Sruthi Ranjani Vinjamuri and Emma Linsenmayer, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD
Digital technologies can help personalise learning for students, widen access to education and foster digital literacy from an early age. This explains why many countries and organisations actively promote the integration of digital learning technologies in the classroom.
The flipside of this enthusiasm is that new digital learning products are often embraced because they are user-friendly and scalable, despite a lack of evidence for their positive impact on learning outcomes. Also, edtech companies are developing and launching a huge array of new digital learning tools, making it difficult for teachers and administrators to sift through the sea of new tools, let alone understand which ones are of high quality.
The OECD is exploring the question of how digital learning platforms can be envisioned not only to improve student learning, but also to aid assessment, foster cross-country collaboration, and reduce overhead costs for school systems and teachers. The Platform for Innovative Learning Assessments (PILA) was developed to support this exploration.
PILA is a free, open-source platform that offers teachers and students engaging, interactive learning applications with built-in formative assessments. Since its inception in 2020, the PILA team has collaborated closely with teachers and researchers through pilot studies and iterative testing to refine content, pedagogical resources, and interface design. These interactions revealed some important insights on what factors make a digital learning tool worth the investment – be it time, money or of other resources.
Here are six questions that can help school leaders and teachers make measured decisions about investing in edtech tools for the classroom:
Is the learning tool aligned with the curricular priorities of my school?
Ensuring that digital learning tools align with local and national curricular goals facilitates easier and more impactful use of the technology. The learning goals of digital tasks should be clearly mapped to the curriculum, or it should be made easy – through tagging systems, for instance – for new mappings to be established. PILA works with national curriculum experts and provides tools to make curriculum mapping intuitive and customisable.
Are there reporting tools on how students learn and how useful are they for my teaching practices?
Reporting tools, such as dashboards displaying student engagement with the content and success in solving embedded assessment, can help teachers adapt instruction. However, as teachers who piloted PILA revealed, too much data in a dashboard can be overwhelming and it may not always be clear how this information should be used.
Dashboards should be fit-for-purpose. For example, a dashboard view that provides an overview of how all students in the class are progressing on specific tasks is helpful for indicating when and to whom teachers should provide support. Another dashboard view could provide examples of student work or indicate common mistakes to facilitate class or group discussion.
PILA applications include multiple dashboard views that make formative assessment simple and intuitive. These dashboards convert complex data into clear insights on students’ progress.
Are my students’ data safe?
Digital educational platforms require robust data privacy and protection measures. PILA ensures student privacy by design through a zero-knowledge security system. This means that student information is encrypted and anonymised in PILA databases, but teachers retain the ability to access it securely. Only data collected through approved research protocols and fully anonymised will be used for research at the OECD and in partner universities. In all cases, it is important to read the fine print of data privacy policies.
Is the content adapted/adaptable to our local context?
When digital learning tools incorporate content that resonates with the daily lives, cultural background and language of students, it enhances their learning. Cultural adaptability and local ownership of content are essential features of good digital platforms. On PILA, teachers and local experts can generate their own digital learning and assessment material from existing templates, using simple customisation tools. Through a centralised translation tool, the platform can be made available in as many languages as possible.
Do teachers, students, researchers have a voice in the design process?
Stakeholder collaboration can’t be restricted to translation and adaptation processes – it needs to be a defining feature of a platform’s earliest design stages. The PILA project has prioritised this collaboration since its inception and depends on insights of teachers and students collected through teacher interviews, observation forms, surveys, and usability studies. For instance, teachers liked the idea of being able to communicate directly with their students as they work. Our team has since designed a chat interface for teacher-to-student communication.
Is the technology and content sustainable?
Edtech sustainability – as Anusca Ferrari noted in the PILA launch webinar – means equipping the technology to weather future challenges both on the content and technical fronts. Does the learning tool allow for easy expansion of its content by design? Is it adaptable to future technical and infrastructural needs?
On the content front, a sustainable learning tool gives teachers easy-to-use tools to customise tasks for their students – keeping them at the centre of the learning process. Another feature would be to offer item libraries and forums globally so teachers in different countries can share with each other ideas on using interactive material in their daily lessons. On the technical front, employing a consistent interface for both current and future tools makes it easier for teachers to stay updated using their existing training, without the need to learn a completely new tool.
Sustainability also means democratising access to edtech products and making them easily shareable and adaptable. PILA makes all its software open source – after all, quality education is a fundamental human right and its digitalisation should not change this.
As digital infrastructure and connectivity increases around the world, integrating digital learning and assessment tools in the classroom will remain necessary to prepare students for the demands of the 21st century. Keep an eye on the adaptability, data safety, and sustainability of digital learning and assessment tools you are currently using or are considering adopting.
