hack.ED 2030 – A Speculative Future

Composite image by Darren Wilson

Mika Berenskiy’s fingers dance across the keyboard with blinding speed as she puts the finishing touches on some custom accessibility code she’s co-authored with colleagues across the globe. And with a final flourish, she pauses, sweeps her right hand in a graceful arc, and hits the “Enter” key with an authoritative “clack.” The upload starts, and in less than a second, it’s gone. Mika shakes her head in disbelief. “That’s the crazy irony with progress bars,” she quips. “The networks are so fast now that the progress bars are gone before we even register they’re there. Progress, indeed.” However, she remains acutely aware of the privilege of access to a prototype 7G wireless network while staying with friends in Trelleborg. 

She pauses for a moment, gazing out across the Baltic Sea toward Poland and beyond to her home country of Ukraine. “I never would have imagined this ten years ago.” She makes quick eye contact, and a slight smile curls the corner of her mouth for a fleeting moment before she turns her attention back to her laptop. She dashes off a quick note to a colleague in Thompson, Manitoba. “See you at the conference!” In what seems like a single, fluid, choreographed motion, she downs her last gulp of coffee, slams closed her laptop, shoves it in her battered and badge-covered RIT backpack and starts her sprint down the ferry dock.

The unexpected detour

In 2019 Mika was in her second year studying Computational Mathematics at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Like many of her international classmates, she had to return home in a hurry as campuses around the world closed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. She would have to finish her second year remotely from her hometown in Borzna, about 100 kilometres northeast of Kyiv. It wasn’t ideal, with 7 time zones between Borzna and RIT, and not enough rooms in her family’s small rural house where she could participate in Zoom calls without something going on in the background, or while her family was sleeping in the next room. With just a few weeks left in the semester, she would manage. 

The pivot to remote learning was challenging. The school, her instructors, and her classmates were not prepared for the change in delivery. They all breathed a collective sigh of relief when that Spring 2020 semester was over. And then they waited. Mika fully expected to return in the fall to start her third year. It wasn’t until August that RIT made the announcement that the fall semester would continue with remote delivery for most programs. Computational Mathematics was one of them. This was not what she had hoped for, but she continued to make her best effort. And then they announced that the Winter 2021 semester would remain online as well 

Her classmates set up a Discord server to use as a “back channel” to communicate with each other outside of RIT’s Brightspace Learning Management System (LMS), which was slow and awkward to use, not really designed for students to easily communicate and collaborate with each other. It was through Discord that they started to connect with other RIT students studying Computer Science and User Experience Design, and they began participating in “hackathons” partially to relieve boredom, but also to stretch their skills into areas outside of their primary focus areas, supplementing their university learning with intense “sprint” events and coding challenges to solve real-world problems. 

In her graduating year, only select programs were being offered in campus-based classes, so Mika continued to study remotely, which did not get any easier. Her online learning community supported her in ways she never anticipated, which helped immensely. Yet with only months to go before graduation, Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Mika’s family immediately prepared to flee to Europe, and less than 24 hours after the invasion, the Berenskiy family drove west toward Poland, uncertain they would even be able to cross the border. Mika left with just her school backpack containing just clothes and her laptop. After several weeks in a refugee camp in Poland, they finally made their way to Portugal, where they were temporarily housed with a sponsoring family, eventually getting their own apartment in late April.

Finally able to access a reliable Internet connection, Mika reconnected with her school and her classmates. RIT was understanding and supportive, but Mika had to put graduation on hold, as she couldn’t complete her coursework in time to apply to graduate in 2022. Support from her peer network was overwhelming. Some of her hackathon friends had already volunteered with with the Ukrainian “IT Army.” (Burgess, 2022) Their goals were twofold: First, the cyberdefense of Ukraine’s digital infrastructure, and second, working with global hacker group Anonymous, to find weaknesses in Russia’s cyber infrastructure, and deliver important tactical information to Ukrainian troops.

Mika’s expertise in compression and encryption algorithms made her uniquely valuable to the effort, and her remote learning experiences and weekend hackathon work gave her a new appreciation for the user experience side of digital projects, with a unique understanding of what happens at the receiving end of the communication process. Through her experience with trying to complete her studies while in transit from home to refugee camps, temporary accommodations, and finally landing in Lisbon, Mika went from broadband wired and wireless infrastructure to very intermittent, low-bandwidth connections, and back again – a transition she realized would shape the lens through which she viewed her online experiences. 

She developed a particular interest in designing and developing ways to deliver content to front-line troops using minimal data, essentially micro-learning modules formatted for rapid consumption on mobile devices and designed for optimal retention and recall. Because Russian attacks had crippled much of Ukraine’s wired and wireless network infrastructure, troops relied on ad hoc local wireless networks and donated (hacked) StarLink terminals (Beech et al., 2022) to get tactical information to soldiers defending Ukraine and pushing back Russian troops from the invasion. Keeping download times to a minimum was essential, so soldiers would not have to maintain constant open data connections which may have left them open to detection by Russian forces. Mika unknowingly became an expert in micro-learning and mobile learning delivery.

After Anonymous breached Russia’s defense network in January 2023 (now simply referred to as “1/23”), the conflict came to a quick resolution. Mika still hasn’t returned home, becoming a “digital nomad,” working anywhere and everywhere. She also turned her attention to applying her guerrilla knowledge and intelligence delivery tactics to online learning.

The pivot: Mika 2.0

After experiencing for herself the difficulty of trying to get through emergency remote teaching during both COVID-19 and Russian invasion – and later designing learning materials for delivery to Ukrainian soldiers in the field, where network infrastructure was weak or nonexistent – Mika began to realize that many learning tools and technologies developed from a place of privilege. Although well-intentioned, access to high-speed networks and the devices used to access them were often assumed and taken for granted. Much of the learning infrastructure was not built for learners in marginalized communities: particularly rural regions, indigenous communities, and vulnerable urban populations. Mika used her knowledge and experience to pivot her career from the abstract world of computational mathematics into accessible online learning, working with the Promoting Accessible Remote Learning Everywhere (PARLE) program established in 2024 by University College of the North in Thompson, Manitoba. 

PARLE’S mission is to bring accessible learning to under-served populations in Canada and through global partnerships, to other parts of the world as well. Through her research at UCN, Mika learned that although access to relatively inexpensive video conferencing and broadband networks had improved in the early 2020s, many regions outside of urban areas still struggled with getting high-speed network access, and synchronous online learning was still a challenge (Bates, 2022). Higher education was still inaccessible to many.

Into the early 2020s, much of the talk of the future of ed tech focused on technological developments: new modes of creating, communicating, and delivering learning across digital networks using different modes and modalities, such as synchronous live streaming video, augmented reality, virtual reality, social learning platforms – all of which required (and still require) significant investment in hardware, software, networks, and subscriptions to premium streaming platforms such as Zoom, Teams, and WebX. The alternatives were ad-supported services, which were banished from most classrooms after a data breach in 2024 exposed data collected by Google, Meta, and ClassDojo (Manolev et al., 2018) about learners in primary and secondary schools. As singh and Maughan (2014) suggested, the future of ed tech was – and remains – not evenly distributed. 

According to Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada (2022), access to high-speed internet access in 2020 (defined as a minimum baseline of 50/10 Mbps) approached 100% in urban areas but was still barely over 54% in rural areas. Most Canadians used smartphones (76%), laptops (71%), tablets (54%) and desktop computers (50%) to access the Internet (Statistics Canada, 2017). While these reports cite “households with access” to broadband connections, it is unclear whether the term “access” refers to the physical network infrastructure, or if economic accessibility to subscribe to Internet services and the devices capable of accessing the network were also considerations. The statistics are not broken out according to rural vs. urban communities, and only reflect Canada’s ten provinces. Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut are notably absent in this accounting for access. 

Significant barriers to broadband access remained for rural, indigenous, and vulnerable urban Canadians throughout the 2020s, despite federal government commitments to bring 50/10 Mbps broadband to all Canadians by 2030. Many of those infrastructure projects experienced delays due to COVID-19 and the recession of 2023, with the estimated completion date being pushed out to 2035.

Even with “access” to 50 Mbps network infrastructure, in 2021 there were 441,750 multi-generational households in Canada, accounting for 3% of all households (Statistics Canada, 2022), and that bandwidth can easily be saturated when children, adult children, parents, and grandparents are trying to access the network using various devices for school, work, and leisure activities. Access to devices and safe spaces to learn were identified as issues of concern for the PARLE initiative. 

As the year 2030 approached, much of the promise of “the future of ed tech” from the previous ten to fifteen years remained unrealized, as the resources applied to technological innovation were often not available to examine solutions to many of the human/economic/socio-cultural factors in creating accessible online learning. Conservative governments elected across Canada in the 2020s saw e-learning as a business decision, not a human endeavour. 

Mika’s attention turned to making digital learning content accessible on intermittent or low-bandwidth connections, and a wide array of devices, from ancient (but still usable) smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to the state-of-the-art LEARNING NEXUS connected-classroom-in-a-box prototypes built into shipping containers and being flown out to remote communities and indigenous reservations across Canada. These satellite-connected, self-contained nodes were a key part of PARLE’s infrastructure expansion efforts.

The design of content to address the wide range of bandwidth and device capabilities inspired Mika to focus on how to scale multimodal digital learning content into multiple modes of delivery in real time, for optimal learning experiences in diverse learning conditions. 

Open education without borders

In 2028, Mika formed hack.ED, a global group of hackers, developers, and UX designers with a particular interest in open online education. Their first project was to write a crawler named LUCAS (after the cute animated spider of the same name, but also an acronym for Learning Unit Capture And Storage), which was created to scrape the curriculum of every available Online Educational Resource (OER) and Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) on the Internet and store it in a massive distributed database. Their open-source content delivery network (CDN) could deliver content quickly by serving it from a network node nearest to where a learner requested it. 

Their next project was to deploy machine learning algorithms to analyze and categorize the content into subject areas, in preparation for their next initiative: Scalable content delivery with simultaneous translation into every learner’s preferred language. Live HD video streams would be transcoded in real time into lower-bandwidth video streams, recorded and stored for asynchronous downloading and viewing, and converted into separate audio streams (which can be subscribed to as podcasts), with AI-driven live captioning and transcripts delivered via text and simultaneously translated into learners’ local language of choice. Thanks to investments by Microsoft (2021), Inuktitut was added to their translation engine in 2021, and several additional Canadian Indigenous languages introduced by 2027. The hack.ED community adapted those translation engines to provide real-time text translation of open educational resources across all media in 2027, making many open educational resources available to many learners for the first time ever. They’re calling it Open Education For All – OE4A or “uphoria” for short. (The hackers are known to take liberties with language and pronunciation.) That project is being kicked off at the first-ever hack.ED conference, taking place this year in Poland. 

As Mika gets off the ferry in Swinemünde and rushes to the shuttle to catch her train to Warsaw, her nerves are uncharacteristically showing. She’s meeting many of the people in her global group of hackers in person for the first time. She also hasn’t been back to Poland since she fled there with her family in 2022. Why meet in person? Why now? “The most important thing I learned about learning wasn’t the platforms or the algorithms or the technology… it was the community,” she says matter-of-factly. “Most of these people have already known each other online for years, and have been working on their own parts of the project in smaller groups. We thought it was time to get together and share ideas and have those kinds of conversations you can only have in those energy-filled moments in person… sometimes over drinks.” 

As she settles into her seat on the train, she rubs the Ukrainian flag patch sewn to the strap of her pack, and pauses for a moment of reflection. “It’s been a long journey to get to where we are now. But I’m glad I’m here.” She pulls out her laptop and gets to work on the finishing touches of her presentation for the conference. 

Through all her work with the Ukrainian IT Army during the Russian occupation, Mika developed a particular affinity for writing and typography. With all the talk about rich media and new technologies, she marveled at the efficiency of text. She began to appreciate it not just as characters on a page or a screen, but as a visual representation of the spoken word, full of opportunity for expression and the ability to carry rich messaging. Mika wondered why more attention wasn’t paid to the huge amount of text-based content people continued to consume daily – web pages, blogs, tweets, comments, academic articles published digitally. Well into the 21^st century, text remains one of the most information-dense media, requiring very little bandwidth, highly compressibile, and more easily translated to different languages and adjusted to accommodate different needs.

 The project Mika is presenting is an open-source text engine that can be plugged into every common LMS to ensure that the text content coming out of the OE4A database adhere to the readability principles described by Robert Bringhurst (1999) and adapted for the Web by Richard Rutter (2014). Her team of UX designers and developers created a rich toolkit that presents content to users dynamically in responsive templates that are optimized for ideal readability and accessible text, ensuring comfortable line lengths, spacing, contrast, and type styles, and fully accessible to screen readers, no matter what size screen or how limited the bandwidth. The interface for learners also allows for limited customizability, so that accommodations for visual impairments can be chosen and saved by individual users, including – much to many designers’ dismay – a mode that uses Comic Sans as the main reading font, a very common adaptation used by those with dyslexia (Dyslexia Scotland, n.d.).

“Can you believe it? It’s 2030, and Comic Sans is still the font that designers love to hate. I don’t care… My brother is dyslexic, and he couldn’t have finished school without it.” 

With a wry smile, she flicks off an updated conference agenda to her event coordinator in Warsaw, as she grabs her noise-cancelling headphones, presumably for some focus time. She looks up and quietly turns her screen to face me, and hands over her headset with a sparkle in her eye. She clicks a “read now” button, and the voice coming through the headset sounds incredibly real and lifelike. I recognize the voice as Dr. Adrienne Yellow Bird, delivering her TED talk from 2026 on the coming remote learning revolution set to sweep across Canada’s indigenous communities. As Mika taps keys on the keyboard, the language instantly changes… from English to French, then Hindi, Salish, Cantonese, Afrikaans, Persian… but the voice delivering the talk remains that of Dr. Yellow Bird. The words are being read by an AI engine from the same source text, translated in real time, and delivered using a digital voice print of Dr. Yellow Bird’s own vocal delivery (authenticated and secured via blockchain, to prevent ‘deepfake’ transgressions). AI translation and reading of text would allow for rich content to be reconstructed locally, eliminating the need to send digital audio across limited bandwidth connections. They are calling it Real-time Engine for Audio Delivery, or “READ.” Podcasts would become obsolete, with ‘READcasts’ being a far more efficient and useful way of delivering the same content. “Microsoft secretly donated this tech to the project three months ago, but nobody knows yet… they’re going to see this for the first time tomorrow.”

A wide grin spreads across Mika’s face. “VR and AR are cool, but text is still the shit… and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.”