06 - Has the Internet democratised education? - Hari Sood

When we talk about education, we talk about helping people learn. Learning is the process of absorbing new information into our memory effectively enough to be able to recall the information at a later date. It is one of the most fundamental human endeavours, allowing us to develop understanding, knowledge and skills to navigate the world. Education helps us ensure we are learning effectively.

It’s pretty uncontroversial to say education is important. The knock-on effects of good education are massive - whether these benefits be individual, societal, political or more. It’s also one of the most unequal parts of our society. From access to attainment, from educational infrastructure to teaching quality, if you’re from a more disadvantaged background, you’re automatically less likely to experience the rewards effective education can offer. The effect is a massive, global divide in the educational outcomes of the wealthiest and poorest individuals in society. 

This is brought to light with the figures below. In Figure 1, the UK context, we can see children of parents in ‘higher’ professional and managerial occupations, like doctors and lawyers, achieve double the number of GCSEs (national exams taken when students are 15/16 in the UK) at A*-C grade than children of parents in ‘routine’ professional occupations (the use of ‘higher’ and ‘routine’ arguably reinforcing class and wealth stigma, that’s maybe for another article). In Figure 2, the global context, this time at primary level, the conclusion is clear: higher wealth = higher school completion rates = better educational outcomes.

 Fig 1: source

Fig 2: source

The issue of educational inequality is nothing new, and potential solutions through technology have regularly been discussed – from using AI to craft personal learning journeys, to providing access to high quality teaching to anyone, anywhere in the world through the internet. As the internet grew and expanded around the turn of the 21st century, a new solution to the centuries-long issue was discovered: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and the democratisation of learning.

 What does this all mean? In simple terms, a MOOC is an online course accessible to anyone. It’s usually free, and users can enrol without admissions processes, wherever they are and whenever they want to. From Udemy to Coursera and more, the market for MOOCs is booming, not least thanks to the pandemic, forcing people into lockdowns and to seek alternative forms of learning.

 The democratisation of learning has been heavily tied to MOOCs. By offering easy access to courses online for anybody to take voluntarily, MOOCs have been heralded as ways to bring education into the public domain, and allow the individual to have their say in what they learn.

 But whilst MOOCs may be a move in the right direction, learning in this way falls short of being the true democratisation of education it is often taken to be. The problems boil down to three main ideas – student-led learning, access and outcomes. Let’s look at each in turn:

1. Student-led learning

Giving students agency and autonomy over their learning seems like a good thing. However, giving beginners the ability to decide and choose what they work on can lead to problems. The most evident example of this is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, popularly understood as people’s tendency to overestimate their knowledge, ability, or skillset in a specific area - an amusing example being a survey where 88% of US drivers put themselves in the top 50% of drivers. 

 In their exploration of this effect, Dunning and Kruger establish it is the inherent lack of knowledge of what it takes to be skilful in the first place that leads to people overestimating their ability. In other words, not knowing what ‘good’ looks like will give you a morphed perception of what ‘good’ is.

When it comes to learning, this is of crucial importance. Allowing beginners to lead their own learning can lead to false perceptions of the expertise level they have achieved. Similarly, people completely new to a topic area won’t know what and how they should be learning. Courses allowing students to enrol whenever they want to mean students can easily be consuming content not suitable for them, and picking up knowledge in an unstructured and hollow way.

2.              Access

The idea of fully accessible learning sounds great, but again it’s not that simple. Firstly, access isn’t completely democratic - you need access to the Internet and technical knowledge to enrol in online courses. This already negatively affects those most marginalised by society, and those most in need of a truly open education system.

 Secondly, simply reducing the definition of accessibility to whether you can enrol fails to accommodate for the complexities existing in the psychology of learning.

 For instance, and as alluded to above, MOOCs and other free learning resources are often designed to be accessible to whoever, whenever. There is very little structure and scaffolding around the online learning process. Educational research shows scaffolding is most needed for beginners, people who struggle with learning and people who need educational support.

 A lack of scaffolding for online courses means the people who can most take advantage of them are people familiar enough with the educational systems and values we prioritise to lead their own education further. These are predominantly people who are already wealthy and well educated – those who already benefit most from educational institutions. The consequence is a system of education serving to widen pre-existing educational inequalities, rather than resolve them.

 Access is not as simple as ease of enrolment. Truly equitable access and opportunity requires a full understanding of all the factors affecting enrolment in online learning, and a levelling of the playing field across all of them.

3.              Outcomes

 A final point to consider with the democratisation of learning is what exact learning outcomes are being achieved – are people learning, and committing new information to long-term memory? A great measure of whether a system is performing is the success of its outcomes, and there are a few things that regularly affect the outcomes online learning in its current form can produce.

Quality:

 A lot of platforms are focused on providing as many courses as possible, or courses in as simple a way as possible. This is done for the sacrifice of quality, and means many courses lack key pedagogical principles in their design. For instance, video lectures might not be the best method of learning content, but on many platforms they are the only method used.

Engagement:

 MOOCs have historically low completion rates. Whilst this might not be a universal concern (users may, for instance, come to the platform to learn about specific things and have no intention of completing the course), the low stickability of many courses suggests the way they are designed for learners isn’t directly relating to outcomes.

Monetisation:

 A lot of ‘democratised’ platforms are profit-seeking enterprises, and are always looking for new ways to monetise. Whilst the key metric for these platforms remains revenue over learning outcomes, we need to be careful about what we’re buying into – the prioritisation of profit over learning outcomes can have negative effects on both access to and quality of learning, further deepening educational inequalities. 

The possibilities offered by platforms claiming to democratise learning are huge, and the potential to address inequalities and outcomes in learning is getting bigger and bigger. Democratised learning platforms as they currently are offer a lot of good, but they are not the final solution - when it comes to any form of democratised learning, we should look past the surface level rhetoric to consider its effectiveness in a critical way.

Equality is not the same as equity. The definition of democracy in education we should fight for is not the neo-liberal one we currently have – boiled down to crude and superficial principles of equality. Our definition needs to be truly equal in its representation across all facets of education and learning - perhaps this should be how we approach our definition for democracy in general.