Why EdTechs need to distinguish engagement and learning

EdTechs - Educational Technologies - must put learning outcomes at the heart of their innovations by taking into account learning methods, the spacing and testing effect, and the illusions of learning

For several years, training has been changing and becoming ever more motivating, ever more engaging. Chatbot, virtual reality and more are competing for the attention oflearner and immerse him in his learning. While these technologies make the user experience infinitely more pleasant, they are not enough to enable sustainable learning.

From access to knowledge to mastering skills

Our training system has long been able to provide considerable knowledge and skills to an elite. We also know Give access to education and training for as many people as possible. Our society has shown this for 50 years through the massification of secondary education, the gradual democratization of higher education and more recently the development of MOOCs.

What international comparisons such as PISA or PIAAC show us, but also simply the persistence of unemployment, is that we have a much harder time ensuring that everyone actually succeeds in acquiring knowledge and skills which it needs for its emancipation, autonomy and integration into society. The constant acceleration of the need for new skills leads us to the same conclusion: the effectiveness of our lifelong learning system is one of the major challenges that our society must now meet.

Putting innovations at the service of real learning

To meet this challenge, we need educational innovations whose primary objective is to improve genuinely and sustainably the learning outcomes achieved. This is what most teachers and trainers expect today, whose alleged resistance to innovations is often only a reflection of their legitimate doubts about their pedagogical impact. Digital technologies are particularly the subject of this, for understandable reasons. Their deployment generally requires significant initial investments in time and money (in technical developments or content design for example) for results that are still very questionable, whether in the educational environment [1] or in vocational training. Countless e-learning tools are deployed in public and private organizations whose effectiveness is not measurable and which are largely unused.‍

Technologies that are currently focused on engagement

The recent revival of the “EdTech” sector, driven by the advent of MOOCs, but also by the new possibilities offered by web technologies and artificial intelligence, should now focus on answering these doubts. Unfortunately, many players in digital education and digital training, despite the undeniable energy they deploy, do not put learning outcomes at the center of their technological innovations. In particular, a majority of EdTech solutions focus on improving learner satisfaction by offering modern user experiences. The objective: to ensure that learners are really involved in their training and use the content at their disposal. ” The commitment ” of users has thus become the alpha and omega of digital technologies for education and training.

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Better differentiate engagement and learning

Except that being engaged doesn't mean learning. Engagement may be a relevant metric for an entertainment application or a corporate social network, but it is insufficient for Edtechs who aim to train. It cannot be denied that commitment is an indispensable condition for learning: I will not learn anything if my attention has not been aroused, if I am not ready to start the learning process. But this question of The commitment — am I mentally ready to learn? — must be distinguished from the question of The acquisition : How should I learn? Without a relevant learning strategy, you can be highly engaged during a course or training without be able later to mobilize the skills and knowledge transmitted.

Learners are unaware of which learning strategies are actually effective

But are learners able to identify the right learning strategies? Numerous experiments carried out by cognitive psychology research show that we fairly poorly assess the learning strategies that allow us to learn effectively. We even have a particular tendency to prefer methods that deceive us about our real mastery of subjects [2].

Let's take examples that we all know:

• of learners who watch a course video on any subject will tend, on average, to anticipate better results in a final exam only learners who are trying to learn the same subject by practicing, while Exactly the opposite is happening[3].
• Learners who work on 2 concepts by alternating them systematically (A-B-A-B) rather than sequentially (A-A-B-B) generally come out frustrated and predict worse results, when they are again those who are best at mobilizing these concepts in the long term[4].

These errors in judgment about our real control of our learning, called errors of” metacognition ”, are frequent (see our article here to avoid them). It is therefore necessary to question the relevance of measures of engagement and satisfaction of learners as the only compasses to guide teaching practices. Commitment and learning are complementary but very distinct: it is the combination of commitment and effective learning strategies which allows the real and lasting acquisition of a skill or knowledge.

Refocusing educational technology (EdTech) on learning outcomes

To offer better training tools, we must pilot our pedagogical and technological innovations according to their impact on learning itself. Would you imagine evaluating a surgeon's skills based on the number of seminars he has attended rather than by the progression of his performance in the operating room?

THEinvolvement and the satisfaction of learners are obviously important to measure, because they are a way to achieve better results, but they cannot replace the final objective: the ability of learners to analyze, do, create something that they were not capable of before the training. This is the only metric we need to focus on, if we don't want to take the risk of innovating for the sake of innovating, without lasting results other than having disappointed and exhausted teachers, trainers and learners. A risk that our training system can no longer take in view of the colossal challenges that await it.

REFERENCES

[1] CODE (2015), Connected to learn? Students and new technologies — Key results, PISA, OECD, Paris.
[2] Bjork, Dunlosky and Kornell (2013), Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions, Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64:417 —44.
[3] Roediger HL 3rd and Butler AC. (2011), The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention, Trends Cogn Sci. 2011 Jan; 15 (1) :20-7.
[4] Taylor K., and Rohrer D. (2010), The Effects of Interleaved Practice, Call. Cognit. Psychol. 24:837—848.