With the flow of high-tech gadgets into education, many thought that e-readers are on track to replace paper textbooks completely.

This appeared to be the thinking behind the comments of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan when he said, “Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete,” and South Korea’s recent policy to expand the use of digital textbooks.

But Thomas Reeves, a professor emeritus of Learning, Design, and Technology at the University of Georgia, said that focusing primarily on the technological aspect of digitized learning will not be enough to enhance the quality of education.

“Technologies, media are vehicles for instructional methods. Instructional methods are what account for learning,” he said. “It has zero impact, per se, by itself.” Reeves said during his keynote speech at e-Learning Korea 2014. During the two-day conference at Coex in southern Seoul, scholars from around the world shared their views on recent trends in e-learning such as Massive Open Online Courses and Flipped Learning.

Much of the focus of existing research on e-learning today emphasizes “things” like how to utilize smart devices, Reeves said. Technology is important, but not the most crucial aspect of digital learning, he said.

Reeves likened the various means of education to taking aspirin: No matter what way you deliver the drug, it is the acid compound that relieves the pain. As long as the course materials and teaching methods are kept the same, there are no significant differences in the outcome.

Although the actual focus should be on the pedagogy, Reeves said some people continue to assume that technology will be enough to improve education.

“Lot of people say, ‘Give kids iPads or Samsung notes, and they’ll magically learn,’” he said.

Experts in Korea have also pointed out the problems stemming from putting too much emphasis on technology. Lee Bohm, a former education policy adviser for the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, said that much of the “smart education” in Korea revolves around simply using smart gadgets.

“Why do we call them smartphones? Because they maximize user convenience based on our needs,” Lee said. “But the policymakers think they can just manufacture digital textbooks and distribute it for all teachers to use. That is a smart education that is not smart at all.”

John Hattie, the author of “Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement,” pointed out the 10 variables that affect learning. He defined a term called “hinge point” at which a certain factor or innovation is believed to have a significant impact on student achievement.

According to Hattie, factors like computer-assisted instruction, simulations, web-based learning and distance education ― which are touted as key factors in digital textbooks ― were all below the 0.4 threshold of significance.

Those that do matter included formative evaluation to teachers, teacher clarity, feedback to students, teaching problem-solving and mastery learning, what Reeves described as the “core educational processes.”

The professor quoted a study in the journal Psychological Science that showed taking notes via laptop may be detrimental to the learning process. The laptop allows users to take notes effectively, so students are likely to transcribe the lecture word-by-word rather than assess the information and reframe it in their own words.

While various studies have showed that learning via digital textbooks can be as effective as by books, he said that duplicating the learning methods of the past via computers and tablets holds little meaning.

“With respect to e-learning and traditional instruction, just as good is not good enough,” he said.

Reeves said rather than focusing on “things,” like how to use gadgets to teach content, e-learning research should be more about “problems” impairing the learning process. They include ineffective teaching, poor learner motivation, failure to engage learners and a lack of preparation for the real world.

In his book “A Guide to Authentic E-learning,” he said that designers of an e-learning environment should focus on being careful not to make their courses so that the learner has to find one right answer to the tasks, and the educator simply delivers re-packaged knowledge and assesses how much the student knows.

Instead the ideal model would have robust objectives, content providing multiple perspectives, experimental instructional designs, and authentic tasks. The technology should provide authentic simulations with problems related to the real world, and the role of an educator should be a mentor and a facilitator rather than trainer in both teaching and assessment.

In spite of the shortcomings, e-learning has the potential to take education to the next level. In addition to delivering learning content to more people faster and cheaper, technology allows students from all over the world to collaborate online with each other, said Reeves.

“They learn about other cultures, they learn how to communicate with other cultures. To me that’s one of the most important outcomes of 21st century education,” he said.

By Yoon Min-sik (minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)