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

by Justin Reich

A leader in educational technology separates truth from hype, explaining what tech can--and can't--do to transform our classrooms.



Proponents of large-scale learning have boldly promised that technology can disrupt traditional approaches to schooling, radically accelerating learning and democratizing education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at elite universities and in elementary schools in the poorest neighborhoods. Such was the excitement that, in 2012, the New York Times declared the "year of the MOOC." Less than a decade later, that pronouncement seems premature.

In Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education, Justin Reich delivers a sobering report card on the latest supposedly transformative educational technologies. Reich takes readers on a tour of MOOCs, autograders, computerized "intelligent tutors," and other educational technologies whose problems and paradoxes have bedeviled educators. Learning technologies--even those that are free to access--often provide the greatest benefit to affluent students and do little to combat growing inequality in education. And institutions and investors often favor programs that scale up quickly, but at the expense of true innovation. It turns out that technology cannot by itself disrupt education or provide shortcuts past the hard road of institutional change.

Technology does have a crucial role to play in the future of education, Reich concludes. We still need new teaching tools, and classroom experimentation should be encouraged. But successful reform efforts will focus on incremental improvements, not the next killer app.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Technology, Teaching, Professional Development, Audiobook, Business

316 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2020

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to read critique of edtech's savior complex.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is reasonably technical with lots of references, but quite understandable by a layman. Although I was somewhat involved in Computer-Assisted Instruction in the lat 1970's early 1980's (when Justin was just learning to walk and type (not at the same time), my knowledge of what I was doing was limited. Justin puts forward those questions that educators need to ask themselves regarding new technologies that I never asked myself. It is encouraging that people are still trying to integrate technology into our educational system, but I agree with Justin that incremental steps at improvement will result. This is not a book that parents will read, but they should, especially after the pandemic to see why online technology failed in so many ways. A good follow-up book would be what went wrong and maybe, if any, what went right during the pandemic of 2020.

Extremely well-written, and as mentioned, understandable by the layman. Keep a dictionary close by. The use of the "I" narrative makes the author relatable.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this book for class. While it wasn’t the most riveting, I learned a lot and I’m glad I read it.

[Aaron Schumacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is especially salient during a pandemic, "technology alone can't transform education." Reich's book nicely wraps up the most recent edtech hype cycle, which I was more optimistic about at the time. Reich thinks we have to keep tinkering toward utopia.

I mostly agree with Reich, except that now I tend to put more weight on knowledge à la Hirsch, and I still have hope for the application of tools like Anki in educational settings.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book based on the excellent review by Dr. Barbara Oakley, creator of the highly recommended (and free) Learning how to Learn online course (go to Coursera and sign up!).

The book likely has a narrow audience: it deals with the failure of technology to live up to the promised hype to improve/disrupt school education. (The Kahn Academy, as great as it is, has not gone on to take over the world, for example)

I found it particularly topical given the COVID-19 pandemic school closures having lead to mass school closure and pursuit of "online education".

The book is well written, extremely well researched, cogent, and articulate. For those interested in the topic, give it a go.

[Kelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read for anyone interested in education technology.

In the first half of the book, Justin Reich describes the different genres of education technology used in large-scale learning, as well as the benefits and limitations of each genre. In the second half of the book, he discusses the barriers and fallacies of large-scale learning and explains why education technology alone cannot significantly transform the education landscape.

The ideas in this book are well organized and clearly articulated. They gave me a useful framework to see past the hype and instead to use a critical lens to assess different types of educational technology.

[Leonardo Longo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Justin Reich presents a super realistic and fact based approach to contrast the hype of transformative educational technologies. The author presents the state of affairs of MOOCs, autograders, computerized “intelligent tutors,” and other educational technologies.
It is perfectly explained that technology cannot by itself disrupt education or provide shortcuts past the hard road of institutional change, having a crucial role to play as we still need new teaching tools, and classroom experimentation.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Failure to Disrupt : Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (2020) by Justin Reich is an interesting book on the impact of technology on education. Reich is a professor at MIT and the director of the Teaching Systems Lab. Reich was hired as the first full time researcher to work on the infrastructure for the EdX Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Reich also hosts the ‘TeachLab’ podcast.

The book starts by Reich talking about the promise of MOOCs and how they were jubilantly promoted at TED talks and similar. Clayton Christensen’s description of how by 2019 much of high school education was going to be done online is very interesting.

The book then goes on to describe three genres of learning at scale, instructor guided, algorithm guided and peer guided. The second section is called ‘Dilemmas in Learning’ and discusses issues with online and modern technology driven learning.

Reich really knows his subject and has lots of really interesting insights. He describes how previous technologies have been described as things that would transform learning. Edison described how film would take over from instructor led classes over a hundred years ago.

The book does tend to puncture bubbles on what education can do but Reich does write that education technology can be really useful for autograding math, quantitative science, learning coding and early language education. This is still very useful. Also Reich points out that the most popular Masters Course in Computer Science in the US is now a MOOC.

As someone who does Duolingo daily and has done some MOOCs that were better University Courses I took it’s really interesting to read what Reich has to say.

Reich points out that much of the benefit of education technology goes to people who are better off.

The book was also written before Large Language Models (LLMs) started to be available for public consumption. It would be really interesting to see what Reich thinks of them.

Failure to Disrupt is very much worth a read for anyone interesting in the impact of modern technology on learning. Reich writes well and knows the subject really well.

[Anusha Datar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book uses theoretical frameworks and a wealth of examples to illustrate how educational technology has not caused any meaningful paradigm shifts in the practice or outcomes of education. He provides general reasons for why this is the case - many interventions just replicate existing classroom tools behind a screen, they often help the most privileged students, the assessment frameworks for student outcomes are still broken, and the ways we study education is broken. Reich also discusses common pitfalls and points of hubris developers of educational technology and the people who study it fall victim, which nicely connects the broader principles he discusses to human intentions and its technological consequences.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I appreciated that Reich focused on the value of community-driven education (and how technology can assist with community-centric efforts) rather than just wallowing in negativity. I also enjoyed this book because as someone who went through school between 2005-2021, a lot of the technologies he discussed are ones that I lived through the evolution of and experienced similar reactions to. I do think that this book is fairly surface-level in terms of its exploration of pedagogy and educational theories - I wished there had been more depth about teaching and learning rather than just focusing on technology and logistics. Overall, I'd recommend this book, but I would warn that it is fairly pessimistic about technology and light on theoretical footing.

[Cesar Cossio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy enfocado a aspectos que tienen que ver con tecnologías educativas. Un libro muy especializado.
Creo que abarca mucho los temas sobre porque la tecnología no ha revolucionado la educación, a pesar de todas las opciones tecnológicas que hay.

Creo que se queda corto en propuestas, es más una revisión de porque (bien ejemplificado y argumentado) todavía no se llega a esa revolución.

Bien para saber del tema pero queda ganas de un poco más de propuesta sobre que si se puede mejorar.

Esta frase engloba un poco el sentir:

“If you are hoping that new technologies will be able to radically accelerate human development, the conclusion that change happens incrementally is probably a disappointment. But if you think that global human development is a game of inches—a slow, complex, maddening, plodding process with two steps back for every three steps forward—then Wikipedia is about as good as it gets”

[Fifi · Rating 4 out of 5]

'In reality, it is community, not technology, that offers the best chance of changing practice in schools.'
#DeZinVanHetBoek #ThePointOfTheBook

[Deborah Quazzo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a disappointment. Rather than rehash 10 year old edtech failures by specific entrepreneurs and groups and focused on a small number of clearly personal success stories, this book could have been so much more. Why not start by framing the absolute failure of our current k12 system to support students - especially poor students - at scale. Our kids are not being prepared to participate in the future so rather than hurl pot shots at unique situations, how about doing more research and lift up examples of success in the US and in other countries like India - a county whose edtech sector is rapidly eclipsing the US. China having already achieved that. Schadenfreude is not going to transform the millions of students being left behind by our current system.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I were ever to build my own company, it would be likely in the edtech world, so I've been following it pretty closely. I was (and still am) very into MOOCs - I jumped on the original Andrew Ng course and have continued taking courses ever since then, and I even considered joining one of the big MOOC companies. I also followed Knewton quite closely - it was not news to me that they basically were just using item-response theory, but a lot of the other details I hadn't known. So overall, this was an interesting book covering all the hype that went into the period and what happened in reality.

Reich identifies four major dilemmas for large-scale learning systems:
* The curse of the familiar - teachers, students, the education system as a whole are conservative and will tend to embrace edtech that replicates familiar tools, e.g. online flash cards and online lectures, which is unlikely to actually lead to substantial improvements. When you have actual innovation, teachers and students will probably find it confusing and object to it.
* The edtech Matthew effect - people who get the most benefit out of MOOCs and other learning systems are the ones who are already well-educated/good at self-regulated learning; economically and otherwise disadvantaged students will be left behind.
* The trap of routine assessment - automatic assessment works best with things like math, computer science, maybe early reading, and not other things. Obviously this has changed a lot with GPT-* coming on the scene.
* The toxic power of data and experiments - warns that there are privacy and other ethical issues in hoovering up data from students

Some points I liked:
* Khan Academy's "discoveries" about computer-assisted math instruction, after $100 million in investment, could have been found in academic papers in the 1990s
* Ask "what's really new here?" to pierce through the hype
* Most improvements to edtech will be from tinkering, rather than from massive changes
* Reich's law - "People who do stuff do more stuff, and people who do stuff do better than people who don't do stuff", is discovered over and over in learning research
* Jill Lepore has shown that many of the big dinosaur companies that were supposedly leapfrogged by innovative companies in Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma are happily dominating their industries decades later.
* A major change that MOOCs sparked was that online learning switched from low status to high status overnight - highly selective universities who bragged about how many students they rejected to their physical campuses were now bragging about how many students they'd admitted online
* Some students objected to David Cox's MOOC on neuroscience as being non-serious - I've taken it and I thought it was really good! This is part of the chapter on how conservative teachers and students are

I am really curious to know what Reich thinks about what GPT-*'s effects will be on online learning, as it will very likely change the game on routine assessment. I only say "likely" because there are so many perils out there. For example, my Japanese teacher shared that she has been trying to get ChatGPT to generate dialogues for students to read, but that about one in four times, the dialogue is in very stilted Japanese that she would NOT feel comfortable assigning to a student.

[Melanie]

I mostly skimmed this one, because after living it, it feels more redundant than it would have otherwise. Talks about MOOCs and algorithm-guided learning at scale, and why they haven't had the stunning results in education as originally expected.

MOOC experiments have gone on to show that MOOCs are beneficial to the motivated, relatively wealthy, and already educated. This seems to be true with most virtual learning systems as we've seen recently. Those who have access and interest will excel, and those who lack interest, ability, and appropriate assistance will flounder. Rather than, for example, helping enhance educational outcomes for disadvantaged/remote populations, educational technology helps those who are already succeeding/excelling.

[For grins, I've taken a few MOOCs over the years through both Coursera and EdX, and while I learned a bit, they were definitely a lot more watered down than the actual classes at Yale/MIT/Cornell would have been. Think two 15-minute videos and 5 multiple-choice completion problems in a week, no outside reading. In another case I signed up for a class that never happened as scheduled and was abruptly rescheduled in a manner that weirdly compressed the timeline so that half the not-yet-assigned work was already due. I think they had technical problems because I reached out to the instructor and never heard back. At any rate, after an experience like that, I would never trust the validity of a purchased certification for a class. I also noticed that the attrition rate in classes, even those with set timelines, is terrible. Probably a lot of the students are just looky-loos, but it might be disheartening to see 75000 people enroll in a class with maybe 3200 of them actually finishing (as few as it is, it's *still* too many to grade individual written assignments). ]

[Chris DuPre · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting perspective on the hype and the fall of massive automated teaching technology to upheave the current educational system. The author provides first hand experience of this rise and fall, as well as a framework for analyzing future technological disruptors in the future. The author is very clearly focused on the current age, likely because the current age advertises disruption much more than the past (as far as I know). I was hoping on a bit more of a historical picture. The author does a great job of discussing especially the intersection of technology, social psychology, moral frameworks, and equity in a choice as seemingly simple as taking and completing a MOOC. I would have also preferred if they spent more time on distinct teaching frameworks. While they mention growth mindset and transfer, they miss the flipped classroom model which is prime for pairing with shared videos and formative auto graded check ins.

Overall, good book! Just not quite as interconnected with the rest of pedagogical theory as I would like.

[Supriyo Chaudhuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a balanced review of education technology and the associated claims of 'disrupting' education. The author researches MOOCs at MIT and his insider knowledge is evident. But the great value of this book comes from a historically informed presentation of the challenges of education change and how Edtech attempts - but often comes up short - to transform learning and deliver better outcomes.

I have learnt a lot from reading this: It's not just about different tools and approaches, but also about different practices, like cMOOC, which I have used (but didn't have a theoretical language to explain what I was doing).

I feel my new year's day was very well spent reading this book and would recommend this to everyone who may be interested in educational practice and/or edtech. The book offers extensive notes, but I would have preferred a bibliography. This perhaps shows how successful the book has been in kindling my interest on the subject.

[Mitchell Dorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book brilliantly captures the dilemma that educators face in the twenty first century. As an English educator, I’ve been perplexed by the idea that with the increased use of technology in the classroom, learning is not really improving. Anecdotally, writing skills of K-8 learners has decreased drastically over the last twenty years. I believe this book would suggest that because we’ve switched our focus on quantitive assessments as a means of measuring learning, we’ve also switched our teaching focus to that which can be measured. Where technology currently stands, the capacity to assess meaning and logic still leaves much to be desired in terms of how technology can be used in the classroom. Technology isn’t bad, and there’s much to be excited about, but it also seems like it’s also important to face the reality of its limits in regards to teaching and assessing critical thinking, logic, and the communication of ideas.

[Antonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about how technology can affect education and where it has failed. The book is very recent but unfortunately it predates the Large Language Model / Foundational Model trend in Artificial Intelligence. Nevertheless many, if not all, of the problems that were seen in the adoption of previous technologies can also be applied to this next "revolution" which we will soon see in startup prospects.

It is particularly refreshing to remind ourselves that schools are not just a place where one acquires a particular subject via rote learning, but also a place where one develops themselves as citizen, acquire critical thinking and so on. Most of the predictions of technologies changing education forever have not come through and this book really grounds into reality past and present approach.

In general, what one learns here can also be applied to contexts outside of school, where artificial intelligence is apparently going to change the job market forever.

[Jeremy Lavine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly fluff, but had some good points about how, contrary to many over-optimistic predictions from around the late 2000s-early 2010s, MOOCs, instructional software, and other education technology did not replace traditional bricks-and-mortar education, did not reduce socioeconomically-associated gaps in educational success (on the contrary), and did not produce insights from huge data sets that led to radical improvements in the educational system.
Minor note: The book mentions the DuoLingo app as a rare success story. I didn’t like this, as I see DuoLingo as a mostly ineffective waste of time.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Investigation of the merit of technological innovations for education purposes. Main message: the technology alone has not led to revolutions when they were widely predicted in the past (the most striking example are MOOCs), and are not likely to do so in the future. Well researched and does contain some eye-openers. I would have perhaps liked a bit more of a psychological perspective: what exactly is it about student-teacher interaction that technology can not replace? But I though it is a sharp and informative book, even if it is a bit repetitive at times.

[Lindsay Bolender · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn’t really answer what I expected it to, and the author missed the mark sometimes, but it wasn’t terrible. It’s written from a pretty biased perspective, but the research insights and implications are worth thinking about. I found the chapter on gaming to be most forward-relevant since there are a lot of non-ed stakeholders pushing it as our next big solution.

[Priya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely dense and took me a long time to get through. That said, it’s the kind of thought-provoking book that had me highlighting and writing notes on almost every single sentence, and that I immediately want to re-read after finishing to ensure the words and ideas are seared into my brain. A must-read for folks in education, product, or technology.

[Marcus Goncalves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very timely and important read for Ed tech and education leaders. It took me more than a year to finish it, after lots of notations. An eye opener and a sober reminder to not get too carried away by enthusiastic declarations that elearning is revolutionising our education systems. Students need context and wisdom from their instructors, not solely ML algorithm inferences.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute must read for anyone working around EdTech. Billions of dollars and thousands of wasted hours would be saved if investors, entrepreneurs, designers, teachers, principals and others were familiar with the history of hype in this domain.

[Kwuang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone interested in working in edtech should definitely read this. TL;DR; - change is really hard (scaling is hard, measuring is hard, fixing systemic issues is hard), technology can't really solve the deep deep issues in education, mostly just hopes to get around it and have limited impact

[Shayantan Rahman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for those interested in education technology

Really well written. This book was eye opening and a sobering reminder to not get carried away by enthusiastic declarations that elearning is revolutionising our education systems

[Yoyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although centered upon MOOCs, this book is incredibly inspiring in the current "AI revolution" context. Technologies alone can't bring disruptive changes without a deep understanding of education on a systematic level.

[Bhairav Mehta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice collection of resources and history regarding education technology.

[Tuan Anh Le · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of the edtech space though the author is a bit unnecessarily negative.

[Miguel Panão · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unexpected and delightful take of the effect of technology on teaching and learning. A must read to understand how time and step-by-step is a slow, but rightful way to evolve in learning.