Dr. Robert LeBlanc awarded for research on the impact of digital platforms in today's educational landscape
Research exploring the evolution of digital platforms in education has earned Dr. Robert LeBlanc, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge, the 2024 Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) Educational Research Award. This award is given annually to recognize Alberta-based research that relates to classroom teaching and learning. LeBlanc was named last year’s recipient for his pioneering research on the influence of digital platforms in modern classrooms. His work, titled "Digital Platforms and Education," offers a comprehensive look at how the integration of rapidly advancing technologies is reshaping today’s educational landscape for both teachers and students.
After receiving a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant in 2021, LeBlanc delved into his research as the COVID-19 pandemic drove the rapid adoption of digital platforms in schools. His work has gained recognition in both scholarly and professional circles, with publications in a widely circulated policy brief for the National Council of Teachers of English and in Review of Research in Education (RRE), one of the world’s leading journals in education.
“Education is increasingly facilitated by digital platforms. If you walk into any classroom in Alberta, you are going to find kids interacting with some kind of digital platform: Google Docs, ClassDojo, Grammarly and many others. There are a ton of platforms that are explicitly designed for education and have become an infrastructure for how teachers today do their jobs. This process has been going on for a long time, but was turbo charged by COVID-19. In my own research, I wanted to think about the implications of what that movement to digital platforms has meant for literacy education and for English Language Arts.”
Concerns of increasingly digital classrooms
Acknowledging the advantages of digital platforms—streamlined grading, enhanced collaboration and simplified material distribution—Robert’s research highlights several concerns often occluded from everyday thinking about the use of digital platforms in the classroom, including concerns about data privacy and security.
"Digital platforms are multi-sided markets. While they may be free to consumers, in this business model, they typically aggregate data and sell it on the other side of the market to third parties. Companies want that data for many different reasons. Sometimes, it's to analyze how kids are using documents or platform features, and other times it's for targeted marketing. We are enrolling kids in digital platforms, which may have all kinds of benefits for our classrooms and our teaching, but which may also be enrolling them into data harvesting mechanisms without their knowledge or their parents’ knowledge or without really thinking about the implications. That is a major concern.”
Another concern outlined in LeBlanc’s research is teachers’ limited control over the functionality of digital platforms, particularly when digital platforms become infrastructure in their classrooms. Technical alterations and glitches like updates, closures and maintenance, remain out of their control, often leading to frustration. His research additionally discusses the increasing ‘datafication’ of education, which considers the way that digital platforms transform pedagogy into quantitative data and how it impacts teachers’ work.
“Digital platforms can push you to teach, grade or to think about students in ways that align with the logistics of the platform itself. That can mean a pressure to translate what you’re doing in the classroom into things that can be counted. This might mean using the number of times students log in to the platform as a proxy for classroom participation or converting student behaviours into something you can tally and report. Many platforms build in low cognitive and emotional rewards for keeping streaks or engagement alive. Teachers can end up bending their instruction towards the datafication of the platform itself. We can find ourselves conforming our teaching to the tool, rather than using the tool to facilitate to what we want to do or what we know to be good teaching.”
Looking forward
As digital platforms become increasingly more present in the educational world, LeBlanc is now turning his attention to the intersection of digital platforms and writing assessments, and how this will impact the future of Alberta’s standardized testing.
“For generations, the diploma exams have been handwritten. These exams are now rapidly moving onto digital platforms, and this brings with it all kinds of interesting questions about the nature of the data that’s being produced, where that data is going and how it is being disaggregated and analyzed. There are also really interesting questions about how students interact with platforms, how teachers prepare students to work with digital platforms and what happens when those platforms break down. This issue of the intersection of English Language Arts in the province and digital platforms is more pressing than ever, and I’d like to explore that.”