When the government announced the closure of schools in England in March, many families were thrown into new territory, and opportunities for education technology entrepreneurs abounded. Edtech founder, Murray Morrison, explains that, in fact, schools have been unknowingly working towards this moment for years.

The truth is always a little more prosaic…. While the last few months have indeed seen phenomenal amounts of effort thrown into developing new services for displaced students and stranded parents, the reality is that schools and the edtech industry have been working together for years; the covid crisis and attendant lockdown was actually a chance to really test out the potential of technologies that have been in place for some time.

The potential of EdTech

Like many edtech founders, I started on the other side of the counter: I myself taught science and maths and found myself frustrated by the inefficiency of the entire teaching and learning process.

I asked myself, from experience and from research, how does learning really work; where does learning truly happen? I looked not just at students in the classroom, but athletes in their training sessions, musicians in their practice rooms. The realisation that that solid, sustainable learning, the kind of foundational knowledge that builds confidence and creativity happens through simple mechanisms of repeated, adaptive practice and feedback.

I asked myself how does teaching really work - where is it valuable, where is it wasted in pointless exercise. Again, I saw that much of what I was doing - repeating forgotten facts, setting quizzes and marking them, and using what I’d learned to plan the next session - was a poor use of my time.

Soon, I’d developed my software for my own students - one that gave them practice exercises, with feedback, adapted to their needs and told me where the gaps were. I used it with my students for years; I put it into my first school in 2015 and now we’re in more than 600 with as many as 2 million questions being answered each day. And that was before March.

My tech, like many other solutions out there was already embedded in the school experience precisely because they enabled better learning and better teaching; they were already essential to many schools trying to help their students achieve their best possible results while enabling their teachers to do their jobs more efficiently.

Testing that potential

We would not have reached the position we did - nor other platforms that support the delivery of lesson content, or the management of learning - had they not been rigorously tested in the market, researched, evidenced and developed in collaboration with teachers. We know that what we do makes a difference.

Education technology has already reduced schools’ “teaching and learning risk” from teacher absence, staff churn, long-term student absence or snow days. Schools have embedded edtech into their day to day precisely because it improves their entire operation for all stakeholders.

What had not been tested at any kind of scale was whether edtech could be the sole medium for the business of a school - the teaching of content, the measuring of ‘attendance’ or engagement, the means of learning and practising, or of assessment.

The rush to adopt

Before March, schools selectively adopted edtech to suit their needs and culture; suddenly they urgently had to have every aspect of schooling supported by technology; gaps appeared and were filled amazingly quickly by enterprising teachers and academy trusts, and products like BBC Bitesize expanded rapidly along with new entrants like Oak National Academy.

Companies like Tassomai made their products free to all schools for the remainder of the year and, in so doing, supported an additional 200,000 students in the space of the first week.

Settling into a new normal

We do not know with any certainty what the new school year will look like, but we can be fairly sure that schools in the UK will be seeking to make sure they can operate, as they have done in the past months, with students working remotely for periods of the time.

The requirement for blended learning support, which will allow maintenance of curriculum plans while students rotate between home-learning and school, means that the platforms adopted this term are likely to be here to stay.

Fundamentally, the power of edtech, and its promise, is to be seen in full next year. For a platform like Tassomai, the opportunity will allow us to do the job for which it was first developed - but with the circumstances making it all the more essential. 

The mission is unchanged: partner with schools to move the business of practising learning, reinforcing knowledge to where it belongs - put it into the hands of the student and build it into their daily routine. Put the data in the hands of teachers so that, whether they are in the room with the pupil or not, they can plan where to put their attention, energy and expertise.

Technology like ours has been around for a few years, and developing hand-in-hand with schools and their pedagogical models. While the strange events of 2020 have made edtech more visible, it really has been the time where proof-of-concept has become mission critical.