The Secret to Staying on Technology’s Cutting Edge? Ask a Teenager

If you are feeling like you cannot keep up with all the changes technology is embedding into academic life, you are not alone. Our experience of technology innovation as coming in shorter and shorter time periods, sometimes termed the acceleration debate (Marshall, 2018), challenges even the most enthusiastic first-adopter among us to take a breath and consider all the tools, systems, and innovations we encounter through our academic engagements. One common theme in our Journal of Management Education editorial work is considering how technology is affecting publishing overall, and particularly how technology might help us improve readers’ experience with (and access to) our articles in addition to how it might assist us in disseminating the important scholarly insights our authors impart to the global management education community.

While we are frequently reminded of technology’s power and scope of impact when engaged in our editorial responsibilities, we have discovered a “secret” source of technological prowess and innovation insight: teenagers. Much as we do, Jeanie’s adult sons engage with technology as professionals in their respective fields, but Kathy still has two teenagers at home. These teens provide a window on the future of learning in higher education as technology morphs from K-12 education (P-12 or K-16 in some countries), the system that serves young children to teenagers through their primary and secondary schooling, to postsecondary education. During our regular conversations (themselves a technological gift using Skype or FaceTime), we have marveled at how learning in K-12 has evolved and influences how we engage students at a university level.

Technology is ubiquitous in K-12 school work, with established infrastructure in most developed countries thanks to long-term government funding commitments. In the United States, essentially 100% connectivity in K-12 public schools was achieved by 2005 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2006), and the World Economic Forum reported similar levels of Internet access in developed nations across the globe (Trucano, 2014). While technology infrastructure gaps continue to be problematic in developing and/or war-torn nations, the goal of having Internet access for K-12 school-age children mostly has been met, dramatically changing the nature of K-12 educational modalities and resources.

As university educators, most of us tend to think of high school (Grades 9-12) as a preparatory effort for higher education, which privileges higher education’s way of doing things but may or may not align with how students are coming to us. Anecdotally, we hear faculty around the world complain that more and more students in our classes seem less prepared for university-level work than before, indicating some kind of preparation gap from K-12 to university. For example, although there are no nationally collected data in the United States tracking the proportion of graduating high school students who need remediation courses, some research indicates that no U.S. state meets all college and career readiness coursework standards (Jimenez & Sargrad, 2018). But what if that preparation gap is an artifact of how we are measuring “readiness” rather than a true performance lapse? What if our students, who have grown up in technology-rich environments, are simply adapting to the learning opportunities they have now, and university teachers should be more flexible and reciprocal in how readiness is constructed?

We think we need to be more aware of what is happening with learning in K-12 and use our opportunities to look back toward K-12 as a means of alerting us to the future of learning in higher education. There are real differences in the way technology has changed K-12 education, in turn changing our incoming students’ entire perspective on how college “works.” The great majority of high school students are, for example, completely comfortable with online communities and using learning management systems like Google Classroom as the focal point for course materials, conversations, and collaborations among teachers and peers. Even the hallowed “snow day”—a day off in K-12 schools in some countries when bad weather hits—may no longer mean missing school work as students log into the district’s online portal to retrieve assignments and upload completed work from home (Gumbrecht, 2017; Rago, 2018).

Search engines make facts and data accessible instantly, and students who come to our classrooms now have exposure to vast, freely available, content-driven resources like Khan Academy and OpenCulture.com (not to mention YouTube). Thus, we are no longer the gatekeepers of “knowledge,” and students may be unconvinced of what we present as such. What we may experience as disrespect for our expertise (or skepticism about its value) may really be students’ lifelong engagement with the variety of content available on their screens. In Australia, for example, a growing emphasis for K-12 teachers is about “facilitating guided education through analytics that monitor and report on student progress, identify student strengths and weaknesses, identify patterns in learning to determine preferred learning styles and develop personalised, interactive and gamified curriculum based on these factors” (Glaveski, 2016). Clearly, a student coming from a K-12 system that focuses on that kind of learning would show a college-readiness gap based on our content-driven focus. In the near-term future, university instructors may be seen less as content-area experts and more as curators of a particular set of content.

Also, there is the work collaboration that seems pervasive in many U.S. K-12 workloads. In middle and high schools (Grades 7-12), students are pressed to form groups and use creativity in their project-based work in every class, every semester. Easy-to-use editing software makes the creation of interesting and lively presentations, photos, games, and multimedia displays simple, and students are amazingly proficient at such work. While research examining learning outcomes superiority between individual or group-based work is mixed and depends on many factors, most students do come to university having much experience with—and expectations about—collaborating with their peers for coursework and using technology to do it. Changes to K-12 systems around the world are increasingly being systematized to include collaborative learning assignments that seem more in line with pre-university students’ natural curiosities. In Finland and New Zealand, for example, student assignments such as group projects and culturally based learning teams have taken their place within curricula that also “teach to the test” as a means of preparing students for governmental content mastery standards. Some secondary schools in the United Kingdom (e.g., Essa Academy; http://www.essaacademy.org/) are challenging traditional “test-taking-only” curricula by integrating community-engaged learning and holistic personal development opportunities into students’ schooling.

Working together and scouring the Internet for the newest, coolest, and most interesting tools, and being assessed as a unified group delivering a jointly crafted product, may challenge assurance of learning standards from accreditors that insist each student’s performance be assessed as an individual construct, an atomistic number. While consulting with others on such assignments is considered cheating or academically dishonest now, changes taking place in K-12 learning systems may reframe such collaborations as normal, smart practice, and strategically sought among high-performing peers. This shift parallels what we have seen with different cultures’ understanding of cheating versus collaboration; students’ prior learning context makes a difference in norms and expectations about learning processes in higher education.

The array of new technologies available to learners is stunning. We encourage management educators to create long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with the K-12 systems from which our students come. While our colleagues in schools of education have done this for years, business school faculty can and should be much more engaged in understanding the educational norms and systems within which our students’ learning habits are formed. How we find out about new tools being used in the K-12 context, and how we choose what new technologies can enable our learning objectives, could be a collaborative venture with our students. They find and use technologies we have never heard of, some of which make possible new learning opportunities that were impossible only a few years back.