been involved in is the mission to make more accessible a lot of these developments in education because is often the edtech solutions can be expensive and heavy in terms of investment, and therefore that inevitably makes them inaccessible to many people in marginalized communities or low-income countries. So I know you've done quite a bit of work in terms of looking at the way that we can use edtech to enhance education everywhere, for the bottom 50% rather than the top 1%. Are there still projects you are involved in there in terms of how we can use them?

Yes, definitely. I'm less working in the localities now, which I regret, but it's just the way things have worked out. Of course, yeah. But I still run a competition called the Next Billion EdTech Prize, which is a competition that's addressing actually technology in resource-poor context or EdTech in resource-poor context and especially the Global South. And that is obviously all these people are trying to improve access to learning, improve access to teaching, improving teacher skills, a whole ream of challenges. Even people addressing, you know, how can we teach pastoral communities on a very low-spec smartphone or feature phone. So there's loads of activity happening and some of the activities are absolutely wonderful. And obviously very different according to the context in which they happen. Yeah, but what inspires me with all of them, because quite often people frown a bit and it's like, oh, it's not very sophisticated. No, but it's actually fulfilling a really, really amazing purpose because the fact that people who never had access to these things actually now can access these things is already such an amazing start.

It's incredible. Yeah.

Yeah, and so totally passionate about this, and I quite often have kind of discussions with edtech investors or edtech aficionados who go on about the fact, you know, edtech is too fragmented, you know, it works in China, it works in India, it works in the US because they're big markets, and it's like, yes, that's possibly true, but if you look at what it's doing in China, it's all tutoring and it's all kind of improving learners' prospects. It's not really about access to learning, and that's fine. But it's also fulfilling a very discrete thing, which really benefits those who can kind of engage with those kind of technologies, and that's also not everyone in China.

Sure.

And the same in India. But it's the grassroots stuff that I find amazing. It's projects in India that go into rural India with tablets and sort of let the kids kind of engage with the content on these tablets and then set them tasks and say, 'Now go and, you know, make a movie about how you grow your mangoes and what you do when you harvest the mangoes. And, you know, they find that it's not just a kid that gets involved, or the kids together, actually Grandma wants to get involved, Mum wants to get involved, so the whole community is being educated or learns. And actually the people bringing those projects are learning from the community, which is also fantastic.

Of course.

So, and That's, I think, where the galvanizing power of EdTech is just fantastic, and it's very simple things, but gosh, it does work.

Yeah, that's fascinating because I always come back to this idea that we're very individualistic when it comes to education, and we focus on this individual student and their individual progress and their individual areas for development, whereas the idea of educating a community through a process I mean, that's fascinating, very interesting how we could use that idea going forward, you know, and how actually we could benefit from that in cultures and societies where we are much more fragmented and individualistic.

Yes, absolutely. And what kind of strikes me now is with the COVID virus that, you know, potentially we kind of regressing a bit because of the technology or because of the way, the tools that we resort to. So I'll be really, really interested to see how this evolves.

Yeah, definitely. And what would you say were the kind of key characteristics of the leadership that we need to see in terms of moving these conversations on to really not take a backward step in the tech implementation, but actually really get genuine symbiotic human-machine collaborations?

It's a really difficult question because, I mean, you have school leaders who kind of automatically take to it and sort of seem instinctively to know how to deal with it and others are really worried about it or don't really know where to start. And I think one of the biggest problems for education of course is that there's this kind of reluctance around 'don't experiment with my kids' and of course we should never experiment with the kids, but on the other hand we're also not going to evolve unless we do try out a few things and possibly fail sometimes. Exactly, and I think we need to take those steps. The thing is that we shouldn't maybe take too big a step at once to do this, and of course the minute you start introducing some of these learning technologies, you do need to take quite big steps, and I think that's where the conversation between the school and the technology players can really be quite beneficial, because if you can start things with smaller steps and evaluate, actually, this is really working well, I can now open it up a bit more, then that I think would be a really sensible approach. And then also we mustn't forget that a lot of schools still haven't got the right infrastructure, so they do need to go step by step. And, you know, the sort of difference between affluent schools, less affluent schools, rural versus urban can be quite stark. And so it's also got to work for that context. So, you know, leadership needs to assess what is my context and what can work within it, but also we need to occasionally take a small risk because if we don't do it, we're letting the kids down.

Yeah, yeah, no, of course. It's trying to get the kind of mindset of courageous inquiry that we want our students to have, but also have that within our organisation.

Exactly.

But without risking too much because you're right, of course, these are precious months and years for our children in terms of their learning. I always find that I think the children actually benefit from being involved in that conversation about whether it goes well, whether, you know, reflecting on, well, perhaps that tool that we've just tried actually didn't work as well. So there's kind of a lot of learning that the leadership can generate with the students and the teachers themselves, going back to your conversation idea, if everyone's involved in that conversation together.

Yeah, exactly, and the learning the kids will do from something that might not work, I mean, it might be really frustrating for them, but you know, as long as that doesn't go on for too long, and if it really doesn't work, it doesn't work, and they'll tell you it doesn't work, and they'll tell you why it doesn't work, and we need to listen to that, because that's possibly also one of the conversations that's not happening enough, is actually listening to the learners, you know, we're always focusing on the teachers for very, very good reasons, of course, but actually ultimately Ultimately, it's about that kid that needs to learn to become a citizen in the world when they grow up. You know, we shouldn't lose sight of that. It's very easy to focus too much on the teacher. We need to find the right balance, and I think the kind of collaboration involving the kids in that conversation is definitely, definitely one to go for.

Yeah, interesting.

Just one final question I wanted to ask you because I'm personally very interested in it, and I saw I know in some of your work you've referred to narrative and storytelling as an important part of lots of aspects in terms of creative work that you do, but also in perhaps some of the other educational focus work. I was listening to some interesting conversations even at the level of economics about the power of narrative. We've perhaps moved past this idea of fixed black and white quantitative judgments and actually we're realizing that they're not quite working for us. Anymore, and even this whole COVID situation is helping us also learn that a little bit more, that maybe there's, there's a power in narrative and how we create change through building a story around that. I just wondered whether you, that was something that you could see as playing a role.

Totally, I think narrative is at the hub of it, and it's quite interesting that narrative is seeing quite a lot of interest now And at one point, you know, people weren't really that interested in narrative and story at all because it sort of was fluffy. But of course, the more binary the world seems to be going, the more this is cropping up. Because like you were saying before, everything is not black and white, and it's actually finding that sort of the connections and the scaffold that holds it all together. And that is what narrative does. You know, narrative helps us understand our world, and storytelling is exactly that. It's kind of interpreting our world and imagining possibly a bit beyond our world as well. But that is what storytelling does. And what narrative and story also do, I think, is actually create a mindset that strives for new possibilities, because in a story nothing is impossible. Or, well, Well, that's maybe too wide a judgment, but you know, a lot can be possible in the story that is totally implausible in real life. And so that is also how we start looking at innovating or inventing, because what is an invention? It's doing something or creating something that might not have been possible before or might not have existed before. And I think if we lose the power of narrative and story, we lose the power to do all of those things. And so for me, that's, that's kind of the fundamental role that story plays. Whether that creation is code, or whether that creation is, you know, a new drug, or whether that creation is an amazing painting, or a TV program, or a podcast, whatever it is, you know, there's a story behind every piece of creation or invention that there is in the world. So I think more than ever, I think the power of of story and narrative is fundamental to everything we do.

It's also quite an inclusive force in some ways because, you know, like you were saying about the children drawing, anyone can become involved in the development of a narrative, so it doesn't necessarily rely on expertise or genius in this kind of sense of it's only available to some to tell the narrative. Maybe that's an interesting way to also frame it.

Totally, and I think it's very nice that you highlighted that because actually if you look at stories and narrative, that's where learning started, is through telling stories to one another, and you learned from your elders and you then told the stories to your kids, and none of that is that long ago and it still happens, and actually that's the root of all learning. And as well as finding things and trying to do things with what you found, you know, you found a flint, okay, you sharpened it, but that's also what created the stories, because once you had your sharpened flint, you could go hunting and, you know, you could kill a bear and you could tell that story and you could tell your kid how you killed the bear and what they needed to look out for and those kind of things. And so the power of the story in learning is huge, absolutely enormous.

I think we need a lot of that right now as well in terms of making sense of this, you know, strange situation that we find ourselves in right now and what's going to emerge, whether it's for education or more broadly, out of the other side of it. You know, there's a lot of people, I think, doing a lot of quite deep reflecting, trying to make sense and build a narrative of what's just happened or what is happening right now.

Yep, and the beauty of this is, and of storytelling and narrative of course, is that you don't need to have a nickel to do it. You know, everybody can do it, and it's such a leveller, and it's not about access, it's not about, you know, I have and you don't have, so therefore you can't do it. No, the power of narrative resides in everyone, so I think that's a tremendous kind of, I wouldn't like to use the word weapon, but, you know, resource that we have at our disposition right now to kind of deal with this situation as well.

Yeah, very good. Well, thank you, Carla. It's really interesting to talk to you, and it's kind of an interesting time, an exciting time, and I'm just glad that we can, you know, continue these kinds of conversations and continue to make some sense out of it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, great to talk to you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye now.

Bye-bye.

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