automation

The Political Economy of Education Technology The trend towards a greater presence of digital platforms in higher education has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite ongoing growing pains, remote learning tools have enabled many institutions to remain operational. The more or less seamless transition to virtual classrooms is largely owed to the ubiquitous use of Learning Management Systems (LMS), which have evolved from basic teaching support to robust infrastructures. According to estimates, already before the pandemic 99% of colleges and universities had integrated school-wide LMS while 85% of instructors had used LMS in class, whether in-person or distance learning, synchronous or asynchronous content. By the end of 2019, Instructure Canvas alone registered nearly 20 million enrollees in colleges and universities. As the LMS market saturates and new LMS adoptions decline, companies compete by promising advances in the areas of interoperability, customization, analytics, and design. The pandemic emergency clearly illustrated, for instance, the importance of seamless integration between video conferencing platforms and LMS. But instead of simply enabling remote learning, new education technology (EdTech) reimagines the pedagogic environment, extends performance metrics into virtual classrooms, and reshapes modes of participation and academic labor. For an already growing EdTech industry the pandemic turned out to be an exceptional boon. Against the backdrop of an estimated $76.4 billion market size in 2019, that is before the pandemic, analysts projected “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.1% from 2020 to 2027”. But already the first three months in 2020 account for $3 billion of “global EdTech Venture Capital, nearly 10% Read More