Irish Educational Technology
Enterprise
As established in surveys of Ireland’s educational technology policy and research institutions, there exists of diversity of interests among the sector’s stakeholders. Historically, the industry appealed economically to policymakers, enticing them with promises of a globally competitive workforce. This initial, economic rationale arose in anticipation of the information society, which has since been realized in our global economy. Presently, the sector appeals to policymakers, academics, instructors, students, and businesses for the myriad pedagogic or practical affordances its technologies imply. In short, the diversity of the interests held by educational technology’s stakeholders is reflected in the composition of its enterprises, as exemplified by assessment, courseware, virtual reality, and game-based learning enterprises.
Assessment software is perhaps the most general mode of educational technology. Assessment is, in brief, the task of qualifying or quantifying what a learner knows. It is natural, then, the process is among the most important in education as it validates the instruction process. Though educational technologies propose many transformations for the assessment process, the simplest is the enhancement of a mode of assessment typically seldom used: formative assessments. Briefly, a formative assessment is an assessment designed to document learner knowledge and course-correct their understanding if necessary. The “formative” component of this assessment is delivered through comprehensive feedback on the part of the instructor. Irish enterprises JumpAGrade and Nurture attempt to ease the formative assessment and innovate on it.
The two assessment software enterprises JumpAGrade and Nurture were founded by David Neville and Pádraic Hogan, and the character of their enterprises reflect the values set out in the Department of Education’s (DES) policies and the role of research within the sector. JumpAGrade, for example, is an online tutoring service affording students one-on-one feedback from purportedly expert-level tutors assisted with machine-learning algorithms. JumpAGrade co-founder Ethan O’Brien situates the service well-within the concept of educational technology built by the DES, claiming it, “pair[s] humans’ ability to make judgements based on expertise and experience with computers’ powerful pattern recognition capabilities” and, alongside Neville and Hogan, “share[s] a vision to assist people to be lifelong learners” Kennedy, John. “JumpAgrade: This Start-up Is the Modern Answer to Grinds.” Silicon Republic, August 13, 2018. https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/jumpagrade-grinds-education.. The co-founders imply it is not merely the addition of technology transforming the assessment process but instead the combination of technology and sound practice, “humans’ ability to make judgements based on expertise”, raising the bar in educational assessment. Further, the product is clearly situated in the context of the European Union (EU) and Ireland’s lifelong learning framework, demonstrating not only how entrenched the idea is in Irish education but also how aligned the product is with it.
Neville and Hogan continue to innovate assessment, without O’Brein, at Nurture. Unlike JumpAGrade, Nurture is an online assessment platform integrated into Microsoft Teams designed for one-to-many relationships—one teacher to many students. It is analogous to a learning management system: teachers may create assignments, receive student work, grade the work, and give feedback on the work. However, Neville and Hogan deliver a user-interface and set of functionalities that, in aggregate, guide the instructor towards best formative assessment practices. Within the platform, the duo realize a “feedback loop” consisting of assignment creation, assignment submission, instructor feedback, student reflection, and the summarization of student data for instructor insights. Nurture, “Closing the Feedback Loop in Microsoft Teams”, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbw_tEEFEeQ.
At no point throughout this process is technology the definitive transformer. Instead, it is, at all points, an enabler of sound practice. Neville and Hogan go to great pains to emphasize this, constantly situating their product in education and cognitive science research and, important to present analysis, their collaboration with the Learnovate Centre. Nicholl, Ronan Nurture. “Our Framework Is Research-Backed | Nurture.” Nurture. Accessed July 9, 2023. https://gonurture.com//research. The role of the Irish government in the educational technology sector is made clearer by the fact JumpAGrade is a result of Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers program. Keogh, Olive. “Personalised Tutoring Service Aims to Make Grade in Online Grinds: JumpAGrade Aims to Help Student Prepare Better for State Examinations.” The Irish Times, January 18, 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/innovation/personalised-tutoring-service-aims-to-make-grade-in-online-grinds-1.3356192. As Nurture begins its integration with machine-learning algorithms in a partnership with OpenAI, Nurture. “Nurture AI in Education with Microsoft.” Accessed July 29, 2023. https://gonurture.com//ai-in-education-with-microsoft. it and JumpAGrade become exemplars of the role the DES has had in influencing Ireland’s construction of educational technology and the Government’s broad role in the sector through Learnovate and its start-up assistance programs.
The general broadening of educational technology to include instruction on workplace competencies or implementations of the lifelong learning framework is additionally observed in the “courseware” space of the sector. Courseware enterprise Spotlight Skills, for instance, provides course content for high-school-equivalent students on workplace competencies like interpersonal communication, relationship-building, and decision-making. Spotlight Skills. “Spotlight Skills | Schools.” Accessed June 25, 2023. https://www.spotlightskills.com/schools. Developed in collaboration with Learnovate, Ibid. the course modules are indicative of the entrenchment of lifelong learning within Ireland’s educational institutions, research, and enterprises. In other words, one may interpret the project as a representative of the normative claim that the purpose of schooling amounts to economic preparation, wherein educational technology is a means to economic competitiveness. Yet, the presence of Learnovate implies a degree of pedagogic alignment insofar as Spotlight Skills is as backed by research as it claims.
Regardless of subject-matter or instructional content, however, it must be recognized educational technology enterprises rely on a diversity of skill-sets and industries to compose their products. The nascent mobile application enterprise Little Red Edu is most exemplary of this. Little Red Edu, founded by Anna Carmody, is a mobile application delivering gamified English-language learning lessons through a subscription-based service. Children repeat or read-aloud English words or phrases in response to game-elements, and the application assesses their pronunciation through voice recognition technology. Anna, Carmody. “Our Story.” Little Red Edu. Accessed June 25, 2023.https://littlerededu.com/about-our-story/. The product is ostensibly a confluence of game, instruction, and assessment design—each of which working in tandem to create an effecting learning experience. Of note, however, is the reliance the application has on Soapbox Labs, a Learnovate spin-in—and subsequent spin-out—providing a low-code interface to voice recognition technology trained on child voice data. O’Connor, Fearghal. “Speech Recognition Expert Raises Concerns around Voice Technology in the Workplace.” Independent.Ie, September 29, 2019, sec. Technology. https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/speech-recognition-expert-raises-concerns-around-voice-technology-in-the-workplace/38543299.html. Learnovate. “Meet the Patrons Q&A with SoapBox Labs CEO Dr. Martyn Farrows.” Learnovate (blog), July 27, 2023. https://www.learnovatecentre.org/meet-the-patrons-qa-with-soapbox-labs-ceo-dr-martyn-farrows/. Little Red Edu, then, straddles the domains of pedagogy, visual design, game design, and, as a dependency, machine learning. Further, it is reliant on the research performed by the Learnovate Centre insofar as Soapbox Labs remains under the research institute, demonstrating the role the institute plays in the educational technology sector.
Educational reformer John Dewey forever criticized the “traditional scheme” of education, wherein the information and skills of the past generation are imposed onto the nascent minds of the current generations’ students without regard for their experiences. The gap in the experience required to digest the subject-matter and the experience held by the students is so great that the material is foreign. Dewey, John. “Experience and Education.” The Educational Forum 50, no. 3 (September 30, 1986): 241–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131728609335764. Virtual reality (VR) proposes to facilitate students’ acquiring of the experiences necessary to close the gap. Virtual reality implies a movement from text-based instruction to symbol-based instruction, giving students the experiences necessary to make sense of foreign subject-matters. Helsel, Sandra. “Virtual Reality and Education.” Educational Technology 32, no. 5 (1992): 38–42. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. 1. paperback ed. Education. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. However, VR applications in education have largely been limited to specialized simulation or training sequences and, consequentially, have yet to be regarded as a general medium of instruction. Kavanagh, Sam, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Burkhard Wuensche, and Beryl Plimmer. “A Systematic Review of Virtual Reality in Education.” Themes in Science and Technology Education 10, no. 2 (December 27, 2017): 85–119. Irish educational technology enterprise SchooVR is shifting this perspective.
Founded by Mark Baldwin, SchooVR provides to teachers and students a library of VR course-content and a platform to build educational VR experiences. At the individual level, Baldwin’s conception of the role VR technology has to play in education is well-aligned with that of the DES. When interviewed by the Irish Times, Baldwin claimed, “Today’s ‘digital natives’ need more than words on a page”, Keogh, Olive. “Teacher’s Virtual Reality Platform Aims to Improve Student Engagement.” The Irish Times, January 17, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/innovation/teacher-s-virtual-reality-platform-aims-to-improve-student-engagement-1.3754661. echoing the DES’ claim in Investing Effectively that students’ technological ecosystem has fundamentally changed learning. This demonstrates the perspective of educational technology wherein it must be aligned with learners’ experiences (i.e., learner-centered). Further, in alignment with the DES’ policy for instructors to be competent in the tools necessary to enact policy, educational institutions are using SchooVR tools and content to train student-teachers. In 2021, Trinity College Dublin invited student-teachers to participate in a course teaching the use of immersive technologies in the classroom. Farrell, Rachel. “Immersive Technology in Education.” University College of Dublin: Teaching & Learning. Accessed July 28, 2023. https://www.ucd.ie/teaching/showcase/immersivetechnologyineducation/. Not only was this project an attempt to explore the ramifications of immersive technologies in the classroom, it represented a fulfilment of the need for instructors to be trained in the new media technology affords. Baldwin’s SchooVR presents a concise demonstration of the not only the presence of VR in Ireland’s educational technology industry but also its intersecting with educational institutions and the DES’ policy.
What SchooVR’s integration in classrooms and student-teacher training points to is a need for the educational technology sector to recognize VR and game-based learning as new forms of media requiring new forms of appreciation and design. Michele Dickey argued aesthetics, or experiences, significantly contribute to learning experiences such that instructors are largely already in the business of crafting aesthetic experiences, similar to game-designers. Thus, she argues instructors wishing to adopt games or immersive technologies in the classroom must understand how aesthetics, or game-design principles, function in virtual experiences. Dickey, Michele D. Aesthetics and Design for Game-Based Learning. Digital Games and Learning. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. Situated in the Irish context, Dickey’s argument becomes an extension of the DES’ conception of educational technology: game-based or immersive learning, as technologies, cannot be regarded as the singular catalysts for transformative learning but instead enablers thereof when aligned with practice. What game-based or immersive learning supply are experiences. It is with view, that the aesthetics of game-based and immersive learning must be aligned with practice, Irish enterprise Jetpack Learning is examined.
Jetpack Learning provides a library of HTML-5-based educational games and a platform on which instructors can author similar games. Jetpack Learning. “Jetpack Learning | HTML5 Game-Based Learning Authoring Tool.” Accessed July 28, 2023. https://www.jetpacklearning.com/. Indeed, there is significant merit in attempting to design a platform on which teachers, inexperienced in game development, can author playable games. As the promotional material suggests, Jetpack Learning’s authorship platform allows teachers to “Create games in minutes”. Ibid. However, the platform also encourages instructors to simply “customize” existing games—to apply a layer of literal content onto a game with regard for the underlying mechanics. What Jetpack Learning provides is not the alignment of game and instruction design, as Dickey’s thesis may want for, but instead the surface-most possible engagement with the medium. For example, the sample game “Jetman Collector” situates the player as an astronaut who must “fuel” his jetpack by completing a sentence with the appropriate word. Once the player completes a number of sentences, they are allowed to participate in a gameplay sequence wherein the astronaut flies between asteroids to collected diamonds. Once the jetpack fuel runs out, the player must land and complete more sentences. Jetpack Learning. “Jetman Collector | Jetpack Learning.” Accessed July 30, 2023. https://www.jetpacklearning.com/games/jetman-collector-complete-the-sentence/. There is no integration between gameplay and curriculum-relevant content in this artifact. In fact, the latter is used to lock access to the former. Nothing in the project is learned by virtue of the game; the act of flying between asteroids does nothing to elicit the player’s knowledge of grammar or the English language. The “learning” occurs in the sentence completing sequence, which functions no differently than a traditional pen-and-paper worksheet. In sum, “Jetman Collector” demonstrates the worst of game-based learning: the digitization of existing practices. It is commendable that Jetpack Learning facilitates game authorship among teachers, but until a sophisticated engagement with the game medium is performed, game-based learning will remain a digitization of traditional practice.
Evidently, Ireland’s educational technology enterprises are incredibly diverse in the interests they meet and their evaluative approach to the merits of educational technologies. Assessment enterprises like JumpAGrade and Nurture demonstrate a strongly learning-theory aligned approach to educational technologies, continually situating the medium in relation to good educational practice. Courseware enterprises like Spotlight Skills exemplify the economic motive that continues to exist in the DES’ construction of educational technologies under the learning for life framework, and Little Red Edu demonstrates the confluence of disciplines within the industry. However, immersive or game-based enterprises like SchooVR and Jetpack Learning point towards the future of industry, wherein the aesthetics of interactive experiences are either deeply integrated into course-content or, as it is now, merely borrowed and “tacked on” to existing practices.