The Artifice of EdTech: Are We Hiring Educators or Entertainers?
Dr. Muhammad Fahim Khan
Nowadays, the difference between truly understanding education and showing it is getting confused in education technology. More emphasis has been put on demo rounds by EdTech companies since they are meant to measure a teacher’s teaching skills. Still, these evaluations tend to give priority to excellent presentation, causing people to wonder about our values regarding teachers. It points out that more education today looks like a performance, rather than something truly valuable to learners.
The educational judges pay more attention to theatrical acting than measuring a teacher’s abilities. To succeed in teaching, enthusiastic educators are encouraged to be energetic, have perfected lines and show confidence in front of audiences, much like on a Broadway stage, not in a classroom. Such emphasis on showing personality leads to education being undermined and hiring based on appearance, instead of people’s teaching abilities. Being able to look like a teacher matters more than being an expert teacher.
Digital Shift in Higher Education
While everyone enjoys the excitement, what is taught may no longer be the main concern. Being able to encourage critical thinking, meet learners’ diverse needs and interact well with students may not help an educator as much as displaying charm and charisma when being considered for advancement. This has a huge effect on the level of education. By putting more value on style than content, education lacks focus on what teachers are trying to teach. They influence the culture of schools and affect the way learning values are formed.
Furthermore, putting so much weight on this type of teaching could change the way EdTech recruits teachers in the future. Are our educators able to motivate, push students to learn and build strong connexions with them? Do we primarily focus on getting just the right people to performs the same script over and over? When more importance is given to how someone “acts” during an interview than to their pedagogical knowledge, making this distinction gets very hard. A small classroom, however, creates an environment where real learning can happen due to meaningful communication, kindness towards students and a keen grasp of their needs.
Often, EdTech companies state that focusing on performance keeps students interested when learning online. Still, an emphasis on engagement that ignores education can endanger the purpose of schools/colleges/universities. An educator should challenge your thoughts; help you think critically and encourage you to learn rather than making their classes entertaining. A focus on presentation usually makes students pay less attention to other important subjects.
Its effects can be seen after the hiring process as well. It leads to a culture shift, where how specific leaders present and look is prioritised more than their expertise in education and teaching. Choosing to teach using performance ideas can pressure new teachers, leading to the continual replacement of teaching quality with performance. Gradually, the effort to use appealing teaching styles might cause the information shared to be less valuable than usual.
Moreover, this development leads to questions of fairness in how companies hire employees. Being able to present in English with a loud voice is difficult for some educators from different cultures and languages. Putting more focus on how effective a teacher is rather than how enthusiastic they are can prevent companies from hiring skilled instructors. When playwrights and directors emphasise acting, it could create ideas about what a proper teacher is and sounds like, instead of stressing their effectiveness as teachers.
If EdTech companies want to improve education, they should update their recruitment practises. Since the main goal is to improve students’ education, teachers should place importance on true interactions, flexibility and teaching skills, rather than focusing on dramatic elements. People conducting the interview can be trained educators who judge teaching abilities by analysing how the candidates’ questions help students participate more and think about difficult problems through different ways of learning.
Furthermore, companies may set up demo rounds which imitate practical challenges faced by teachers in classrooms. Through such situations, an interviewer can truly gauge the candidate’s teaching skills.
If the aim is to update education, then there should be a move from creating the showy to focusing on essentials. Since teaching affects the thinking of future generations, we cannot treat it as an activity where teachers must shine, like in a play. Since the way students are taught can greatly affect them, EdTech companies should focus more on effective lessons, powerful relationships and valuable opportunities for learning.
