Critiques of the EdTech Industry

Joshua Kim offers a short opinion piece on faculty lack of trust in the EdTech industry . In my opinion, the many pointed comments following his piece add a lot of insight to the question of trust which Kim raises. For example, ALSOTPS commented:

One reason that faculty...and academic staff and program assistants and anyone else in academia....is that the technology drive/shapes programs and processes, not the other way around. How many times have additions/changes etc to Peoplesoft, for example, created more headaches without ANYONE asking if the changes helped or hindered? How many times have your tech people changed your system without advanced warning about what in the programming would change? Why the changes in the first place, except to make work for IT people and money for the TECH industry?

In sum, the comments seem to say that professors do not trust profit-centered firms to look out for anything but their financial bottom line. My own take is that faculty may also feel that they are losing the ability to influence institutional technology commitments (such as selection of a Learning Management System), and thus control over the course environment is shifting to cost-focused administrators who are rewarded primarily for reducing expenditures.

-DD