Edtech platforms from below: a family ethnography of marginalized communities and their digital learning post-pandemic

ABSTRACT

In this article, we reveal how students in low-income communities in India use and ascribe meaning to dominant proprietary EdTech platforms and conferencing tools through family ethnographies. We explore how these platforms and associated online learning tools influence existing educational practices and lead to the emergence of new forms of learning. Proprietary platforms are situated at the intersection of neoliberal-capitalist forces and welfare policies of public schooling and share a productive association with students’ everyday lives, identities, and cultural realities. Understanding the performative effects of these platforms requires that we examine them as part of broader socio-technical assemblages. We argue that EdTech platforms should not be built simply on principles of standardization and scalability. EdTech platforms are designed to standardize education and make the model scalable, thus undermining students’ social relationships and place-based learning needs. Such a design and approach have an associated gender and class cost.

KEYWORDS:

• EdTech
• neoliberalization of education
• family ethnography
• place-based learning‌
• learning platforms

Introduction

Students and teachers saw the rise of ‘emergency pedagogies’ (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter 2020, 4) using digital technologies to accommodate social distancing norms during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of India, the states and corporations had already primed private and public educational institutions to acknowledge the significance of digital technologies in supporting the learning needs of students in an overburdened educational system–characterized by a high student-teacher ratio (46:1), lack of professional training and support for teachers, meager salaries, and unstable learning infrastructures at schools and home (Nanda 2021). During the pandemic, investments in EdTech platforms soared exponentially, and students were pushed to incorporate these online interfaces into their learning environments.

In this context, we explore how students in low-income communities in India used and ascribed meaning to dominant proprietary EdTech platforms, such as Vedantu and BYJU’s, and conferencing tools, such as WhatsApp and Zoom. BYJU’s and Vendantu use 3-D animation, motion graphics, and visual effects to provide an immersive learning experience. These platforms are based on the freemium business model – students get a 15-day trial period, after which they pay a fee to access advanced-level materials and services. Some products the platforms offer include 1 – learning kits for grade-level curriculum programs, 2. Live online classes, where students can interact with teachers in real time; 3. Learning app that provides interactive video lessons and learning materials for kindergarten to higher education students; and 4. Online tutoring. One difference between these two platforms is that BYJU’s also offers school learning programs: integrated learning programs, providing schools access to BYJU's platform and resources that they can use in classrooms. At the time of conducting this research, Vedantu didn’t offer such school learning programs that teachers could use in the classrooms.

Given the dearth of studies on the everyday learning impacts of these new EdTech platforms on marginalized communities and the coping strategies students from such groups have developed, we embarked on understanding how these platforms and associated online learning tools influence existing educational practices and might lead to the emergence of new forms of learning. According to scholars of critical platform studies such as Bowker et al. (2019), Decuypere and Broeck (2020), and Thévenot (2009), proprietary platforms are situated at the intersection of neoliberal-capitalist forces and welfare policies of public schooling. Moreover, these platforms share a productive association with students’ everyday lives, identities, and cultural realities. In other words, to understand the performative effects of these platforms, it is necessary to examine them as parts of broader socio-technical assemblages (Robertson 2019).

We conducted family ethnographies, including in-depth interviews and observations in low-income communities in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, India. We worked with students, teachers, and families to understand how they used and ascribed meaning to EdTech platforms. All our participants were students (11–18 years) in public and semi-private schools. The onset of the COVID-19-related lockdown was a critical episode in this study to initiate data collection. The lockdown compelled schools to promptly incorporate digital technologies and develop emergency pedagogies that could be delivered in an all-digital environment. Though schools had access to some technologies to support student learning before the lockdown, they had yet to include these platforms in their learning environments actively. As such, the emergency pedagogies could not attend to the learning needs and lived realities of students attending classes from home. Our article makes a case that EdTech platforms were launched before the onset of COVID-19 and were not designed as temporary fixes for the pandemic. BYJU’s was launched in 2011, while Vedantu was founded in 2014. These EdTech platforms gained momentum, and their revenue and membership saw a meteoric rise during the Covid-19 lockdown. The platform companies leveraged this situation to establish EdTech platforms as more than an emergency pedagogy. Their new goal was to create systematic changes in learning practices and aspirations of students to make EdTech platforms a long-term alternative to schools and place-based learning. Our methodology foregrounds the realities and aspirations of end users, thus demystifying the neoliberal and market-focused EdTech hype as it manifests in everyday learning-teaching environments within low-income contexts.

Our analysis of students’ learning experiences with EdTech platforms testifies to the argument that EdTech platforms should not be built simply on principles of standardization and scalability. The enactments of these interfaces, i.e., how students and teachers use them, are intertwined with a connected system of ‘learners, educators, technologies, and broader social contexts, with all kinds of invisible linkages and unexpected consequences’ (Reich 2020, 9). Our findings make a case that EdTech platforms are designed to undermine students’ place-based learning needs. The intended use of these platforms, i.e., their technical intentionality, is to standardize education and make the model scalable. Students and teachers are not encouraged to personalize these digital educational spaces or infuse them with opportunities for creative ways of teaching and learning. The desire for a standardized approach to education may offer capital gains but creates learning experiences and outcomes isolated from students’ everyday lives and social relations. This approach also has an associated gender and class cost–students from low-income classes and marginalized gender communities cannot easily access EdTech platforms. We argue that the process of standardization is often exclusive of the user needs and experiences of diverse niche (here, marginalized) communities, thus making such platforms inaccessible to vulnerable minorities. This doesn’t mean that companies cannot design products for niche users and scale them. In fact, user experience studies have illustrated that developing products and designs for the niche (e.g., audio assistants like Siri or OK Google) can be scaled and make our technologies more intuitive.

COVID-19 and the emergency pedagogies

The onset of COVID-19 disrupted the learning of 94% to 99% of K-12 students worldwide (UNESCO 2020). During this period, teachers and students were compelled to design courses and teaching/evaluation materials using online tools and relied on EdTech platforms for extra coaching and guidance. Vedantu and BYJU’s–two popular EdTech platforms in the country, identified the discrepancies and disruptions in school education. Both platforms saw a massive surge in registered students/users. For example, the number of registered students/users on BYJU’s increased from 35 million in 2019–100 million in 2021 (Raghunathan 2022). These platforms have similar interface features and functions, giving rise to standard patterns of platform use and experiences.

Scholars (Bozkurt et al. 2020; Butcher, Davies, and Highton 2020; Rapanta et al. 2020) argue that digital technologies provide the most efficient and cost-effective way to fulfill students’ educational needs during emergencies where in-person learning and teaching are impossible. These studies explore the role of technologies in contexts where digital infrastructures and the lived realities of teachers and students are conducive to online learning and interaction. These studies emphasize that digital platforms offer flexible learning styles, greater autonomy, and more innovative content to enable students (Choi 2016; Zygouris and Papadopoulou 2021) and create equal learning opportunities for everyone (Race 2002). Barbour and Reeves (2009) also argue that remote learning enabled through digital technologies leads to higher learning efficiency because the content designed for such EdTech platforms is based on the logic of repetition and student-centered timelines that make the process more accessible. The conference tools such as Zoom, Google Classroom, and Facebook may also facilitate two-way and non-hierarchical communication between learners and teachers, thus increasing student autonomy and creativity (Yeung et al. 2023). According to Blau and Shamir-Inbal (2018), ‘the equalization effect of the digital environment, which diminishes status cues, changed the power dynamic and promoted students’ active participation and their pedagogical partnership with the instructor.’

These studies argue that technology-based interventions in public schools can help schools and the state achieve equity in education. The literature on EdTech dominantly adopts an experimental methodology and a technology-centered lens. However, despite these opportunities, there is a substantive critique of technocentric approaches to education that underlines the scope and limitations of the platformization of public education.

Arora (2010; 2019) challenges the technology-centered approach to learning/education through self-discovery because it shifts the onus away from public education and to learners’ self-learning initiatives. It overlooks cultural realities, infrastructural constraints, students’ lived experiences, and social dynamics in their families and communities. Arora (2019) explains that ‘the self in self-organized learning needs support structures, even more so in these deprived communities. Good learning and teaching cannot be automated.’ Building on Arora’s thesis, we argue that the growth and development of startup EdTech platforms as alternatives to public schooling are firmly rooted in the business strategies from the fields such as venture capital investments, fundraising, revenue generation, and profiteering over discussions on student’s pluralistic educational needs. Education scholars have documented how the neoliberalization of public education has led to the promotion of market-driven principles and diminished the role and responsibility of the state in educational governance and equity in learning. (Gulson and Sellar 2019; Nguyen, Cohen, and Huff 2017). Under this model, education is often treated as a commodity, and market forces triumph over the needs of marginalized learners and teachers. These critics argue that neoliberal reforms may undermine the principles of social justice in education, as they prioritize individual choice and competition over the collective responsibility of the state to provide equal educational opportunities for all. Hence, the neoliberal orientation propelling EdTech companies build on the age-old tech-utopian myth that champions technological innovations as a ‘win-win’ solution of unlocking profits and enhancing public welfare (i.e., educational outcomes) simultaneously (Burch and Miglani 2018).

Studies that adopt the technology-solutionism lens position EdTech platforms as neutral tools created to aid the existing education system or even replace it. According to Decuypere and Simons (2016), a significant gap in the literature is on how introducing an EdTech platform in an educational space may have differential contextual effects on students/teachers. Existing studies continue to neglect the concealed contingencies of using EdTech platforms espoused as an all-in-one solution to enable the continuity of learning in the face of school closure (Rodriguez-Segura 2022; Sharma 2022).

A neoliberal logic built on prioritizing market demands of profit-making and scalability cannot provide a robust framework to sustain the role of EdTech startups in the public education arena. Public schools are locally sensitive and more aligned with their students’ sociocultural needs and economic realities than EdTech platforms. Though these schools exhibit many limitations and educational outcomes are not always ideal, learners and teachers customize learning environments to best suit the social dynamics in their society (Bhatia and Pathak-Shelat 2019). On the other hand, EdTech platforms are designed to harness economies of scale to generate revenue (Rosenman 2019). As a result, they standardize learning often at the cost of contextually relevant and indigenous practices in learning and teaching. According to Cohen (2022), marketized EdTech platforms isolate educational practices from social connections and local infrastructures that influence students’ learning aspirations and experiences. Actively delinking schools and students’ learning from their communities increases the care responsibilities for students’ family members living in already strained households.

Embedded in neoliberal practices, EdTech platforms illustrate the workings of ‘optimistic attachments’ (Macgilchrist 2019), i.e., technologies and data can be used to expose inequality and bring about change. Accordingly, the fantasy of ushering in individual autonomy and social justice is projected onto the EdTech platforms that are designed to introduce minor and temporary interruptions in existing inequalities. The fantasy that EdTech platforms are an elixir to socio-economic, local, cultural, and other constraints to students’ education and learning does not account for multiple studies that have established correlations between access to services and infrastructures and students’ lived realities and local contexts, including societal norms, political systems in their communities, their social identities (gender, religion, class, caste, race), the social capital of their families, disability, and other quotidian experiences. For example, studies of learning gaps in the use of EdTech identify that girls are often more disadvantaged than boys when accessing and benefiting from EdTech technologies (Crompton et al. 2021; Samuels et al. 2022). While a critical gendered lens can help EdTech platforms adopt a gender-transformative approach to educational technology, technology alone does not fix these issues. They can amplify the gender divide in learning as boys are typically encouraged to capitalize on these platforms while girls are deterred from getting online due to reputational concerns (Bhatia, Arora, and Pathak-Shelat 2021). It is essential to ground the use, design, and analysis of EdTech platforms within physical spaces of classrooms, homes, and communities to ensure that users (teachers and students) can effectively practice control over curricula, learning-teaching, and evaluations to further students’ learning needs and aspirations.

Methodology

This study aims to understand how students used and ascribed meaning to EdTech platforms during the COVID-19-induced lockdowns when schools closed, and remote learning at home was mandated to support students’ educational needs. We explored the socio-cultural and economic forces influencing students’ engagement with online learning platforms and conferencing tools. In other words, the research emphasized understanding what students and their families ‘do’ (Morgan 2011; Dermott and Seymour 2011) to shape their engagement with EdTech platforms. We, therefore, included the family members who lived with the students in the same household and determined their experiences with the select EdTech platforms. Schänzel (2010) and Nash, O'Malley, and Patterson (2018) call this the ‘whole family approach’ and is helpful to understand how individual and collective practices and intra-family dynamics manifest as gender roles, financial limitations, and cultural norms influence how students use and ascribe meanings to EdTech platforms.

To design an ethnographic approach, we drew methodological force from the works of scholars such as Caru and Cova (2008), Murphy and Dingwall (2007), Parker (2007), and Shankar, Elliott, and Goulding (2001). Our work as design and media educators allowed us to cultivate deep bonds of trust with students and their families before we commenced fieldwork for this study. Two researchers volunteered at schools in these communities for a few years before the onset of the pandemic. They conducted media education workshops for schools and community members, helped students participate in city-level competitions and other extracurricular activities, and ‘hung out’ (Bhatia and Pathak-Shelat 2019) with the students and their family members during various festivals and community functions. They stayed in touch with them through social media: messaging and video calls, throughout the pandemic and resumed in-person contact after the lockdown was lifted. They introduced the other researchers to the students and their communities to start data collection for this research while remaining as primary contacts with the participants, their schools, and the community.

As the researcher-participant relationship is pivotal to richness and depth in ethnographic inquiries (Shankar, Elliott, and Goulding 2001), we relied on our existing relationships with students and families to request access to their homes and observed their use of EdTech platforms.¹ The long-term association of the researchers with students and their communities as media educators was instrumental in establishing them as insiders and provided the research team with intimate access to home-as-field (Chavez 2008). We gathered ‘thick description’ (Geertz 2008) without spending too much time orienting ourselves within the research field. Given our long-standing relationships with the families, we had a higher level of access to their intrafamily dynamics and community norms. For this research, we included students and families who were the most comfortable talking with us, spent a few hours each week hanging out with us, and often invited us to their family events.

Ethnographic process

Our ethnographic approach can be categorized into two phases. First, we spent a month (5 days a week) observing students use EdTech platforms. We conducted our observations between December 2022 and January 2023 and conducted home visits in 20 households. Primary data collection was conducted by two researchers: one visited households and schools in Delhi, and the other researcher covered Bangalore and Mumbai. We chose this time because, by late 2022, schools and universities were open for classroom instruction, but it was not mandatory for students to attend. Though many students were attending classes in school, some (mainly girls) chose to stay at home because their families were used to relying on them for household chores and other domestic responsibilities, such as taking care of their preschool younger siblings while the parents went to work. Also, some students were immunocompromised and were afraid to resume public life. Students were still unsure about the effects of long-Covid or had witnessed its impacts on family members and chose to stay at home and avoid public places. As a result, the schools, students, and teachers continued to use EdTech platforms for daily teaching and learning. Observations were overt and conducted with a semi-structured guide to allow for flexibility, respect for complexities in lived realities, and document culture-family-specific observations. To conduct observations, we practiced ‘deep hanging out’ (Wolcott 1999) and immersed ourselves in the students’ homes for 7–8 h daily. We created field notes, video and audio recordings, and annotated casual conversations in the household. We also conducted digital ethnography: paid close attention to how, when, and why students were using EdTech platforms and interspersed it with the concurrent thinking-out-loud technique to reduce recollection bias. This included observing how students interacted with their peers and teachers on these platforms. We also analyzed the content of the platforms and students’ responses to the educational material (asynchronously through interviews and synchronously based on content analysis of their submissions and feedback for their submissions). Towards the end of each observation day, we always scheduled a 20-minute interview to ask them about their interactions with and through the online learning platforms. Accordingly, the data collected offered insights into students’ learning experiences, teachers’ teaching practices, and family members’ engagement with and understanding of the interactions between their children and their learning goals, EdTech platforms, and the schools.

After the one-month-long immersion, we initiated the second phase. We conducted a preliminary analysis of the ethnographic data. We set up interviews with all our participants to ask follow-up questions and seek clarification on some of the insights from our ethnographic data. These interviews were recorded and lasted for 45 or 60 min. At this stage, we also interviewed participants’ school teachers to understand formers’ experiences and aspirations in school. These interviews were conducted at the research sites, i.e., students’ homes and in their classrooms (with their teachers), to facilitate a familiar and relaxed environment conducive to our research.

Finally, we used the holistic content analysis technique (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber 1998) to analyze the data gathered from multiple sources as a corpus of student-centered narratives on EdTech platforms’ role in shaping students’ learning experiences and aspirations. Holistic content analysis involves reading the observation notes, interview transcripts, and other textual material (online content) closely to identify themes. The themes were identified inductively. We entered the field for data collection with a single question in mind: how were students using EdTech platforms after the lockdown? Data analysis was done in six phases: familiarizing with data, preparing transcripts, generating initial codes, creating and reviewing themes, and naming and defining themes (Bhatia 2022). Two researchers analyzing the data were intimately connected with participants in the select cities. They were familiar with the socio-economic, cultural, and personal contexts of the participants.

Findings and analysis

Neoliberalizing education

The proliferation of EdTech startups during the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures was possible because online learning platforms were positioned as an alternative for classroom learning, peer relationships, and student-teacher interactions. Vedantu’s digital advertisements emphasize that the platform is designed to ensure that students can learn independently from the safety and comfort of their homes with live interactions with top-rated teachers. Their tagline is ‘India’s learning won’t stop.’ BYJU’s marketing strategy is to convince parents and students that their learning material, online classes, and teaching methods will offer students conceptual clarity instead of training them to memorize study materials. BYJU’s tagline ‘Samjho, Seekho, Jeeto’ (Understand, Learn, Win) critiques the rote-learning method promoted in most public schools nationwide. While these platforms were marketed to offer individualized attention and customized course/learning materials to students, they actively introduced and promoted the neoliberal discourse of ‘self-responsibility.’ Their marketing strategy and products are founded on principles of technological solutions in contexts of the global South–viewing access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as sufficient with an assumption that children are inherently motivated to prioritize learning, employment, health, and other neoliberal aspirations when engaging with digital technologies (Arora 2019; Bhatia 2024).

In our conversations with students from low – and middle-income families, we observed that children did not think EdTech platforms granted them greater access to educational resources or improved their learning experiences and outcomes. The children argued that access to the educational materials on EdTech platforms without sustained guidance and monitoring from adults resulted in them not using these resources efficiently. Also, the children were unsure how to use these resources effectively – they did not know which learning practices would be best suited to optimally harness the potential of online resources. Suresh and Ravi, students in a government-funded school in Bangalore, explained how their parents had paid subscription fees for Vedantu, believing their children would be more motivated to study because the platform offered unique services, including live interactions. Reeta, Suresh’s mother, explained,

They want to be on phones all the time. They are digitally savvy, you know, and they think we are ignorant. So, we thought that if we give them access to a digital technology [EdTech platform Vandantu], we will help them learn in a way they are most comfortable. He hardly uses the platform. When the schools were open, he would at least look at YouTube videos.

Suresh and Ravi, like many other students, used to spend much time online for entertainment and leisure activities before the pandemic and school closures. Though they used digital media for educational purposes, it was primarily because their friends and classmates in schools and tutoring centers would introduce them to an interesting online video, or their tutor used such videos to solve their doubts. In such instances, YouTube videos or educational material on EdTech platforms served as a supplemental resource to the core learning that happened in schools and through in-person interaction with their peers and teachers. Students did not use EdTech platforms as a substitute for classroom learning, mentorship, and relationship-building experiences because these platforms did not offer sustained and interpersonal monitoring and guidance by teachers as was possible in classroom settings.

Students and parents agreed that when they bought subscriptions to EdTech platforms, their decisions were based on two assumptions. First, teachers in public/semi-private schools were too laid-back to learn technologies to conduct remote learning during the lockdown. As a result, they were afraid their children’s education would suffer. It is important to mention that school and tuition teachers promoted the dominant discourse on the potential of EdTech platforms. Students and their parents often did not know anything about these platforms. However, their teachers described them as critical to the student’s educational success during remote learning. For the teachers, ready-to-use videos on these EdTech platforms were instrumental in teaching a concept online. Many teachers lacked basic and advanced ICT skills to produce content for remote learning. To overcome their lack of technical skills to produce digital content or create a physical environment conducive to online teaching, they relied on videos and lesson plans on EdTech platforms.

Second, EdTech platforms’ allure to introduce a new and more effective way of teaching compelled parents and students to believe that using these platforms would improve their children’s educational outcomes. For instance, Vedantu’s and BYJU’s brand positioning rests on the argument that their platform will usher in a new way of teaching that would help students become self-learners– students who enjoy using these platforms without the encouragement or guidance of their teachers. Our observations indicate otherwise. When school or tuition teachers used videos as a teaching aid to conduct a lesson plan, students were more inclined to bookmark that video and watch it later and before their exams. They did not use these platforms themselves or without the guidance and mentorship of their schoolteachers.

We argue that the success of EdTech platforms in India is founded on the commonly held belief that public and semi-private schools are overburdened and lack the resources to support a high-class education. The technological architecture of EdTech platforms may make different kinds of knowledge legible and initiate novel forms of learning. However, these changes are influenced by students’ learning experiences in physical schools and classroom spaces. Also, EdTech platforms’ goals to substitute schools during and after the pandemic and the marketing strategy to train subscribers to become self-learners can be problematized to highlight the contradictions inherent to their functioning. Vedantu and BYJU’s were marketed to spark curiosity in students through their teaching methods that would encourage them to prioritize their education because learning would become fun. Such an approach would elaborate one-on-one interactions between students and teachers and more customized lesson plans to meet the unique needs of different students. On the other hand, their plan to substitute schools centered on principles of scalability and standardization. We observed that students felt removed from the course material and their teachers/peers in online sessions. Most lesson plans had standardized evaluation methods (standardized testing) to track student progress. For example, most tests are standardized quizzes that can be assessed instantly. While the assessment tasks leave little room for students to showcase their creativity and innovation, the automatic feedback is quantified and does not delve into understanding students’ experiences.

According to Krutika, a 15-year-old student in a government-funded Convent school in Delhi, BYJU’s was unhelpful because she is not a self-motivated learner. She explains,

I am not someone who enjoys studying. With BYJU’s, you must be someone like Preeti [the topper in her grade]. When I am on BYJU’s, I feel like the machine is making me do things: read this, watch this, take this quiz. And in the end, they give me some numbers for the quiz I took. In school, I feel I should work hard to make teachers I like proud. On BYJU’s, no one cares, and so I do not care if I learn something or continue doing miserably on a quiz.

Students appreciated the role of interpersonal relationships and interactions in physical classrooms in encouraging them to acquire education. EdTech platforms like Vedantu and BYJU’s use algorithms to guide learning, achieve scalability, and increase profits. These platforms use high levels of automation to teach learning materials and track student performance asynchronously. Even for human-centered learning components on these platforms, such as online classes or one-to-one interactions for problem-solving, students did not feel a connection with the teachers or other peers/ subscribers. The reason is that affiliations and social identities (age, geography, culture, religion, and class) that organized learning experiences in physical classrooms were rendered irrelevant or non-existent on EdTech platforms. Tanmay, a 14-year-old student from Delhi preparing for his board exams, said,

Vedantu will never be like my classroom, where we crack jokes, throw chalk at each other, or rush to the canteen during our lunch break. When you spend so much time with other students, you want to learn with them and from them. Also, my teachers care. They know when I am going through a difficult time at school and pay more attention to me. It is not a lot of attention because we have a 30-minute period, and there are 60 students, but it is enough to make me feel that they care.

Our observations and analysis endorse the experiences of Tanmay and many other students when they argue that EdTech platforms are very different from physical schools in that they lack the ‘human element’ central to all forms of learning and development. Most learning material on Vendatu and BYJU’s is pre-recorded, automated, and a linear progression through computerized educational content with limited scope for customization, interaction with peers, or harnessing students’ creativity and imagination. Though the EdTech platforms were championed as antidotes to less-than-par education in schools focused on rote learning, their technological infrastructure built on the logic of scalability through standardization and their practical use among students and teachers augmented the existing approach to learning in schools and tuition classes. The following section will explain how these platforms undermine students’ place-based learning needs.

Place-based learning needs and care labor

Ruchit, a 14-year-old student in a semi-private school, had 100% attendance in fifth, sixth, and seventh grade. Attending school allowed him to exit the cycle of intergenerational trauma at home, such as neglect, substance abuse, and domestic violence, and focus on his education and personal development for 6–7 h, five days a week. For him, the school was a site for healthy socialization and relationship-building practices. His teachers and classmates performed the care labor to enable him to learn new and effective ways of dealing with issues at home. He regularly consulted with the school counselor to learn new strategies to cope with his trauma and regulate his emotions and behavior.

According to his school counselor, the onset of the lockdown and school closures led him to regress psychologically, and he could not deliberately engage with educational materials and online resources. Rachit’s home situation influenced his learning needs and competencies at school. His teachers, especially his school counselor, practiced care labor in different ways to ensure Rachit could be protected from physical and mental abuse at school and home. They would regularly visit with his family, educate them about the impact of physical abuse and neglect on education, and invest more time voluntarily tutoring Rachit after school. The social connections Rachit had nurtured through interactions with his classmates and teachers at the school were a critical terrain of struggle over schooling practices. His place-based learning needs framed school as more than an educational pursuit for neoliberal purposes such as employment, better living conditions, capital gains, and improving his class status.

School, as a social and physical site, was also a practice in resilience against the standardization and privatization of education through EdTech platforms. Public and government-funded semi-private schools are often represented as part of a community and civic space –with residential neighborhoods and religious, caste, and cultural groups residing within the same jurisdiction. Our observations revealed that teachers and students experience a sense of belonging to a community because of their shared local experiences and social identities. Often, these shared experiences are invoked through the relationships at the school to initiate struggles over who owns the systems of knowledge and how the knowledge workers are paid and treated. Schools and communities have collectively advocated for children’s right to education and teachers’ right to unionize and demand better working conditions and compensation. For example, students at a public school in Bangalore collaborated with their community leaders, families, teachers, and state actors to demand that the educational boards and government improve the Midday Meal Scheme in the schools in the area. They organized protests and set up demonstrations to convince the educational board to include more nutritional options, such as eggs and bananas, in the meals for children in elementary schools. Midday Meal Scheme and related food programs are indicated to improve primary and elementary school enrollments of children from marginalized and poor communities (Jayaraman and Simroth 2015).

Place-based projects have bolstered democratic and locally relevant civic issues in schools and neighboring communities. An online learning environment delinks learning-teaching from community life, lived realities, and students’ social identities. As students and teachers used EdTech platforms, they reoriented in ways that would reduce the reliance on interpersonal cues, place-based relationships, and community belongingness to deliver the course materials and tests. Based on our observations of online classes at students’ homes and short interviews with the teachers and counselor, we argue that teachers had less autonomy to customize their lesson plans and grading techniques to ensure they completed the courses on time. They also had to use online resources, including pre-recorded videos on the EdTech platforms, to teach a topic. Prakash, a 16-year-old student from Mumbai, said, ‘In the class, our Math teacher used the entire board to teach a topic. He cracked jokes during the class to make us laugh because he knew all of us–our families, where we lived, and our love interests in school. Online classes on Vedantu are different. They try to copy a classroom-kind-of experience, but it does not feel real. My online tutor does not know anything about me.’

Based on similar findings, we argue that teachers are instrumental in creating a personalized experience for students. Teachers in classrooms have the opportunity to examine how the situatedness of a student is not simply a difference of learning levels, cognition, socioeconomics, gender, etc., but rather, an intersecting of several of these elements, which are beyond and above the scope of technical systems. Accordingly, there is a need to rethink personalization as a concept that has been usurped by digital systems with algorithms. The use of EdTech platforms in an only-remote learning environment transferred the onus of performing care labor on already overworked family members of students at home. Many students in this study belonged to low-or-middle-income families. Their parents had to resume work after the lockdown. They could not offer continuous guidance and mentorship as the students negotiated their access to technologies, the Internet, and online conversations on the EdTech platforms. Many parents lacked digital literacy skills and financial resources to help their children troubleshoot technology issues. Also, the cramped spaces in their homes made it difficult for many students to focus on their education without distractions. We observed students constantly moving around in the house, looking at children playing outside or rummaging through the kitchen drawers for food during an ongoing online session. Only three students chose to sit through their online sessions without taking a break or looking for a distraction.

In our interviews, we asked students why they could not attend the online sessions (30 min) without breaks or why they would not turn on their cameras. A standard reply to these questions was that they did not want their classmates to know where and how they lived. Turning on cameras meant the student would give their online peers a glimpse into their home lives. Though students knew they could use filters to blur their backgrounds, they also believed that a technical glitch in the filters would reveal their living situations. They were not willing to experiment with the filters’ viability. For many students, the school provided an opportunity to experience a sanitized environment of learning and living, unlike their homes. Online learning stole from students the possibility to distance themselves from everyday discrimination and scarcity they faced in their families and homes. If they turned on the cameras, they would metaphorically merge their classrooms with their homes and, in so doing, would lose the safe spaces and aspirational identities they performed at school. Jayesh explained this sentiment succinctly when he said, ‘I am a topper in my class. My teachers respect me and appoint me as the monitor. Everyone comes to me for help with their homework. At home, I am the son of poor parents who do not have the time or education to understand my dreams. My teachers, on the other hand, believe I am meant to achieve big things and become rich.’

Some students wanted to hold onto their idea of classrooms as safe spaces– away from their home lives, where they could perform their aspired identities. Other students did not turn on the camera, were distracted during online sessions, and did not take notes because they knew they could always re-watch the videos and cover-up. EdTech platforms such as BYJU’s and Vendantu use the neoliberal assumption that students, regardless of their lived conditions and personal aspirations, are self-motivated to embrace their teaching-learning pedagogies designed to promote learning at an individual pace (Mishra 2023).

On the other hand, students insisted they required more consistent mentorship in setting boundaries and deadlines to meet their learning goals. Though BYJU’s and Vendantu offer live online classes, they emphasize that educational materials produced and stored as digital archives, such as recorded videos, standardized tests, and self-paced lesson plans, that use animation, automation, and instant quantified feedback to explain concepts enable students to define their learning goals and pace independently. Students constantly debunked this myth in conversations and through practice.

We observed that students used EdTech platforms to browse through their lesson plans out of curiosity and because their school and tuition teachers were using some educational materials from these platforms to teach their classes. Except for 2 students, all the others did not actively participate in these lesson plans. When we looked at their dashboard, they had started many lessons and had not completed them. They purposely watched videos and read educational material used by their teachers in schools and coaching centers. Bina, a 17-year-old student in a public school in Delhi, explained why she left most of the lesson plans on the EdTech platforms incomplete,

I need constant monitoring and guidance. For BYJU’s, there are online classes and live interactions, but they are limited. It creates an environment where you feel the instructor will not spend one extra minute to help you solve your doubts. The student-teacher relationship on the platform feels pretty mechanical. The teachers are constantly overworked, and students do not feel self-motivated to pursue these instructors for problem-solving.

Like Bina, many other students discussed why they preferred classroom learning over EdTech platforms. Our conversations with students, families, and teachers reveal that the learners complained that EdTech platform-based learning was geared towards compelling students to lock in more time online, subscribe to year-long tuition classes, and reduce the teaching-learning practices to limited forms that could be supported through asynchronous channels and materials, automated feedback mechanisms, and an absence of strong peer-connections. Despite an increase in the use of these platforms after the pandemic-induced lockdown, students and teachers did not endorse EdTech platforms’ core marketing arguments: online education is self-paced learning, provides instant feedback, and consistent personal attention and accountability. We argue that EdTech platforms play a critical role in actively de-linking schools and education from students’ lived realities, social identities, community experiences and norms, and local contexts and politics.

Studies examining EdTech platforms as a technology solution to incompetent schooling systems should critically evaluate how these online learning environments transfer care duties and labor onto students’ already overburdened family members in low-and-middle-income contexts. If EdTech platforms do not consider the complexity of students’ lived experiences and local contexts and operate on the neoliberal logic of scalability and profit-making, their teaching-learning pedagogies will disregard the importance of place-based struggles for educational equity. Also, the standardization of curricula will dampen students’ curiosity and creativity, thus replicating the rote-learning model in many schools across India.

The following section will analyze why a placeless and spatially apolitical conceptualization of education as envisioned through EdTech platforms may render pedagogies incapable of responding to socio-cultural norms dominant in the communities and neighborhoods that students inhabit. In particular, we will highlight how EdTech platform-based learning does not acknowledge and account for the influence of dominant gender norms in the learner’s sociocultural communities.

Gender cost of platforming education

Scholars, governments, and corporations often overlook how gender norms and expectations in low – and middle-income families can create unique and nuanced situations limiting or complicating girls’ access to EdTech platforms for remote learning. Rafat, a 16-year-old student in a semi-private school in Mumbai, had to drop out during the pandemic due to family restrictions on girls’ access to digital technologies in their community. Rafat’s family believed that digital technologies and the Internet were instrumental in morally corrupting their girls and turning them into Westernized defiant individuals. Additionally, her parents did not want to encourage her to finish her schooling because they were afraid that boys in their community did not want to marry girls who were more educated than them. As a result, Rafat could not convince her parents to let her attend online classes for school or spend money to buy her subscription to EdTech platforms.

On the other hand, Urmila’s parents did not prevent her from attending online classes through Zoom or using open-access educational materials on the Internet or EdTech platforms. Moreover, some of Urmila’s friends had subscribed to BYJU’s and wanted to share their subscription plan with her so she could access all the resources. For Urmila, the issue was not a lack of access but a lack of time and motivation. Urmila had to stay home all day with her younger siblings while her parents worked as essential workers (janitors) at a government hospital. Urmila was overburdened with care responsibilities for her young siblings, and she spent most of her day looking after them, cleaning the house, cooking, and tending to her aging grandmother. Urmila tried to engage with her course materials online, but EdTech platforms intensified the isolation she experienced when she became the sole 9–5 care provider for her family. During one of our conversations, she said, ‘For boys, it is different. You switch on your laptop and tune out the world. Maybe they can focus, but how can I when my younger brother stands in the kitchen looking for food and snacks? Also, he will be the family's breadwinner, so he needs education more than I do.’

Access to EdTech platforms was not the only factor influencing girls’ remote learning experiences. Gender norms also have a productive relationship with issues around digital security and privacy. Though the state and national governments support the growth of EdTech platforms and digital interventions to enable student education in India, they have not created robust laws and policies to protect the privacy and ensure the security of students (especially girls), teachers, and other digital media users. For instance, the Government of India (GOI) launched an EdTech platform– the Digital Infrastructure of Knowledge App (DIKSHA)- in 2017 and promoted its use extensively among school students during the pandemic. State governments pushed teachers and schools to encourage students to download the app. According to an inquiry by the Internet Freedom Foundation and Wired in 2017, the app stored the personal information of 1 million instructors and 660,000 students on unprotected servers. The IFF criticized DIKSHA's digital infrastructure and referred to a Human Rights Watch identifying 21 other platforms that allowed third-party companies to access children’s personal information. Many private EdTech platforms also sell their subscribers’ data, thus violating children’s fundamental right to privacy.

During our fieldwork, we observed that girls felt more vulnerable using EdTech platforms than boys. Girls were less inclined to turn on their cameras, interact with other students in their online classes if they did not know these students personally, or schedule a one-on-one interaction with male teachers. Girls argued that it was very easy for bullies and harassers to secretly capture their photographs during online classes on EdTech platforms. In a classroom setting, students were not allowed to use their mobile phones, so boys could not click such secretive videos or photographs. Also, the EdTech platforms did not have any rules or guidelines to ensure accountability in such cases. The girls often knew nothing about their male classmates attending these online sessions.

Girls also said that schools and classrooms were safer sites to build rapport between them and their peers and teachers. They found it more challenging to foster or sustain interpersonal relationships and conversations online. They could not share their personal contact information with their online peers. They had limited data packages, so they did not use chatrooms within the EdTech platforms. On the other hand, boys participated more actively during online classes and networked with other students. This approach to relationship-building helped them form small online communities for doubt-solving and other learning-related topics.

We began our research assuming that the onset of remote learning and access to EdTech platforms will introduce some challenges for girls in conservative families and resource-constrained contexts. Though we observed that some of our assumptions held weight, we also realized that girls were constantly devising strategies to negotiate with the restrictions imposed on them. Many girls we interviewed accessed online educational materials on their brothers’ mobile phones and could spend time on EdTech platforms when their parents left for work. They also started comparing notes with their friends in the neighborhood and attended these online classes together. In a middle-income residential apartment complex, we observed how three girlfriends used a single subscription to a grade 7 tutoring course (CBSE) and divided the subscription cost. The three friends shared access to all online resources and would combine all their questions so that one of the girls could schedule a one-on-one doubt-solving session with the instructor to resolve these questions. Similarly, Tina, a 16-year-old student from Bangalore, said she could convince her parents to buy her a mobile phone with an Internet connection because she wanted to access EdTech platforms.

Though some girls negotiated their access and engagement with EdTech platforms, they operated from within the limitations imposed on them because of their gender identity and the associated norms in their community. Most EdTech platforms and conferencing tools lack inclusive designs and technical infrastructures to accommodate the privacy and security concerns of girls and young women. Instead, these platforms standardize design, education, and interaction to scale and universalize teaching-learning experiences. In doing this, EdTech platforms fail to address the gender cost of reinforcing the neoliberal logic of markets and privatizing education for profit.

Conclusion

Borrowing a critical platform gaze as our methodological entry point, we argue that companies design EdTech platforms to enable specific forms of thinking and action across multiple settings. The companies are guided by their logic of scaling their products for profitability, leading to standardization of curriculum, lack of teacher-student autonomy, compelling self-responsibility towards learning, and the subsequent erosion of socio-spatial relationships critical for developing place-based critical pedagogies. On the other hand, students and teachers use these platforms from within the socio-technical and cultural realities they inhabit. Overall, this paper makes the case that there is a growing chasm between the company-intended use of EdTech platforms and how these interfaces are (un)used by students, teachers, families, and cultural communities. This tension needs urgent addressing if we are to recalibrate and reimagine public education with the aid of new EdTech platforms for inclusive learning and digital futures. In doing so, we need to rethink ‘personalization’ with EdTech and shift from an algorithmic-centered effort to a social-driven effort. Edtech, in its current state, is less futuristic and more a Fordist model that builds on standardization and scalability. This study reminds us that information dissemination makes for a small slice of the larger learning worlds that schools offer students.

This work adds to the growing critique of the neoliberalization of schooling and makes the case that future research should channel scholarly energies on identifying how to improve public digital EdTech and make them viable alternatives to proprietary platforms. Efforts like UNICEF-UNESCO's Gateways to Public Digital Learning demand that we cross-share state efforts and focus on institution-building in the digital arena through an iterative intra-regional effort. This helps us continue the centuries-old democratic agenda of public schooling as a common good, essential for building inclusive citizenship to help tackle some of the most urgent challenges like inequality, the climate crisis, and peacebuilding.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Stuti Dalal and Kopal Nanda for providing administrative support throughout the research process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Two researchers on this project worked as media educators in these communities from 2015 to 2020. We relied on their relationships with students and their families to recruit participants for the study.