Gurumurthy Kasinathan, Director of IT for Change, and Lead—Education and Technology, wrote a chapter titled 'The Pandemic and the Platformization of Education,' which was published in the Southern African Review of Education's special Issue: Researching, Teaching and Learning During Times of Crises: Experiences of the Global South in August 2024. The following is an overview of the output:
Technology in education is no magic fix. Many educators believe it has unleashed a Pandora’s box of problems, affecting the education system at large, starting from the classroom. Instead of fostering critical thinking and creativity, technology often encourages passive content consumption, weakens teacher autonomy, and reduces both teachers’ and students’ control over learning. It also distorts curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment while straining teacher-student relationships and learning environments. Moreover, EdTech can undermine institutional autonomy and weaken the education system’s role in promoting progressive societal aims. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the role of technology in all sectors, EdTech being the tragic outcome of this process in education. The crisis has deepened with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and opaque 'black box' algorithms that further erode teacher agency, atomize teaching-learning processes, and leave students and teachers vulnerable to surveillance, data harvesting, and manipulation.
However, this crisis is not inevitable—it is a function of its political and pedagogical design. This paper argues that for technology to truly serve the highest goals of education and teachers to exercise their agency towards a meaningful pedagogic design of EdTech, public ownership and control are imperative. If proprietary EdTech can be regulated and a public EdTech ecosystem (comprising public production, distribution, and appropriation of EdTech) seen as an integral part of the public provisioning of education, the crisis can be averted. Free and open digital tech movements have been independently working to enable such public ownership, and this needs to be mainstreamed into EdTech. The paper provides the example of Kerala, a state in South India, which has developed a public EdTech ecosystem over the last two decades, enabling it to avert the EdTech crisis, and ensuring that it was less affected during the pandemic.
Read the full paper here.