Good teaching can’t be “sensed” by an algorithm driven by a couple cameras and a couple microphones.
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The dystopian name of this tool should be reason enough to stay far away. EduSense. It’s like Blade Runner but for education.
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I’ve long argued the work of teaching has been ill-supported, devalued and instrumentalized. Good teaching can not be reduced to quantifiable bits, like how long a teacher waits after asking a question. Sure, that matters, but effective teaching is more than the sum of its parts.
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When we fail to adequately prepare teachers and fail to support their work, parasitic edtech companies swoop in and offer “solutions” like EduSense. Or Turnitin.
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To be clear, this is also part of an effort to outsource faculty development to edtech. Teacher teaching machines. Actual human beings do (and have done) classroom observations for years. Done well, these involve dialogue, discussion of pedagogy, and learning that goes both ways.
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These algorithms driven by data from a camera are an “evolution” of the video consultation, in which a pedagogy expert records a teacher teaching and then watches the video with them. I did these back in early 2000. The video was a red herring. What helped was the conversation.
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I stopped using video for these altogether, because I found it actually got in the way of the conversation. EduSense is all the pieces of this that didn’t work and none of the pieces that did. Plus, for a video consultation, the camera was NEVER pointed at the students.
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And I’ve mostly commented so far on why all of this terrible for teachers and the work of teaching. But this also fuels a culture that diminishes students, presumes inattention, and makes bad assumptions about what learning actually looks like.
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Learning looks like different things for different people at different times. What EduSense describes is an algorithm that seems both incredibly reductive and also ableist, because they presume “learning” takes shapes that conform to an idealized view of the body/brain.
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