Arguing about whether technology helps learning is unanswerable, because teaching is four different jobs. Digital systems are excellent at two of them and poor at the other two.
Delivering, practising, noticing and motivating — and how well each one moves online.
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| Job | Moves online? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Delivering | Better than before | It can be paused, repeated and taken at your own speed |
| Practising | Well | Feedback arrives while you still remember your thinking |
| Noticing who is lost | Badly | A system sees scores, not the student behind them |
| Making somebody want to continue | Barely | It depends on a person expecting you back |
Why the two that fail are the same two: Noticing and motivating both depend on a relationship with a particular person. That is the property nothing in the system supplies, and it explains both failures at once.
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Making a course free does not make it equally usable. What surrounds the tool — a device, a quiet hour, somebody to ask — decides who finishes.
Real-world examples you can name
School closures and remote learning — 2020–2022
At the peak, UNESCO counted over 1.5 billion learners out of school. Where teaching moved online it kept going for households with a device and a connection and stopped for those without, turning the digital divide into a measurable gap in learning.
Who it affected: School-age children, most sharply those in low-income and rural households.
The people still offline — ITU Facts and Figures — 2023 estimate
The International Telecommunication Union estimated roughly 2.6 billion people had never used the internet, with the gap concentrated in low-income countries and, within countries, among women, rural populations and older people.
Who it affected: About a third of humanity, who cannot reach services the rest treat as default.
The number worth remembering: Free online courses are started by enormous numbers of people and finished by very few, and finishing correlates far more with having time and support than with interest.
How this is tested — education is the context students know best and write about most vaguely — naming the job fixes that. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part c: evaluate online learning for a described group
- Part b: explain why online delivery did not work for everybody
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q4: synthesise sources on remote education
- HL Paper 3: recommend, and say which job it addresses
The trap: “technology improves education”: Which of the four jobs? Delivery improved, noticing got worse, and an answer that does not separate them cannot say either.
Explain one reason why online learning works less well for some students than others.
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Evaluate the use of online platforms to deliver school education.
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