Will Brehm  1:20
Molly Wyss and Brad Olsen, welcome to FreshEd.

Molly Wyss  1:24
Thank you.

Brad Olsen  1:25
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Will Brehm  1:27
So Molly, this new report that you and Brad put together focuses in on EdTech and government decision-making in Southeast Asia and South Asia. Why are you looking at this region in particular, and how are decisions being made around some of these topics?

Molly Wyss  1:41
So first of all, why this region? It’s two very large regions for sure, and we were looking specifically at low and middle income countries in the region. There’s a lot of diversity across the region — many different languages are spoken, many different cultural groups — and so that certainly complicates scaling and how you adapt and think about expanding EdTech to reach different populations. There are also some very large education systems, so again, that brings some interesting complexity into the scaling question. And that’s a large portion of the world, so lots to learn and lots of exciting things happening there.

Will Brehm  2:12
And Brad, why are we looking at EdTech? What’s so special about EdTech in this part of the world?

Brad Olsen  2:18
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question, Will, because some of what we’ve been thinking about is what we learned that is true for all innovations in education and scaling them, and what’s unique to EdTech. That’s one thing I hope we’ll get into. But I think the other thing to consider is that really ever since the pandemic, technology and EdTech has just taken off in terms of demand and popularity — almost exponentially. And now with the rise of AI, in some ways it’s kind of sucking the oxygen out of a lot of the education decision-making room, and we wanted to better understand that.
I think we all love technology and we also hate technology, but when you start thinking about it in the context of education, I think it takes on higher stakes. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about learners, we’re talking about the next generation. This is a very vulnerable and very important group, and I feel like we need to get it right. And one could argue we’re still living in a social experiment — high-tech digital technology in education has been around for a few decades, and I don’t think it’s been particularly successful in demonstrating clear learning outcomes. So given this current popularity and given this current moment, we just thought it made sense to dig into it.

Will Brehm  3:14
So Molly, let’s dig into it. For the decision-makers who are trying to figure out which EdTech tool to adopt in their system, what motivates them? Is it that they know a particular technology is going to work and make an impact on learning outcomes?

Molly Wyss  3:27
Not so much. I would say we largely saw that evidence of impact is not a big motivator or a big reason behind being excited about EdTech and wanting to invest in it. There were several dimensions that really stood out. One was sort of the promise of improvement and the excitement and potential of EdTech — a lot of beliefs around EdTech being able to make rapid progress and address challenges that have really persisted and that we haven’t been able to crack. There’s a strong belief among many people that EdTech has the potential to scale really rapidly, maybe more rapidly than non-tech innovations, and to adapt — or maybe it doesn’t need as much adaptation. So there’s this feeling that it can make progress where we haven’t been able to make progress before.

After COVID, of course, there’s also a strong belief that education systems have to have tech capabilities — in particular, distance learning — to be resilient in the face of shocks, pandemics, and natural disasters. And connected to that, which is very understandable, is the conviction that to have a 21st-century society and a future workforce, you need to know how to use technology.

But another factor is political incentives and the perception of what technology signifies. Everywhere in the world, new political leaders want to make change, want to distinguish themselves from past administrations, and adopting a new, exciting EdTech innovation is one way to do that. There are political benefits to investing in exciting, shiny, very visible things like new laptops. Even if they might not show results in the long term, in the short term they can bring political wins. And of course, decision makers are human — they’re subject to the hype and excitement over something new, just like the rest of us.

And then lastly, we saw a lot of external pressures motivating EdTech investment, coming from all different places. Parents learn about EdTech happening somewhere else and don’t want their kids to miss out. Large, powerful companies are advocating for their products. And then donors — multilateral and bilateral organizations — have their own favorite EdTech projects that they’re bringing to countries. So there are all these different factors working together to increase motivation. But as you say, evidence of impact is not really a standout one.

Will Brehm  4:58
Let’s unpack a couple of these, Brad. This perception of technology playing into local domestic politics — how does that play out? Why do some governments want to use technology to show progress, show modernity to their electorate?

Brad Olsen  5:11
I think this notion of optics seems to matter a lot. What we’re finding is there are really two areas that exert force on decision makers in this way. One of them is, as Molly pointed out, what we might call signaling. And I think there are two aspects to that. One is that many low and middle income countries believe that if they can emulate high income countries, they will have education success. There’s a sense that high income countries have already gone digital, and so low and middle income countries ought to do the same and they’ll get the same kind of results. That’s interesting because if you look at learning outcomes, high income countries aren’t necessarily always doing best — but again, this is about optics.
The other thing is something that when I was in graduate school was called regional isomorphism, which is a fancy way of saying countries want to keep up with each other. They want to look like they’re doing as well as or better than their neighboring countries, and no one wants to get left behind. If a nearby country has moved its entire educational curriculum platform onto a digital application and you’re next door and haven’t done that, your constituents may think you’re falling behind.

And the other part, which certainly connects to it, is the retail politics of it — the electoral politics. It looks really good to constituents if you’re a political leader and you can talk about how many schools have digital connectivity, how many platforms are being used in a particular region. It’s cutting edge. You can distinguish yourself from the previous administration, which is something that often happens in education and in politics. And as Molly pointed out, you’re able to show that you’re being responsive to in-country needs — that we’ve learned from the lessons of COVID, that we’re paying attention to rural communities that have perhaps felt left out. So I think it’s good politics, it’s good global signaling, and it suggests that a country is moving forward and not being left behind.

Will Brehm  6:42
Molly, one of the external forces you talked about with motivation was around external actors. Brad just talked about what’s going on internally within countries and how the perception of neighboring countries might shape motivation. But there’s also, particularly in low and middle income countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia, a lot of multilateral aid and donors pushing certain agendas, as well as EdTech companies trying to sell their products. How does that impact decision-making and motivation for adoption?

Molly Wyss  7:08
We heard one example from an interviewee who was describing a government running multiple EdTech projects at the same time, funded by different multilaterals — all with different objectives, sometimes overlapping objectives, not coordinated with each other. I think that illustrates the broader challenge. There’s a lack of coherent strategy a lot of the time. Governments are offered these external projects that come with resources, expertise, and capacity that might be really needed in the system, and so they’re understandably incentivized to take these projects. But they’re not always — or even often — coordinated with each other. So we see this landscape of disparate initiatives working in parallel, sometimes working on the same thing but not working with each other, not learning from each other. A lot of them run for a few years and then the funding goes away and the project is over. So there’s not a coordinated strategy working towards something — just different little islands of things happening.

And all these different technologies aren’t even interoperable. They can’t work together, they can’t share data across different systems, they can’t technologically be part of a broader system. They’re even more stuck in their silos.

Brad Olsen  7:58
As Molly points out, in terms of the multilateral organizations, in some ways it resembles that same set of pressures around country governments — they too are in a sort of competitive landscape, whether they’re willing to admit it or not, where they don’t want to be perceived as having fallen behind. And so I wonder if they inadvertently spur each other on to go digital quickly.

Will Brehm  8:18
This idea that it’s not coordinated is quite fascinating, Molly, because if the goal is to scale certain technological solutions in a system, not being able to coordinate obviously impacts feasibility. Do the governments you were looking at think about feasibility in that longer-term way — trying to coordinate all of these EdTech solutions toward some future system they’re working towards?

Molly Wyss  8:38
I think they think a lot about feasibility, but in the short term. And as a result of the decisions they’re making, that often undercuts sustainability in the long term. Cost is a really good example. Decision makers are very sensitive to costs — understandably, budgets are really tight in a lot of these places, and education decisions are always sensitive to cost. But digital technology is a comparatively high-cost investment. So we saw that this means they often prioritize free or low-cost innovations, or work to develop them in-house. What that means is companies capitalize on this reality — they may offer free or subsidized services or content directly to governments. And of course governments are also getting free or low-cost EdTech from donors. As a result of these cost pressures, sometimes the free offers are taken without fully interrogating how well a project will work or how suited it is to the context. So there are short-term cost savings, but that also undermines long-term potential impact.

And all of these different free innovations are contributing to this fragmented landscape — all these different EdTech solutions working in parallel because they’re being brought by different people and selected more on short-term costs than on long-term sustainability.

Beyond that, a lot of these systems have many different teams, departments, and ministries responsible for making decisions about education and technology, and they’re also not always well-coordinated or talking to each other. In Bangladesh, for example, within the Ministry of Education there are different departments managing different education levels, each responsible for tech decisions in those schools — but then there’s also an ICT body under the ministry’s ICT division. How exactly they all fit together isn’t clear. In Indonesia, religious schools are governed by the Ministry of Religion, not the Ministry of Education, so decisions get split across different ministries. An interviewee in Sri Lanka counted 22 different systems built in-house that were not working with each other — each time a new need came up, they created a new system. So that lack of internal coordination, combined with all of these external projects, really contributes to this short-term feasibility mentality rather than long-term sustainability.

Will Brehm  10:12
It’s so interesting to hear about the challenges at that policy or national level — trying to coordinate across different departments, navigate donors and pressures, thinking about how to reform a system with technology at scale. But on the other side, at the coal face, you have teachers. If you do end up adopting certain EdTech solutions, it ultimately matters whether teachers can integrate them into their teaching, their pedagogy, their classrooms. So Brad, what did you find when you looked across this region as to what teachers are doing or how they’re involved in this process of EdTech adoption?

Brad Olsen  10:45
I think that’s a really important piece. I’m one of those who believes that teachers might be the most important system lever in the entire education ecosystem. One thing we found is that very rarely are teachers included in the work of designing and developing education innovations. And maybe that’s something we’ll come back to. But it seems that there are innovators who are really focused on doing cool stuff and having their idea come to life, and there are tech vendors that may be predominantly interested in making money — but the actual ones who think about teaching and learning, who think about students and know their students, those are not often folks who are in the room.

We also looked at what kinds of knowledge must be in place to create the conditions in classrooms for teachers to use these innovations well. Of course there’s the need to be digitally literate — we talk about that, we talk about the need for infrastructure, for electricity and connectivity, for teachers to know how to use the machines. But I think there are other aspects that aren’t often enough considered. There needs to be pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. But there also needs to be knowledge of how to use the technology to teach the content differently. In other words, if teachers use a new technology to simply teach the same way they’ve always been teaching, then I don’t think anything has improved. The whole point of this, if we’re talking about innovations designed to work in the classroom for instruction, is that they’re going to support or facilitate teachers to do things differently. And that requires knowing your subject, knowing pedagogy, and knowing how your pedagogy and your subject interrelate — as Lee Shulman would talk about pedagogical content knowledge. And now there’s this new dimension called TPACK, or technological pedagogical content knowledge. That’s pretty sophisticated stuff. And unless teachers are getting the kind of training that will allow for this — unless they are familiar with, comfortable with, and confident in using technology — it’s very easy for them to resist it, to wait it out, or to pull a few of their fellow teachers onto the resistance side.

There’s this notion about how you get a critical mass, and we heard a lot of people in our study talk about that. Some of it is making sure you’ve got teachers who are comfortable with and confident in using technology. This also appears to cut along not quite a generational divide, but a location-on-the-career-cycle divide. You may have early career teachers who are digital natives but don’t have much teaching expertise and experience, and then you’ve got veteran teachers who have quite a lot of experience but perhaps aren’t particularly comfortable with digital technology. So I think there needs to be a kind of intergenerationality to teaching workforces.

Molly Wyss  12:42
And in addition to the lack of training and support, we also saw that the incentives weren’t always there for teachers to use technology in the classroom. As I mentioned earlier, in a lot of these countries there’s high-stakes testing and exams for students that are taken on pen and paper and don’t include technology. Teachers who are feeling a lot of pressure to make sure their students pass are not going to spend their time learning a new technology and integrating it when it’s not part of the exam. Unless the incentives are there, they’re not necessarily going to take it up. And then teachers also have very reasonable concerns about student privacy, security, and — AI is a whole separate question — but how it informs the learning process. So there are also genuine concerns about the role of technology in education.

Will Brehm  13:18
I remember being in, I think it was seventh grade in New Jersey, when for whatever reason the school district signed a deal with Apple and all of these computers were coming in. They had this rule — you have to have five computers in every classroom. That was seen as the thing to do. I had this English teacher who taught American novels, and during the term he would draw on the chalkboard the characters in the book as we read through it. It was this amazing thing to go through your reading alongside him drawing more and more. He was a fantastic artist. But then when these computers came in, they had to go somewhere in the classroom, and they put them in front of the chalkboard where he used to do the drawings. And he just stopped doing the drawings. He was one of those older teachers who just didn’t know what to do with these computers, so we never used them — and we lost the drawings. He soon retired afterward. It was just like the technology was not needed for his pedagogy, and the trade-off was real.

Brad Olsen  14:05
That’s a powerful example. I can almost picture it myself. And I think it reminds us that technology is a tool, not a solution. If teachers are going to use it, it still requires that teachers engage creativity, knowledge of their students, knowledge of subject matter, and knowledge of instruction. We’ve got decades of experience to see that new technologies — whether they’re film strip projectors, VCRs, smart boards, or laptops — don’t often actually change the way teachers and students engage in classrooms and therefore aren’t necessarily doing much that’s better. It becomes really important to focus explicitly on how a technology is going to change the way teachers and learners operate in environments.

Molly Wyss  14:38
I was going to say, it highlights that we have to be precise when we’re talking about scaling EdTech. It’s not just scaling access to EdTech — are there computers in the classroom, is there electricity and internet? You have to have that to make it work, but that’s really just the fundamentals. We need to scale the use of education technology — is it just sitting in the classroom, or are teachers actually using it? And then also scale the impact — is it actually changing teaching and learning? Because if not, the others are somewhat meaningless.

Will Brehm  15:04
I like that, Molly. It almost makes me think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — there is this set of levels, and certainly some things at the bottom of the pyramid have to be in place, but we can’t stop there. So how do we think about sustainability? Because Molly, one of the interviewees said something like this landscape you’ve been describing today is “complete and utter chaos.” That stuck with me when I read the report. How did it get this way? How did we end up here, where it’s so fragmented with so many different companies, approaches, and departments working on it — and not really knowing if the computers are just sitting in the classroom rather than being used, or if there’s even electricity to power them?

Molly Wyss  15:35
Yeah. I think this comes back to some of the things we’ve touched on. Partially it’s due to contributions from companies and donors and the historical relationship between donors and these countries, as well as the fact that the systems are not necessarily coordinating — decision-making is somewhat diffuse. There’s also a lot of political turnover that we talked about earlier, which interrupts reform continuity, so things are always starting and stopping. And that’s alongside the fact that technology advances so quickly — there’s some statistic that in about a year and a half it’s sort of obsolete. It takes longer than that to test something, find evidence, and scale it up. So there’s a lot of starting and stopping and trying new things, which really contributes to this focus on the immediate next thing rather than the long term.

Will Brehm  16:12
Is there an inherent tension between the goals of a government — improving learning, training the next generation of citizens and workers, which is a longer-term horizon — and what some EdTech companies are trying to do, which is sell as many products as fast as possible to report earnings next quarter? Does that inherent tension drive a lot of this chaos?

Molly Wyss  16:33
Yeah, I think it really shapes what products are being created, how they’re being developed, who they’re being developed for, and whether or not they scale. These disparate incentives really do hinder a focus on sustainable learning outcomes because different actors are measuring different metrics. And that’s coupled with the tension we mentioned earlier — education systems do want to see long-term learning outcomes, but you also can’t take politics out of the equation. That’s just real life. So there’s also that tension.

Brad Olsen  17:00
And I wonder if there’s also a tension between commerce and learning. I don’t fault tech companies for prioritizing market expansion because that’s their job, that’s what they’re supposed to do. But therefore the incentive system to which they’re subject is really focused on how can you sell these, how can you make some money, and how can you do it relatively quickly. But what I’ve noticed — and we heard some folks talk about this — is there’s a short-term part and a long-term part. One person told us that they’re happy to give schools their products for free, partly because what they’re able to do is create a kind of brand loyalty that will transfer into personal use over several years. And this is going to be awfully crude to say, but it’s talking about hooking young people on devices in the hopes that they will stick with those devices for many years to come. So it’s not that they’re only focused on the short term — it’s that they’re thinking about it very differently from how we think about EdTech. If our focus is learning outcomes, if our focus is reaching learners and communities in the hardest-to-reach areas, if we’re thinking about equity and sustainable scaling, those are quite different notions.

Will Brehm  17:58
I love that idea — that EdTech companies are actually thinking long term because they’re cultivating future customers. Once those students graduate, get jobs, and have disposable income, they want them buying their platforms or devices. They are thinking long term, just not about learning.

Brad Olsen  18:13
Well, and a lot of the biggest EdTech companies are providing training for teachers, but it’s training on their own tools and products. So teachers are developing capacity, but it’s capacity to use a particular product. They’re being steered in a particular direction for the future. And the companies are perhaps creating future customers in governments too — we heard in one country that when the government is looking to do a system-wide implementation, a new education management system, they’re going to go with the brand name they know and have worked with for a long time. They’re not going to trust it to a small, unknown local company, even if that company might understand the context better. So there’s also this idea of: in the future, you will turn to us as a system.

Will Brehm  18:52
How do we think about equity in this part of the world when it comes to EdTech adoption? At the beginning of our conversation, Molly, you mentioned that this is a region with great diversity — in wealth, income, religious backgrounds, you name it. How do we think about equity across this diversity when it comes to EdTech?

Molly Wyss  19:10
I think the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think about equity in EdTech is rural locations — people with low connectivity, low bandwidth — and how do we create EdTech that is for them? That is absolutely an important part of equity. But there are a lot of other components, and just solving the low-bandwidth question — designing for offline or low-bandwidth use — is not going to address all the different types of marginalization or exclusion that exist.
We heard a lot of assumptions about technology’s inherent ability to adapt to different users, to be inclusive — that adaptability is one of the benefits of EdTech, that it can more easily offer content in local languages, that it enables distance coaching. But we found that assumption isn’t really true most of the time. EdTech innovations do need to be adapted to different contexts and different needs and experiences, and that’s not just about low bandwidth.
For example, girls typically have less access to digital devices and internet than boys do, and they have less free time to use them when they do have access — they’re often given more household chores. On top of that, adults often assume girls are less interested in or less capable of using technology, so teachers might inadvertently steer boys toward tech through unconscious bias. A low-bandwidth solution alone is not going to reach that group. But maybe an asynchronous option — something you don’t have to access at a specific time, that you can use when you’re available — might be more accessible to them.

Children with disabilities might not be able to use technology if there aren’t assistive elements tailored to their specific needs, and if their teachers don’t know how to use those features, it’s out of reach again. So I think there’s actually a lot more adaptation and contextualization necessary than is often assumed — and that almost flies in the face of scaling and economies of scale, because it’s not the same thing being replicated in each place.

Will Brehm  20:32
By way of conclusion, I’m keen to hear what recommendations you would have. Now that you’ve looked across this region at motivation, feasibility, scalability, and all these tensions inherent in public-private partnerships and equity, what would you recommend for decision-makers and policymakers in these different countries?

Molly Wyss  20:50
We have a couple of things in that regard. One is really focusing on contextualization of the innovations. It’s not realistic to say that every innovation will be developed in-country or in-house, but working together — and this is maybe an opportunity for the kinds of partnerships you’re talking about — working with companies but also local communities and stakeholders to test and adapt the technology being developed to the actual challenge. Is it a challenge that technology can address? Is it tailored to the appropriate context to make sure it fits the need? Is it a solution in search of a problem, or a genuine response to one? So that would be one.

Another, which is more challenging to achieve, is to demand use data on impact and quality more broadly — things like equity and inclusion measures, safety and security, as well as learning outcomes — and to make that a requirement when working with external actors. And then another is really designing and selecting with hard-to-reach users and locations in mind from the very start, which is counterintuitive to how most scaling goes. But I think we won’t reach the so-called last mile unless we prioritize reaching the last mile from the beginning.

Brad Olsen  21:46
I might add a few to that, which also show up in our report. One is to focus on the purpose, not the product. There’s a real need to understand what a particular set of needs are, what technology could do and how, and what it’s not able to do. Sometimes it seems like we lead with the product, not the purpose. There are reasons for that — we’ve talked about them — but what would it entail to actually bring various stakeholders together and talk about why EdTech is useful in a particular situation?

I also think that one of the things folks told us is that it may be that the most promising EdTech is not in the classroom per se, but rather tech applications that are outside the classroom doing support work — whether that’s educational management information systems, or different ways of recording, organizing, and storing information. The kinds of tedious, routinized tasks that we can offload to machines so that humans are freed up to engage with learners, to collaborate with each other, to think creatively and intellectually about the work. That seems promising, but it doesn’t seem shiny enough to always attract decision makers.

And the last thing I’d mention is that one thing that became clear to us in this work is that government decision makers are between a rock and a hard place. They are absolutely aware that they’re having to make incredibly difficult decisions quickly, without sufficient evidence, without much research, while being inundated with savvy marketing. They’re also having to balance all of these different constituencies. I would love for us to be able to prioritize what it means to give them the kind of support they need to slow down, have some expertise in the room, and really think about these things carefully. They know they’re having to move too fast. They know they’re making decisions that they’re not particularly proud of, but they feel constrained — and they need to do something, because doing nothing isn’t the right call. So I want to make sure that we’re sympathetic to and able to support the really complicated situation in which they find themselves.

Will Brehm  23:18
Molly Wyss and Brad Olsen, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It’s been a real pleasure to talk today. Congratulations on the report — it’s so fascinating and I think it can be applied far beyond Southeast Asia and South Asia.

Molly Wyss  23:30
Thank you so much.

Brad Olsen  23:31
Thank you very much, Will.

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