To switch on, or to switch off, that is the question

The Educationalist. By Alexandra Mihai

Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”! Today I’d like to reflect on something that has been on my mind lately. After a few years of pushing towards more technology in education (starting with the pandemic and continuing with GenAI), I now start to notice, more and more, another push, from the opposite direction: moving towards device-free classrooms. As educators and educational developers, we need to navigate this space and the first thing to do is trying to make sense of this tension. I wrote down some of my reflections and I am really curious whether and to what extent this resonates with your experience. Please share with us any practice that worked in your context. This is the only way to add some nuance to what is becoming a more and more polarised debate. Enjoy reading and have a good rest of the week!

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Black or white. Never grey

Here we are again, playing the same game.

Higher education often falls into binary thinking—adopting “all in” or “all out” approaches—while neglecting the nuanced middle ground. This is both puzzling and problematic, particularly in a context that is meant to value critical thinking.

Lately I’ve been noticing how two competing forces are fighting for a place both in our teaching and learning practice and in education policies. On the one hand, there is a strong drive towards using technology and specifically towards integrating AI as much as possible in teaching, learning, and research. On the other hand, what has become more prominent recently is the push (and implementation, often under the radar) for device-free classrooms.

I see a clear tension here. As educators and educational developers, we are expected to promote and support the use of technology (currently especially AI), and to encourage reflection on when and how to use it in the teaching and learning process. At the same time, there is an opposing movement towards rejecting technology altogether and returning to fully analogue teaching environments.

These are, of course, two extremes.

My sense is that both approaches are driven by fear. The push for AI integration is often motivated by concerns that students will otherwise be unprepared for the labour market. Conversely, the move toward device-free classrooms is driven by the fear that technology enables cheating and encourages students to take shortcuts in their learning.

So here we are again, acting on fear, giving in to pressure, and losing track of what is important in our work, and of what universities are here for. Not least because we don’t have (or make) the time to stop for a second and think.

This creates a real challenge for educational developers. University policies can pull in conflicting directions, and we are expected to communicate these mixed messages to teaching staff. We are, in effect, asked to support and justify two opposing approaches.

Structured reflection

As usual, the more reasonable path lies somewhere in between these extremes. Rather than adopting one-fits-all recipes, educators need to take the time to engage in reflective decision-making that considers context, goals, and intended learning outcomes. This process can help them decide not just whether an entire course should use technology or be device-free, but how to navigate the nuances that are often overlooked.

One way to support this is through structured reflection. Educators can ask:

• What is the problem we are trying to address?

• Can technology help solve it?

• Could limiting or removing technology be more effective?

• What are the intended learning outcomes of the course, session, or task?

Such prompts or decision trees allow for more flexible and nuanced decisions. Technology use does not need to be uniform across a course; it can vary between sessions or even within a single class. At times, devices may enhance learning; at others, limiting them may support focus and engagement.

Crucially, technology should not be treated as an end in itself. Its use—or restriction—should always serve pedagogical goals. Choosing the suitable modality requires returning to the fundamentals of course design: what we want students to learn and how they can best achieve those outcomes. How can we ensure meaningful learning is happening in the classroom? It requires resisting the urge to default to extremes.

Engaging students in these decisions is also essential. Discussions about AI use, device policies, and classroom expectations should take place openly, ideally from the start of a course. You can take this even a step further and design some co-creation sessions, whereby teachers and students design their own rules of engagement.

Adopting a policy can sometimes seem to be the easier route, allowing people to defer responsibility. While this nuanced approach requires more time and effort than simple yes-or-no policies, it encourages more intentional course design. It also preserves the agency of educators and students to shape their own learning environments, something that I consider extremely important.

The grey zones

If you’ve been reading the past two issues on slow learning and on patience and perseverance, you may think that the analogue classroom goes right down my alley. However, having thought about it quite a bit in the past weeks, I prefer to position myself in the grey zone here. This is mainly because I strongly believe that banning devices does not eliminate the issue (whatever that might be), or it eliminates it only temporarily. If we want to support students in developing certain skills, we need to do it intentionally, through course and task design, not by conditioning their classroom experience. And here I mean either by forcing them to use AI or by forcing them to switch of their devices. These are equally counterproductive, in my opinion.

If we want genuine engagement in learning, we need to ask deeper questions: What is the problem? Why do we use technology (if we do)? Why do we want to ban devices? Is it because students are distracted, because they are unprepared or because they might use AI tools like ChatGPT instead of talking to each other in class? Even then, banning devices might not solve the problem. Students could still use AI beforehand, print the results, and bring them to class. We also need to take into account accessibility issues (for some students technology is the only way to access educational materials) and environmental considerations, although I am wondering how printing more in an analogue environment compares to prompting ChatGPT in class for every question you are asked.

And if it doesn’t need to be black or white, then let’s create our grey zones:

• choose parts of the course (modules or tasks) where you specifically use a certain technology tool and some where you ask students to work device-free. You can decide based on what you want the students to get from the respective activity. In my course, students use mind maps on Mural for several sessions, and I have one session where they work in an analogue way, on a different type of task.

• universities could design some device-free environments (like some cafes have laptop-free sections), where students and staff can socialise and stay away from their screens. While this is not directly linked to education, the broader environment in which we work and learn is very important in shaping the way we think and connect to others.

• even when we decide against going analogue in our classrooms (as we see technology bringing obvious efficiency gains), it is still worth intentionally supporting students with skills such as (hand-written) note-taking, analytical thinking, coming up with good questions or reflection. Believe me, even if they don’t know it yet, they will thank you for it.

Ultimately, the challenge is to navigate this complex landscape shaped not only by pedagogy, but also by institutional pressures, political considerations, and commercial interests in educational technology. The key is to avoid falling into extremes, while still supporting educators’ and students’ autonomy and encouraging reflective, context-sensitive decision-making.

It is not an easy task, but it is one we will need to actively engage with in the near future.

Resources

(I included here only resources on device-free classrooms. You can find some resources on the use of AI in one of my previous newsletters.)

Tech-Lite Classroom Policies, from Cornell University

The Cornell Note Taking System

Technology Restrictions in Courses: Impacts on Student Accessibility, from University of Waterloo

Glass, A. L., & Kang, M. (2019). Dividing attention in the classroom reduces exam performance. Educational Psychology, 39(3), 395–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2018.1489046

Hall, A.C.G., Lineweaver, T.T., Hogan, E.E, O’Brien, S.W. (2020): On or off task: The negative influence of laptops on neighboring students’ learning depends on how they are used. Computers & Education, 153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103901

Quesenberry, K.A. (2022). Engaging the Disengaged: Implementing a No-Tech Policy After Years of Adding Tech to the Classroom. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 77(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/10776958221106020

Pérez-Juárez, M.Á., González-Ortega, D., Aguiar-Pérez, J.M. (2023). Digital Distractions from the Point of View of Higher Education Students. Sustainability, 15, 6044. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15076044

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