(Credit: Svetlana Dotsenko) Educational technology is booming. Technology is helping to redefine how we learn, obtain skills, and get credentialed. That value proposition has captured public attention and attracted record amounts of venture capital funding. But the vision for edtech is, and should be, much broader. After all, the education market serves not only to instruct but also to invent. And educational technology can transform the “other half” of this equation by streamlining the research process. The need for research innovation is arguably strongest at universities. Higher education is a vast market, in no small part due to the research enterprise. Last year, universities in the U.S. received nearly $70 billion in funding for research in science and the humanities, of which most was from the federal government. Funding for academic research is also growing rapidly internationally, such as in China, whose total research and development spending is now second only to the U.S. Despite the scale of this research engine, technological progress has been slow to reach the mechanics of scholarly progress. Many faculty members report spending as much time on research as they do on administrative tasks. A commissioned review of the University of California Los Angeles pointed out that the university spends about a billion dollars a year on research but lacks a “formal, guiding technology strategy for research administration.” In aggregate, administrative inefficiencies impose burdens on researchers. It diverts time and attention from more productive activities; it delays experiments and raises the costs of doing research. There are roughly a million faculty and academic researchers in the U.S. – which means reclaiming even one hour every week from admin by using technology would be worth trillions of dollars annually. Improving research efficiency could also accelerate scientific progress. For example, academic research plays a vital role in the discovery of many innovative medicines, contributing to over 150 FDA-approved drugs and vaccines over the past 40 years. More time spent on research, rather than administrative tasks, could speed the discovery of new breakthroughs, such as the revolutionary cancer drug imatinib (Gleevec; developed based on work at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Oregon Health & Science University) and the HIV drug abacavir (Ziagen; discovered at the University of Minnesota). How can technology improve research? Here are a few examples of where the impact of technology could be most meaningful. Building Research Teams: Attracting Human Capital Finding and training research personnel is time-consuming and costly. Indeed, despite the fact that there are nearly half a million incoming graduate students and over a hundred thousand doctorates minted each year in the United States, there is often a mismatch between this supply of qualified trainees and the needs of researchers. Part of the reason for this inefficiency is that the burden of recruitment usually falls on individual labs. This means faculty members – already occupied by teaching, research, and administration – must also find, screen, and interview candidates. It’s a process that still relies on methods that are not only low-tech but also low-yield (faculty driving out to meet students or posting ads on internal mailing lists, for example). These challenges are magnified for faculty representing smaller, newer, or less well-known research programs that must be even more proactive in recruitment. And some of these recruits will not finish the envisaged research program – triggering another search. Better matching platforms could reduce these costs and allow researchers to start their projects faster and more efficiently. Building Research Networks: Enabling Collaboration Technology can also enable greater collaboration beyond what was once possible – an important development given the many benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Collaboration allows researchers to tackle broader questions, pool resources, diversify their workforce, more flexibly conduct peer review, and permit methods that may require significant upfront investments (such as expensive imaging instruments). Interdisciplinary research teams are also favored by funding agencies. Today, the vast majority of published academic research is created collaboratively. The average paper published in Nature has four authors, and, overall, the number of papers with international collaborators has roughly doubled in the past decade. And as a rough proxy for impact, articles with more co-authors also tend to be cited more frequently. More sophisticated solutions for connecting researchers horizontally and geographically - and facilitating the sharing of data and equipment - could dramatically increase the amount of collaborative research and resulting knowledge generation. Harnessing the Cloud As A Virtual Laboratory The impact of technology is also increasingly being seen in the actual conduct and administration of research. Digital platforms are facilitating marketplaces in scientific research and lab supplies and equipment, while also providing new ways to track inventory and manage procurement. Even funding can now be crowdsourced. By reducing or eliminating these administrative barriers, the hope is that it would encourage a new generation of researchers. It’s a model, exemplified by the “virtual biotech,” that is also increasingly common in industry to more nimbly manage research while controlling costs. And the concept of the virtual lab is gaining currency in other areas, such as in promoting science education. * * * The current renaissance in edtech is bringing new attention to the pressing and still unresolved needs of our educational system. As we reflect on edtech’s future, it’s worth appreciating the power of technology in also reshaping research in addition to educating students.
Universities should make use of available technology to streamline administration tasks for researchers, saving trillions of dollars and leaving more time for scientists to make important breakthroughs. The report also calls on the government to increase funding for basic research by $45 billion over five years, with a focus on areas such as cancer research, climate change science, energy efficiency and clean energy.