Book Review: Failure to Disrupt – Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education

The book is written by Justin Reich, who serves as Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Director of the Teaching Lab Systems at MIT. Overall, the book aims to present an argument against the overestimation of the power of technology to profoundly alter the ways educational institutions operate and how students learn. The author aims to provide observations and analyses of various educational technologies as they were promoted and celebrated as the forces that will transform the education field. Due to his positions at two distinguished universities, Harvard and MIT, the author claims that “he had exceptional and unparalleled opportunities that allowed him to examine the progress of educational technology trends and recognize their limitations.”

The analyses presented in the book by the author have several limitations. First, and most important, he claims to present conclusions on the overall use of technology in education, mainly based on experiences associated to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which is where most of his personal experience has taken place. This, from a research and analysis perspective, is very limited. MOOCs are one of many different ways how technology can and is being applied to learning and education, so conclusions on the overall use of technology can not be drawn from such a limited scope.

A second limitation of the analysis presented in this book, and a very important one as well, is the fact that Reich establishes a set of generalizations for the higher education system overall, based on observations limited to institutions that are not highly recognized for adopting learning technologies to provide education at scale overall – they mainly still operate under the old-fashioned higher education approach and have developed MOOCs, which is one of many different ways to address learning and education at scale. His analysis is mainly based on observations at Harvard and MIT, which are not at the top edge of education at scale but are still higher education institutions that measure academic quality through scarcity: having low admission rates as a proxy, driven by academic rankings, to measure quality. As such, the insights and conclusions that he presents in this book can not be generalized to education overall, as the author aims to provide.

The twelve main takeaways that I got out of this book are presented below:

• Schools and colleges are among the most durable and conservative of our social institutions. They prepare people for the future by connecting them with knowledge and wisdom from the past. Faculty make some accommodations for changing times, but for the most part, instructors teach how they were taught.
• “We will have much to rebuild, and perhaps learning technology can help. But online learning won’t be an effective replacement for our old system. Rather, the best possible future will be one where we recognize the incredible importance of our formal education systems to the social order, and we provide these systems with adequate funding, support, and respect. Our learning technologies are only as strong as the communities of educators who guide their use.” This is another strong limitation of the analysis presented in this book. Reich confuses education with schooling – his statements are based on the assumption that the education system will continue to exist as the main basis for learning in society. This may not be the case, as several authors have outlined, since options like home schooling will continue to increase in the upcoming years, making Reich’s assumptions not valid under such trend.
• For those with access to global online networks, now is the greatest time in history to be a learner. Never before have learners had such incredible access to resources and communities of tutors and apprentices. Whether they want to learn to play guitar, brew beer, identify birds, translate Cicero, throw a javelin, intubate a trauma victim, integrate a function, detonate a bomb, program in Javascript, or become a better teacher, there are online classes, tutorials, forums, and networks full of people who are excited to teach and excited to learn. If you’ve ever signed up for an online class, downloaded an educational app, or watched a video about how to unclog a toilet, you are part of that network.
• Genres and dilemmas – in the decades ahead, educators can expect to hear a new generation of product pitches about the transformative potential of new technologies for school systems: how artificial intelligence or virtual reality or brain scanners are the innovations that, this time, will actually lead to profound changes in education. The author predicts that these pitches will also be wrong – these new technologies will not reinvent existing school systems (though some of them may make valuable incremental improvements) – and this book is an effort to explain why. This may be an accurate statement. However, as previously described, the scope of his analysis is a very limited one in order to come up with such generalization.
• The author addresses tools like adaptive tutors in K-12 schools for topics like Mathematics and Early Reading. However, he misses to provide a comprehensive assessment of the advantages (and limitations) of learning technologies in different academic fields. He aims to provide generalizations, which are limited due to the fact that learning technologies serve in different ways for different academic fields. And the information presented in this book simply does not address that.
• Reich addresses learning technologies like algorithm-guided learning games, such as Duolingo. He says that “The assessments in Duolingo can evaluate whether a person has defined or translated a word or short phrase correctly; they cannot evaluate a student’s arguments for the impact of Don Quixote on Spanish literature and culture. Language-learning games may be a great way for people to start learning a language, but for the foreseeable future, developing real fluency will require engagements with native speakers and culture that are not possible through an autograded app.” Duolingo is not aimed to provide that; it is aimed to help learners get basic knowledge and understanding of a different language, as well as basic skills to speak it. Nonetheless, there are other technologies, some of them based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which provide valuable foundations on such fluency.
• In this era of virtual learning and the overwhelming reliance on technology to connect, this book outlines some insights which the author defines as “issues” with educational technologies. It explicitly aims to inform readers on the various approaches and tools technologists developed and what should be taken into consideration when attempting to adopt, utilize, and implement technologies in varied educational settings. Another limitation of the analysis presented by the author is that he never addresses the disadvantages of in-person learning versus online (synchronous and asynchronous) learning. As a professor, I can share that synchronous learning allows students to share insights and opinions all at once in a clear and structured manner, whenever a teacher or professor leverages different tools to get such insights from them. Also, as several studies have shown, some learners feel more confident to share insights in a digital context, compared to an in person one.
• The author also challenges perceptions surrounding the promises and predictions of large-scale educational technologies and their abilities to establish dramatic shifts in education. For instance, educational technologists promoted their innovations on the premise of envisioning a future where education would be affordable, accessible, effective, and engaging for all students. The author aims to document the inconsistencies in enrollment and completion of online courses, the benefits (or lack thereof) that students gained from participating in online certificate courses, and the pivotal role of educational technologies in perpetuating the cycle of inequitable access for students from low socioeconomic status. However, as previously shared, all of his statements are based on his strongly-focused MOOC experience, which can not be used as a basis to provide generalizations on the use of technology in education overall.
• Schools are conservative institutions in society. People tend to teach how they were taught, and new technologies are far more likely to be bent to fit into existing systems than they are to lead to major reorganizations… When faced with integrating new technologies, most educators take an approach constrained by a combination of an anxiety abour trying new things, a desire to make the best possible use of students’ time, and the stress of the demanding workloads required just to keep classes running. It is only with support, professional learning opportunities, collaborative planning time, and other system-level resources that most educators can become comfortable enough to try new approaches to teaching and learning with technology.
• Furthermore, the author aims to elaborate on the magnitude of four dilemmas confronting educational technologies: Curse of the familiar, the trap of routine assessments, the EdTech Matthew effect (where the already advantaged gain more from technology than do the less fortunate), and the toxic power of data and experiments.
• The author aims to guide readers through the establishment of various educational technology tools, their claims, and their mystifying hype. One of the key chapters in the book is perhaps the last one, “Conclusion: Preparing for the Next Learning-at-Scale Hype Cycle.” The author invites readers, educators, administrators, policymakers, and technologists to be deliberate in assessing the value of educational technologies and to be wary of new tools that proclaim to be transformative. Accordingly, he poses the following questions to emphasize the importance of evaluating these tools logically aside from the charismatic lure of new technologies: “1. What’s new? 2. Who is guiding the learning experience—an instructional designer, an adaptive learning algorithm, or a community of peers? 3. Pedagogically, is this attempting to fill pails or kindle flames? 4. What existing technologies does this adopt?” Moreover, he signifies the need to critically examine how and when technological tools can be incorporated into students’ learning process and cautions against the intractable factors that could hinder learners’ abilities to achieve the desired results.
• Overall, the book provides arguments to examine the hype regarding educational technology. It also aims to establish the pillars for “an effective and promising future in the educational technology field.” However, as outlined in this book review, the insights he presents are limited by the inadequate generalizations he outlines under a limited scope – including types of learning offerings and experiences (beyond MOOCs), academic fields and learning technologies used.