Do We Still Need the Term “Educational Technology”?

The Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) has since built on that foundation: “Educational technology is the ethical study and application of theory, research, and practices to advance knowledge, improve learning and performance, and empower learners through strategic design, management, implementation, and evaluation of learning experiences and environments using appropriate processes and resources” (AECT, 2023). What I find compelling about both — and about the book-length commentary that unpacks them — is precisely how much they refuse to compress. They cover processes and resources of all kinds, soft and hard, human and material; they foreground ethics and purpose rather than tools; they span the full arc from design and theory through to implementation and evaluation; and they treat creating, using, managing and empowering as genuinely distinct modes of engagement. Definitions like these signal something important: that the field they name is not reducible to a tool, a trend, or a deployment plan. And yet the label itself — “educational technology” — keeps attracting a question I find hard to shake: does naming this thing separately actually help?

There is a case for it — and a more principled one than it might first appear. Peter Goodyear (2023), in a reflective editorial written after forty years in the field, makes the argument directly: “educational technology” is a perfectly serviceable name for a field of research and development that is genuinely of practical importance and in which serious intellectual work takes place. His point is that the label identifies something real — a body of knowledge, a set of methods, a community of practice with its own theoretical traditions and research history. Scanlon (2021) traces that history in some detail, showing how educational technology research has developed a genuinely interdisciplinary identity across 50 years — drawing not just on the learning sciences but on human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, activity theory, sociocultural theory and design research. She identifies research strands — personalisation, social learning, learning design, learning analytics, AI in education — each of which has deep roots in early work in the field and has matured into sustained, methodologically serious inquiry. What runs through all of them, she argues, is a concern not just for what technology does, but for the full complexity of the ecosystem in which it operates: the pedagogy, the technical components, the ecology of practices, the communities involved. That is not a narrow brief. On this reading, the term is useful precisely because it names a field that exists — one that can be held accountable, developed, critiqued from within, and distinguished from other fields of educational enquiry.

The term also earns its place when a new tool or approach genuinely disrupts how teaching works — when it demands that educators pause and examine what they are actually trying to achieve, who they are designing for, and what assumptions they are carrying into that design. In those moments, naming the territory helps. It creates shared language for a conversation that needs to happen. Fawns (2019) explains this clearly: terms like “digital education” or “technology-enhanced learning” can be useful insofar as they encourage people to look closer at the design and practice of teaching and learning.

The problem arises when the label stops opening inquiry and starts doing the thinking instead. Fawns (2019) is precise about this as well: the term “technology-enhanced learning” quietly reassures teachers that technology will only make better what is already good — a comforting assumption that substitutes for a more honest account of how technology and pedagogy actually shape each other. From a postdigital perspective, the digital, material and social are already woven together in every educational situation (Jandrić et al., 2018); calling something “educational technology” can make it look like an addition to teaching rather than part of its fabric. The boundary the label draws — between teaching that involves technology and teaching that does not — is harder to sustain the more closely you examine actual practice.

There is also a different kind of problem that Goodyear (2023) identifies, and it runs in the opposite direction. The term “EdTech” — a truncation that now carries its own weight — has become a vehicle for a very different kind of boundary-drawing: one that flattens everyone from Silicon Valley vendors to thoughtful educational designers into a single, suspect category. When critics of commercialised technology in education use “EdTech” as a pejorative, they tend to totalise the field in ways that render its more careful, reflective scholarship invisible. Goodyear’s discomfort with this is worth taking seriously: the conflation obscures the difference between a snake-oil salesman and an educational designer who spends months thinking carefully about what students actually need. The label, in other words, can be weaponised in both directions — used to hype tools uncritically, or used to dismiss an entire field without adequate nuance. Reich (2020) points to the empirical consequence of the first failure: a decade of initiatives framed around “edtech” that largely reproduced existing structures rather than transforming them, precisely because the label carried the weight of the argument while the actual entanglement of purposes, values and context went unexamined.

This is also where I think some of the terminology starts to sit on the wrong plane entirely. Take “blended learning” — a term that gets routinely bundled alongside “educational technology” as if they belong to the same category. In my view, they do not. Blended learning is a way of designing learning: a deliberate mix of in-contact moments and other learning activities, which by its very nature involves technology. It is a pedagogical approach. “Educational technology,” by contrast, I would argue is something closer to a field of study and practice in its own right — more comparable to instructional design, the learning sciences, or, by analogy, fields like architecture or medicine: disciplines that bring a body of knowledge, methods and ethical frameworks to bear on real-world problems. You would not place “surgery” and “operating theatre design” on the same conceptual level; similarly, placing “blended learning” and “educational technology” side by side as equivalent terms flattens a distinction that matters. One describes how you design a learning experience; the other describes the field of expertise and inquiry that informs — and extends well beyond — any single design choice. Goodyear (2023) captures something of this when he notes that educational technology has always embraced both “soft” and “hard” technologies — methods and know-how as well as tools and devices — which is precisely why it cannot be reduced to a synonym for any particular approach or medium.

So perhaps the more useful question is not whether to use the term, but who is using it, in what context, and to what end. A teacher reaching for “educational technology” to describe a deliberate, purpose-driven design process is doing something quite different from an institution folding it into a transformation agenda or a competitive strategy. When a field of study becomes a line in an institutional plan, the vocabulary tends to stay the same while the questions it was built to ask — about learning, about values, about what technology actually does in context — may quietly recede. Which version is in play, and what it makes possible or forecloses, seems worth asking before reaching for the label at all.

References and Further Reading

AECT. (2023). AECT definition for educational technology. Association for Educational Communications and Technology. https://www.aect.org/aect/about/aect-definition

Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in design and practice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(1), 132–145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8

Goodyear, P. (2023). An education in educational technology. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 39(3), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.9082

Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000

Januszewski, A., & Molenda, M. (Eds.). (2008). Educational technology: A definition with commentary. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can’t transform education. Harvard University Press.

Scanlon, E. (2021). Educational technology research: Contexts, complexity and challenges. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2021(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.580

Wagner, E. D. (2011). In search of the secret handshakes of ID. Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 1(1), 33–37. Reprinted in West, R. E. (Ed.). (2018). Foundations of learning and instructional design technology. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations

West, R. E. (Ed.). (2018). Foundations of learning and instructional design technology. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations