As edtech has come under increasing scrutiny, it’s worth considering key anomalies and counterexamples to some of the prevailing criticisms.
With nine randomized control trials showing its positive and significant impact on building literacy and numeracy for learners in some of the most challenging circumstances in the world, Imagine Worldwide, where I’m a founding board member, is one of the most important case studies challenging the prevailing narrative.
It does so in part because it doesn’t fall victim to two of the big and valid criticisms of many edtech implementations. First, that digital environments fragment attention and introduce distractions. Second, that most students don’t use the edtech itself. Instead, Imagine Worldwide offers digital curriculum in a redesigned learning model with a clear, dedicated use case for the technology.
The distraction problem is the one filling many of the anti-edtech headlines in the popular media. The idea is that edtech is actively hurting learning because once a student is online, they gain access to billions of potential distractions for every possible motivation and proclivity that exists in the world. Being on an Internet-connected device causes addiction-type issues because of short-term dopamine hits, in particular from having access to videos and social media.
Imagine Worldwide solves this—unintentionally—because its program is offline. When students file into a specified room in schools in places like Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania and engage in daily, 30- to 45-minute self-paced sessions on solar-powered tablets, the digital curriculum from onebillion is delivered offline because the Internet is unreliable.
Students consequently don’t have access to digital distractions when they’re on these tablets. The students aren’t exposed to things on the Internet outside of the lessons and learning objectives. They also only have the tablets for the 45-minute block of tablet-based learning, so the learning is one part of a larger set of activities.
In school environments of 100-plus students per teacher where direct feedback is scant, the digital curriculum that Imagine Worldwide helps implement offers an important opportunity that’s not about short-term rewards. It allows students to consistently receive instruction at their learning level and, importantly, to engage in deliberate practice with immediate feedback—progressing only as they demonstrate mastery.
Imagine Worldwide’s learning model also addresses the challenge that most students don’t, in fact, use edtech even when it’s available. This is what’s become known as the “5 percent problem,” a phenomenon that Laurence Holt, a senior advisor at the XQ Institute, has documented. In short, Holt’s observation was that in a striking number of digital math programs that show strong learning results in research, roughly only 5% of students use the programs for the minimum amount of time recommended. In the case of Khan Academy, for example, that’s just 30 minutes per week. Roughly 95% of students using Khan don’t meet that threshold.
Imagine Worldwide solves this by having a clear model and extensive training to implement that model, in which students go into a room where they work with the tablets. The only thing they do in that room is work on the tablets. And the teachers’ role during the 30- to 45-minute period is to make sure the students are staying on task and making progress.
The Imagine Worldwide team has also built software that monitors the implementations to check that the schools are operating the program with fidelity. If they aren’t, Imagine Worldwide or the government can provide more support.
This ensures that students who attend school receive the intended dosage. And there is also evidence that implementing Imagine Worldwide boosts attendance.
There are a few key lessons.
Put aside the obvious—that edtech isn’t created equal, as not all programs are designed well, nor do all programs help all learners make progress in all contexts. Imagine Worldwide succeeds not because tablets were layered onto existing classrooms, but because the technology is embedded within a tightly designed instructional model: dedicated time blocks, constrained use cases, focused attention, implementation monitoring, and consistent dosage.
The extensive body of research behind Imagine Worldwide suggests that the educational effects of technology may depend less on whether learning is “digital” and more on how the digital environment is designed—whether it fragments attention and diffuses focus, or instead creates the conditions for sustained practice, concentration, and mastery.
