Overview

During the past decade, the investment into education technology (EdTech) has been increasing exponentially, leading to a surge of start-ups and products that promise to leverage AI technologies to improve education. This process accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic school closures, during which the vast majority of children accessed education through technology.

However, while the steady growth of investment flowing into the EdTech market reflects investors’ confidence in the sector, it does not offer insight about how much education technology is currently being used. Nor does it identify the role being played by AI technologies, and which skills and tasks in educational services are affected by this change.

This project seeks to investigate these changes by pursuing two research objectives:

1. To pioneer a methodology to build the first OECD-wide AI in EdTech usage index
2. To understand EdTech trends across OECD countries in terms of AI usage to augment or replace certain tasks and skills in the educational sector.

A close inspection of the impact of automation in EdTech is needed to understand how digital technology may change classroom dynamics and transform education. This project aims to help parents and policy makers gain a better understanding of how AI technologies change the governance of education, as processes are becoming increasingly measured, recorded, and rendered to data. Understanding the functions and structures of AI technologies in EdTech can shed light on how future policies may reconfigure education towards public interest.