The digital divide in America isn’t just about access – it’s about skills and meaningful use of technology. While 92 percent of jobs require digital skills, one in three adults lack the workplace digital skills they need, including young adults. This is known as the Digital Skills Divide. Beyond this divide lies what the National Education Technology Plan (NETP) calls the “digital use divide” – the gap between passive consumption of technology and active, skill-building engagement in educational settings. At JSI’s World Education, we’re working to bridge these divides by reimagining how educational technology can serve adult learners, prioritizing innovation and inclusion.
Our goal is to increase economic opportunity and civic engagement for adults, particularly those who may not have completed high school, or who are learning the English language. This means preparing people for careers and personal success in a rapidly changing digital landscape and that requires digital resilience – the awareness, skills, agility, and confidence to be empowered users of new technologies and adapt to changing digital skill demands.
The majority of the edtech market focuses on children in schools or adults enrolled in college and university courses. But you know what they say – scarcity is the mother of innovation. The “in-between” nature of adult foundational education has created a petri dish of experimentation. Teachers leverage K12 and higher ed products in new, interesting ways to retrofit them to an audience they weren’t designed for. Edtech companies that are in our sector tend to be mission-driven and commit themselves fully to serving adult needs. Edtech coaches, experts, and innovators increasingly develop strategies that turn “Big Tech into edtech.” That is, they incorporate the common tools and software from the technology giants – Microsoft, Google and others – to create learning experiences.
Edtech coaches, experts, and innovators increasingly develop strategies that turn “Big Tech into edtech.” That is, they incorporate the common tools and software from the technology giants – Microsoft, Google and others – to create learning experiences.
When Big Tech Is Edtech
It’s the latter that is most intriguing to me, and that poses important questions for the future of the edtech industry. In fact, it harkens to the very origins of the edtech industry, too, which started when educators found ways to leverage “bulletin board systems” to promote learning in the first online discussion forums. Back then, it was the limited availability of technology paired with educators’ craft wisdom that started the field of edtech. Today, the abundance of technology may necessitate a shift in our approach.
When we asked adult learners to tell stories about their digital lives for The Change Agent magazine, all authors wrote about technology use in their real lives, not edtech in a classroom. One author submitted an article entitled “Discord,” which talked about the use of the group chat platform, typically used for gaming, to make social connections. Others wrote stories of how translation apps have helped them access services in the U.S., one in particular named the many ways they’ve used ChatGPT for language support. Of course, these examples are acknowledged by edtech experts, too, who know that YouTube, for example, has been the #1 tool for learning for years.
Tech tools, especially those that are free and popular, open doors for adults to build community, access critical services, and take advantage of learning and employment opportunities. It’s not just adult learners who find creative uses for digital tools, adult educators also have found ways to use these same tools for educational purposes, building workplace-relevant digital skills while offering active learning opportunities. We’ve crowdsourced adult educators’ “edtech routines” in our EdTech Integration Strategy Toolkit and here are some examples of how they’re working to bridge these divides:
- Learners build a picture dictionary in slideshows
- Teachers administer formative assessments using voice and photo messages in popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp
- Students self-assess and track their progress in spreadsheets
The Digital Resilience in the American Workforce (DRAW) project, funded by the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, encourages the development of such edtech routines. These routines use real-world tools like Google Slides or ChatGPT (yes, it’s a real-world tool now) to help learners gain content knowledge while developing digital resilience. These are not “edtech” tools in the traditional sense, and they don’t provide granular data on user engagement. But they are integral to preparing adults for work and life outside the classroom.
Real-world tools like Google Slides or ChatGPT help learners gain content knowledge while developing digital resilience. These are not “edtech” tools in the traditional sense, and they don’t provide granular data on user engagement. But they are integral to preparing adults for work and life outside the classroom.
Building Awareness, Skills, Confidence & Agility
It’s not always feasible to rely on free software to build the awareness, skills, confidence, and agility needed for digital resilience. After all, jobs and communities use specialized software. A technical education program, for example, may not be able to purchase the electronic charting system Epic so future laboratory technicians can have an authentic learning experience. It’s for that very reason that “skills” are only one element of digital resilience. Think about how these other elements can be developed:
- Awareness – Educational programs with low-tech and no-tech access can print screenshots of an electronic charting system, having learners identify the features and functions of the system.
- Confidence – Learners who recognize common icons like those used to indicate saving, printing, filtering, and searching will understand icons as a nearly universal “language” across various interfaces.
- Agility – Task and project-based learning will lead to great agility. A digital or paper-based flowchart exercise can mimic lab workflows in electronic charting systems and learners can practice receiving an order, processing, reviewing, and entering results. This enables learners to develop fluency with the task and troubleshooting strategies for the future.
- Skills – Of course, transferable digital skills are built throughout all of the previous suggestions and, in a very tangible sense, there are edtech products that simulate the electronic system that can be purchased and used to develop technical, on-the-job digital skills.
This applies, of course, not just to adults developing occupational skills using specialized software, but to adults and children developing foundational literacy and numeracy, along with content knowledge and other key competencies. The more technology is an integral part of communicating, calculating, and accessing information, the more embedded it must be in the learning process.
A Worthwhile Challenge
Of course, it’s more challenging to scale a variety of practices like those mentioned above than a single product. Learning engineering relies on data capture, which can be incredibly useful for refining tools and understanding user engagement patterns. However, gathering that kind of data isn’t as straightforward when digital education consists of hands-on experiences with real-world tools. Are Google and Microsoft going to build data dashboards for teachers to see the activity learners spend on their platforms? That sounds like a privacy disaster! What are the other methods we can rely on to measure, analyze, and scale edtech integration practices that build digital resilience?
Engaging learners in content might require more gamified learning. For adults, though, it also means connecting the ways we use technology to their goals.
To meaningfully understand how to engage learners with technology and help them build the digital resilience necessary for a successful life, we may need a Minecraft mindshift. We can look at the technology that learners want to spend time using – like my son wants to spend time on Minecraft – and then develop the strategies, structures, and evidence that will support more productive and learning-focused use of those tools. Engaging learners in content might require more gamified learning. For adults, though, it also means connecting the ways we use technology to their goals. Everyone enjoys responding to quiz questions in Kahoot, and that can be a helpful way to check understanding. Addressing the digital use divide, though, means empowering learners to create their own polls in Kahoot, to use spreadsheet formulas, to write prompts, and to be active creators, communicators, and citizens in the digital world.
From Navigating To Collaborating
Even now AI finds us moving from an approach to digital literacy that demands more nuance, and away from one that focuses on navigating, accessing, and evaluating information. Collaborating with technology in the ways that teachers and learners are working alongside new AI tools requires fluency in productive thinking routines and competencies for effective and ethical human-AI collaboration. We don’t want the learners in today’s classrooms to end up like some professionals who have let their names be tarnished by reports and products rife with misinformation and lacking in the human touch, only because they put too much trust in their shiny new chatbot and weren’t fully AI-ready. AI literacy matters for everyone.
The urgency to tightly align edtech and real-world digital tools has perhaps never been more palpable. Richard Elmore says in a 2018 keynote, “Schooling is the present. Learning is the future.” We might adapt that to say that currently edtech is the present, but all tech is the future. What does it mean to prepare technologists, researchers, teachers, and learners for that future? Then, to take it a step further, what can we design, what data can we collect, and what human and machine resources can we deploy to enable that? Even a step further than that, how are we making those designs, that data collection, and those resources equitably representative and accessible? The good news is: there’s much work to be done to design learning that produces digital resilience and AI can only do some of it. The rest is up to us.
Rachel Riggs is a Technical Advisor on AI and Emerging Technologies for World Education. She works toward digital inclusion and innovation through the AI for Learning and Work initiative and World Ed’s EdTech Center projects.
Rachel Riggs
Technical Advisor on AI and Emerging Technologies for World Education