For TeachLab’s tenth and final Failure to Disrupt Book Club we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guest Kevin Gannon, professor and director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa.


The pandemic gave the education technology industry the opportunity to FINALLY deliver on the bold promises it has been making for decades. What happened instead was just another failure to disrupt, says MIT’s Justin Reich.


Alexander, Bryan. (April 30, 2021). How much has technology changed higher education? Future Trends Forum 


Reich, a professor at MIT, is the veritable definition of a straight shooter. Both ed-tech evangelists and skeptics (like me) should be interested in his exploration of how and why technology has failed to live up to the promise of fundamentally upending how we teach. I’d describe Reich as someone who believes in the power of technology as a tool of instruction who is also disappointed in how this potential gets treated at the institutional level. As a skeptic, I wound up warmer to the possibilities of ed tech after reading Reich. I think an evangelist would (hopefully) feel somewhat chastened.


Reich, a professor at MIT, is the veritable definition of a straight shooter. Both ed-tech evangelists and skeptics (like me) should be interested in his exploration of how and why technology has failed to live up to the promise of fundamentally upending how we teach. I’d describe Reich as someone who believes in the power of technology as a tool of instruction who is also disappointed in how this potential gets treated at the institutional level. As a skeptic, I wound up warmer to the possibilities of ed tech after reading Reich. I think an evangelist would (hopefully) feel somewhat chastened.