Learning Agency: The Role of Students, Educators, and EdTech Providers

As a founder in the education space, I often reflect on pedagogical aspects of sAInaptic, with learning agency being one of them. Learning or learner agency is a term that captures an important goal of teaching and learning where students are active learners, making choices and taking actions to fully participate in their learning activities. Learner agency is, therefore, a big psycho-social idea in education that has been historically achieved through everyday classroom interactions, such as Assessment for Learning (AfL) or formative assessment practices, that ultimately set students up for lifelong learning.

With EdTech becoming an integral part of education and more recently, AI making its way into teaching and learning, thinking about learning agency becomes imperative. Providers are developing tools and platforms for students, with improving learning outcomes as the north star metric, but it’s not possible to achieve this goal, without learner agency.

But who is responsible for it?

Is it the responsibility of EdTech developers to ensure the design of their tools incorporates or promotes learner agency?

Or is it in the hands of teachers to instil agency among their students to ensure that they are mindfully engaged in their learning process?

Or indeed is it solely left to the student?

The best approach? All of the above.

Historically, agency to learn among students was left to the students themselves, until research started to shed light on the importance of learning agency on outcomes, not only during school years, but also as a lifelong skill that prepares individuals for a successful professional career. For example, students who actively ask questions or request assistance from their teachers have been found to score higher on standardised exams. Students who develop a strong sense of agency in their formative years are more likely to have an enriched professional career and healthy personal relationships in adulthood.

Such evidence from research papers led to classroom practices like student-directed learning through formative assessments and feedback, combined with ‘just-in-time’ support, all of which promote student agency. New teaching and learning methods such as problem based learning (PBL) and assessments for learning (AfL) were integrated at scale, in a way that students were learning in an environment that actively ensures student agency.

And so in this digital age, with AI poised to play a crucial role in shaping the future of education, it’s also the responsibility of EdTech providers to think about how their tool can support learning agency, whilst constantly asking themselves what is the right amount of agency the tool should provide.

EdTech platforms must offer tailored content, pacing, and difficulty levels. This personalisation allows students to take control of their learning journey, making informed choices about what to focus on and how to progress. What if we go one step further and personalise the level of agency offered to learners, based on their current levels of engagement with learning materials and performance on assessments? And then mix this up with psychological and meta-cognitive metrics?

With AI models, this is very much an exciting possibility and offering personalised levels of agency to learners will help optimise learning outcomes. Even as I write this, although I know that this is possible, such models have remained limited to education research and are difficult to commercialise, due to various reasons, but primarily due to lack of access to the right kind of data.

EdTech has to take responsibility for promoting learner’s agency, with an interdisciplinary approach for the most appropriate implementation. This is the only way that technology can strive to achieve optimal student outcomes by leveraging learning effectiveness and learner engagement and thus better delivering on their promise of being educational.

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