In LRNT 523 we examined histories and futures surrounding education, technology, and their moves towards convergence. Our final assignment was a social-science fiction look at the very near future, 2030. I chose to dovetail off of assignment two, where Karen McMurray and I examined personalized learning, and the opinions on both sides of the debate.
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Since the 1980s, discussions on the proliferation of “choice” in education have sparked both intense debate and rapid innovation to the forefront of the educational stage. Where to purchase property and live – and consequently, where their children will attend school, private versus charter schools, home-school versus public school, standard curriculum or French language programs – these are some of the considerations, or choices, that parents are presented with during their child’s educational journey. While parents are grappling with an overwhelming variety of choices, governments and institutions are faced with the unintended consequences of those choices, such as equitable distribution of school choice, teacher quality and educational competition. The debates surrounding school choice are contentious, (Hoxby, C. M., 2003) and are likely to persist in the near future. This paper examines the introduction of a new and innovative “choice” in education, the Personalized Learning Centre.
In 2030, the Calgary Separate School District (CSSD) in an attempt to modernize and attract students has implemented a “two track” approach to educational delivery, Personalized Learning Centres (PLCs) and Traditional Learning Centres (TLCs). By renaming community based schools to TLCs, and creating PLCs, the district’s attempts to remain marketable and relevant have had a number of implications for teaching and learning throughout the city. Personalized Learning Centres aim, in part, to create the “smooth users and competent subjects” (otherwise known as digital natives) that Macgilchrest et al. (2019) previously prophesied. CSSD has partnered with Google to equip every student in a PSC with a Chromebook that connects them to the curriculum, an educational “curator”, and their other PSC classmates. Each Chromebook is equipped with technology that is designed to “adapt and personalize the learning experience in a more efficient way” (Jarke & Macgilchrest, 2021), such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and digital surveillance. It is important to note that use of these platforms is mandatory in the PLC schools, and is in fact seen as integral to their success.
Teachers and students of the PLCs utilize a learning dashboard, which not only lays out the course of learnings the student is to undertake, but also acts as an individual progress repository for the teacher, allowing them to monitor progress of the learners assigned to their ‘realm’. In the PLC environment, artificial intelligence and data surveillance drives the majority of the supplementary resources that are presented to students. For example, a student’s Google searches will be monitored and used to present them with clarifying information. The teacher in a PLC acts primarily as a learning ‘curator’, responsible for curating the playlist of material that learners are to traverse in order to move on to the next subject or grade. While teachers monitor this progress using the dashboard, it is evident that the dashboard does not truly take into account structural or circumstantial inequalities in the lives of the enrolled students (Jarke and Macgilchrest, 2021), rendering the personalized learning aspect of this PLC very impersonal, and requiring learners to take full responsibility for their own success or failure.
New graduates and tech-centric teachers apply to work at PLCs in droves, which indirectly lowers the already reduced cost to run a PLC. Older, more tenured teachers are left in the lurch at these new digitized school environments, as apprehensions surrounding personalized learning platforms and their corresponding instructional theories are heightened, while new graduates show a keen interest in the future of digital learning and the bells and whistles that go with it. Newer graduates are able to be hired at a much lower rate than tenured teaching staff, or those with graduate degrees. This lowered instructional expense, coupled with sponsored devices provided by Google make PLCs cost winners, when compared to TLCs. However it is important to note that what PLCs save in staff expenses, may be lost in skill, aptitude, and experience (Leigh, 2012).
TLCs operate using the older, community school-based educational model where students attend a physical school in their community, taught by a present teacher. While PLCs admit students based on an application process (including requirements for academic achievement, financial means for deposits, and family structures that allow for enhanced parent involvement), TLCs take the remainder of the students enrolled with the CSSD. Where PLCs laud the efficiency and success of personalized learning models, educational critics continue to ask the question: Is the personalized model more effective, or is it really just “cream skimming” masquerading as superior education?, and more – will student success peak, and then decline as more schools are converted and more students are enrolled in PLCs. Altoni et al. (2015) ask an important question when considering the equity of models such as PLCs versus TLCs, being “will a choice program lure the best students away from current schools? Dan Goldhaber (1999) identified this issue in 1999, when pointing out that private schools are often producing more successful students, but typically have access to demographic control mechanisms, such as entrance criteria and cost prohibitive fee schedules. In a society where an increased emphasis is placed on equity and inclusion, early critics call the PLC model a drastic blow to the landscape of educational equity, particularly for those with special needs or in marginalized communities.
These same critics sound the alarms of concern about student privacy and data collection using the PLC approach to education. As Audrey Watters details in her book Teaching Machines, educational technology is not “convivial” (2014). In an educational environment where Google is sponsoring the educational tools, these PLC students have truly gone from “the role of persons to that of mere consumers” (p. 122). By agreeing to the data collection and dissemination terms at the beginning of the school year, do students and parents involved in PLCs truly understand the implications that this unfettered access to their data may have.
As 2030 is the inaugural year for the TLC and PLC trial, the findings regarding equity, privacy, and most importantly, student success are yet to be discovered. Will institutions look back at their separation of learning delivery positively, or will the future, say, 2040 show the CSSD reverted their tune, determining that the harms associated with the PLC model far outweighed the innovation.
References
Altonji, J. G., Huang, C.-I., & Taber, C. R. (2015). Estimating the Cream Skimming Effect of School Choice. Journal of Political Economy, 123(2), 266–324. https://doi.org/10.1086/679497
Goldhaber, D. D. (1999). School Choice: An Examination of the Empirical Evidence on Achievement, Parental Decision Making, and Equity. Educational Researcher, 28(9), 16–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1177197
Jarke, J., & Macgilchrist, F. (2021). Dashboard stories: How narratives told by predictive analytics reconfigure roles, risk and sociality in education. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025561
Hoxby, C. M., & National Bureau of Economic Research. (2003). The economics of school choice (Ser. A national bureau of economic research conference report). University of Chicago Press.
Leigh, A. (2012). Teacher pay and teacher aptitude. Economics of Education Review, 31(3), 41–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2012.02.001
Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H., Bruch, A., (2020) Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology, Learning, Media and Technology, 45:1, 76-89, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2019.1656235
Watters, A. (2014). The monsters of education technology. Licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.
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