Week 1 (2/3/21–2/10/21) — Pre-Thesis
For the past few years, of both my undergraduate and graduate career, I’ve been interested in the accessibility of education with regards to edtech. I’ve done a few research projects looking at specific issues with regards to how to use technology in an accessible way in the classroom, how to make edtech more accessible, and than more wicked issues of educational equity and inequality. With this project, I would like to keep the same direction — looking at how to address issues of equity with edtech. I haven’t necessarily narrowed down which issue of equity I would like to address, but as part of the assignment this week, our task is to find roughly 15 projects that speak to some research questions or interests we have.
To approach the research questions, I did some reading, looking into some of the top issues in Education Accessibility today. I took a look at the Public School Review blog, which identified ten issues affecting the quality of education today. After reviewing the article, I noticed that all of the problems were connected and rooted in systemic racism and inequality — some who have more do better; those who don’t do worse. I would consider that sum a generalization, but it does speak to a more significant issue. People who live in neighborhoods with higher tax rates generally have better schools. Those who live in neighborhoods with less funding (gentrification, redlining, etc. all issues contributing to this) have less access to resources that would contribute to a more “productive” school. However, I’m interested in looking at how to use technology to make schools better and lower the achievement or opportunity gap for students. So, I came up with a few research questions:
Some research questions….
- How do you make education accessible to all using technology?
- How do you build collaborative, adaptive, and innovation platforms for shared learning experiences?
- How can you make education impactful using technology in the classroom?
- What can we learn from COVID-19’s impact on education and technologies role in addressing issues of equity with regards to learning metrics?
- How can we use technology to improve innovation within education?
- What does personalized learning look like? How can technology contribute to this form of learning?
The next steps was to look for some projects within the past few years, five years, and past ten years.
For the first few projects, I decided to go with some projects I was familiar with all which are addressing issues of accessibility to edtech, and also issues of accessibility within edtech itself.
BRCK is an organization that aims to make internet accessible to everyone so that they can take advantage of the digital economy — with a special focus on education accessibility. BRCK aims to create tools that address the connectivity issues that are specific to Nairobi. The goal is to create products and services that actually address the needs of their end users.
EkStep aims to reimagine learning opportunities for every child using the EKStep Model. It’s an open learning platform designed for use by government to help meet issues/challenges within education accessibility.
MindSpark is an adaptive-based learning platform that helps students improve their skills in mathematics.
Rumie provides students free learning content with an emphasis on making it accessible to those who might have challenging educational environments.
Some other projects that I took a look at within the past 5 and 10 years that are relevant include:
- Adobe Youth Voices
- Student News Action Network
- Sprout E-Course
- iBook
- Edmodo
- Schoology
- Ning
- Khan Academy
- Google Plus
- Gorckit
- Knewton
Lastly, to some up the research — I took a look at some articles and resources that address and talk about several issues that I’ve mentioned above that have been really helpful in framing the issue and research questions I’ve posed.
https://edtechnology.co.uk/comments/covid-19-what-means-future-edtech