What the history of education technology tells us about our future.
GUEST COLUMN | by Anne Trumbore
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
The history of education technology spans nearly a century, yet it’s rarely acknowledged during each new cycle of disruption. Seventy years ago, computers were predicted to transform education. Fifteen years ago, MOOCs were poised to revolutionize higher education. Today, AI and AI tutors are expected to fundamentally change how we teach and learn. The claims in each era are strikingly similar. Each promises personalization, efficiency, standardization, and scalability, but rarely delivers a truly good education. With each new wave of innovation, we forget the last. The history of education technology is as much about forgetting as it is about discovery.
‘With each new wave of innovation, we forget the last. The history of education technology is as much about forgetting as it is about discovery.’
After researching the social and historical contexts of education technology for my book, The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology (Princeton University Press), I’ve come to believe that the history of online education has been deliberately ignored for three main reasons: innovation drives adoption (no one wants to invest in an “old” idea); venture capital profits from scale and standardization (which often leaves individualization behind); and the idea that technology can make education both more efficient and democratic tends to consolidate power in the hands of disrupters, usually businessmen and scientists from elite universities.
It’s Worth Asking
This dynamic isn’t new. For more than fifty years, scholars have asked what technologies work in education, how they can be improved, and for whom they offer the most benefit. A long tradition of research has questioned whether edtech truly addresses problems of access, engagement, or relevance. Yet universities rarely use evidence-based research when selecting technology. They tend to “buy as a pack,” mimicking peer institutions, a behavior that edtech companies exploit.
Given this pattern, it’s worth asking: would universities so readily enter into contracts with edtech companies if they understood that many of these “innovations” are recycled? We may never know, because it’s unlikely even the most advanced tools will prompt universities to recall that more than half a century ago, they took part in government-funded experiments in educational technology as a way to advance Cold War international policy and domestic strategy.
Knowing Your Roots
In 1958, the National Defense Education Act was passed in reaction to Sputnik and led to a surge of federal investment in higher education. Some of that funding supported research into how students and machines learn; some created the first federal student loan systems. Ever since, entrepreneurs and universities have tried to use computers to expand access to personalized learning. Today’s enthusiasm for AI tutors echoes the 1960s and ’70s, when Stanford’s Patrick Suppes, Illinois’s Donald Bitzer, and MIT’s Seymour Papert imagined a future of computer-supported education. That moment was deeply entwined with the origins of artificial intelligence, student lending, and the post–World War II university.
Yet few today know this history. Only a handful of sociologists and cultural critics have woven together the strands of technology, entrepreneurship, policy, market forces, and regulation to explain the roots of online learning. Some scholars argue that the United States embraces a kind of historical amnesia, one where forgetting becomes more useful than learning, so that ideas like the “education gospel” or higher education as a financial investment can be repackaged and resold.
More Aware, More Discerning
If higher education were more aware of its own history of technological disruptions, we could become more informed consumers of edtech, more thoughtful partners to platforms, and more clear-eyed about what disruption really means and where it actually happens. We would also be less susceptible to the influence of the homogeneous edtech class: administrators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who promote technological solutions to policymakers while obscuring their financial interests and blurring evidence of impact.
Remembering this history can help us escape what Papert called “The QWERTY trap,” the tendency to let technology dictate our behavior instead of shaping technology to meet human needs. It reminds us that technology is not powerful on its own. It is shaped by political, social, and economic forces. In many cases, technology reflects problems in education; it does not solve them. We must choose to use technology as a tool to benefit students, not investors.
Online learning and generative AI will undoubtedly grow quickly in the coming years. My hope is that by understanding where online education came from and how its development is intertwined with AI, federal policy, and market interests, that universities can be more discerning about their partnerships, more thoughtful in how they expand access, and more committed to building equitable learning environments that benefit students more than shareholders. For readers who want to go deeper into the forgotten histories behind today’s edtech debates, The Teacher in the Machine offers a longer view and a more grounded one.
—
Anne Trumbore is Chief Digital Learning Officer at Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at The Darden School, University of Virginia where she is responsible for creating a strategy to expand access to world-class education and advance Darden’s mission of providing transformational learning experiences to learners globally. Previously, she established and led Wharton Online, a strategic, revenue-producing, digital learning initiative of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. An early-stage employee at Coursera, NovoEd, and Stanford’s Online High School, Anne helped pioneer new forms of student-centered online education. Her work has resulted in a number of publications on online pedagogy and history, the future of higher education, and the future of work. Ann holds an AB from Brown University, and MA from San Francisco State University, and an EdD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a 24-25 Stanford Futures Fellow. Her book, The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology has just been released by Princeton University Press and is also available on Amazon. Connect with Anne via LinkedIn.
0 Comments