Key points:
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on K-12 education, reshaping how students learn and educators teach. As schools closed their doors, remote learning became the primary mode of instruction, accelerating edtech’s role in classrooms.
Digital tools, once mainly supplementary for many schools, became essential for delivering lessons, facilitating communication, and maintaining student engagement. This overnight pivot also exposed inequities in technology access, highlighting a digital divide among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds that persists today.
For many schools, Zoom, Google Classroom, and Microsoft Teams replaced traditional classroom settings, enabling virtual instruction. Learning management systems and digital resources became indispensable for assigning work, tracking progress, and providing feedback. At the same time, the reliance on technology brought challenges, including limited access to high-speed home internet, lack of adequate devices for students in low-income households, and difficulties in adapting teaching methods for an online environment.
Some students thrived in the flexible learning environment, while others struggled with distractions, lack of direct teacher support, family stress, and social isolation. Educators developed new strategies to engage students remotely while balancing the demands of their own disrupted lives. Concerns arose about the long-term effects on learning outcomes, particularly for younger students and those with special educational needs.
The pandemic underscored both the potential and the limitations of technology in education, prompting schools to rethink their approaches to digital learning, student support, and equity in access to educational resources. In short, there’s no denying that COVID put a spotlight squarely on digital teaching and learning resources.
“While that quick shift to virtual learning was rough, and certainly was not necessarily a showcase of the best of learning design everywhere, there were some really excellent examples,” said Dr. Tracy Weeks, senior director of education policy and strategy at Instructure. “We spent a lot of time and effort getting devices into kids’ hands and getting platforms set up for digital content and curriculum. We’re seeing teachers becoming stronger and stronger in terms of being able to leverage these technologies in the day-to-day classroom.”
Indeed, the pandemic acted as an impetus for learning innovation in general.
“Teachers got a taste of being able to customize learning,” Weeks said. “This allows for teachers to be able to push content differently, and a big part of that is understanding what they need. We saw assessment tools take a greater leap, especially those more formative assessment tools. How do we give teachers the data they need to understand what their students already know, what they’ve learned, and how to support them going forward?”
Many teachers changed their approach, moving from longer lessons and lectures to shorter spurts of content delivery, prompting students to engage with learning materials and demonstrate their learning before moving on.
“Leveraging tech platforms like learning management systems enables that tactic of breaking up learning and letting students engage with it in various ways,” Weeks noted.
As teachers change their instructional strategies, changing educational needs prompted new teaching and learning tools in the wake of the pandemic.
“Learning management systems go from a ‘want to have’ to an almost ‘must-have’ status,” Weeks said. “An LMS becomes one of those key pieces that schools realize that have to have, particularly when it comes to having better formative assessment tools that give teachers data and help them understand where their students are.”
A focus on edtech’s effectiveness has spurred responses from districts and edtech providers alike.
“Companies have spent lots of time making sure they can demonstrate the effectiveness of their tools–I think we’re also mindful of the tools that are out there that have demonstrated they make a difference in teaching and learning,” Weeks added.
Credentials got their start before the pandemic, but matured during COVID and have grown in popularity when it comes to demonstrating skills, training, and learning, she noted. “Even during high school, to demonstrate that you’ve gained certain learning–I think we’ve seen more and more of that, and we’re seeing our community colleges and even our 4-year institutions take a good look and how they can provide multiple avenues for students to get to some sort of credentialed level. Now we’re seeing the workforce give that value.”
And no look at edtech’s evolution post-pandemic would be complete without at least mentioning AI.
“This isn’t the first technology we’ve come across and worried about,” Weeks said, referencing debates around allowing calculators in math classrooms and how they might impact students’ deeper math learning. “I look at AI that way–can it do things that we aren’t excited about our kids doing? Yes. Can we plan teaching and learning in ways that work around that and leverage AI in positive ways? Yes.”
And at Instructure in particular, development teams are working to ensure the company’s use of AI is “grounded in creating opportunities for deeper human connection in safe, equitable, and transparent ways,” she added. Ensuring AI improves efficiency for educators, or effectiveness for learners, is a priority.
“There are lots of empowering ways [to use AI] to make the lives of our teachers and learners better, so we try to focus on those, and making sure things work in a safe and transparent way,” Weeks said.
“Over the next five years, keeping the educator and learner in mind, [we’re focusing on] thoughtful, deliberate use of AI to solve problems,” Week said. “We will continue to focus on accessibility–our educational organizations are being held accountable to ensure that anything they use with students is accessible, and we want to make sure we meet and exceed in that.”
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