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eSchool News is counting down the 10 most-read stories of 2025. Story #7 focuses on sustainability in edtech.
Key points:
Educational technology, or edtech, has reshaped how educators teach, offering opportunities to create more sustainable and impactful learning environments.
Using edtech in teaching, educators and school leaders can reduce environmental impact while enhancing student engagement and creativity. The key is recognizing how to effectively leverage edtech learning strategies, from digitized lesson plans to virtual collaboration, and keeping an open mind while embracing new instructional methods.
Rethinking teaching methods in the digital age
Teaching methods have undergone significant transformation with the rise of educational technology. Traditional classroom settings are evolving, integrating tools and techniques that prioritize active participation and collaboration.
Here are three edtech learning strategies:
Sustainability and innovation in education
Have you ever wondered how much paper schools use? There are approximately 100,000 schools in this country that consume about 32 billion sheets of paper yearly. On a local level, the average school uses 2,000 sheets daily–that comes out to $16,000 a year. Think about what else that money could be used for in your school.
Here are ways that edtech can reduce reliance on physical materials:
Additionally, edtech platforms are beginning to incorporate budget-friendly tools designed with sustainability in mind; some of these resources are free. For instance, apps that monitor energy consumption or carbon footprints in school operations can educate students about environmental stewardship while encouraging sustainable practices in their own lives.
Supporting teachers in the shift to edtech
Transitioning to edtech can be a challenging yet rewarding experience for educators. By streamlining administrative tasks and enhancing lesson delivery, technology empowers teachers to focus on what matters most: engaging students.
Circling back to having an open mind–while many teachers are eager to adopt edtech learning strategies, others might struggle more with technology. You need to expect this and be prepared to offer continuous support. Professional development opportunities are essential to ease the adoption of edtech. Schools can offer workshops and training sessions to help teachers feel confident with new tools. For instance, hosting peer-led sessions where educators share best practices fosters a collaborative approach to learning and implementation.
Another way to support teachers is by providing access to online resources that offer lesson plans, tutorials, and templates. Encouraging experimentation and flexibility in teaching methods can also lead to better integration of technology. By allowing teachers to adapt tools to their unique classroom needs, schools can foster an environment where innovation thrives.
If you’re concerned about bumps on this road, remember teachers have common traits that align with edtech. Good teachers are organized, flexible, have communication skills, and are open-minded. Encourage a team approach that’s motivating and leverages their love of learning.
Bringing sustainability and enhanced learning to classrooms
The integration of edtech learning strategies into classrooms brings sustainability and enhanced learning experiences to the forefront. By reducing reliance on physical materials and introducing eco-friendly tools, schools can significantly lower their environmental impact. At the same time, teachers gain access to methods that inspire creativity and collaboration among students.
There’s also this: Edtech learning strategies are constantly evolving, so you’ll want to stay on top of these trends. While many of those focus on learning strategies, others are more about emergency response, safety, and data management,
Investing in modern technologies and supporting teachers through training and resources ensures the success of these initiatives. By embracing edtech learning strategies, educators and administrators can create classrooms that are not only effective but also sustainable–a win for students, teachers, and the planet.
As per government data, the UK recorded the highest number of Indian student deportations over the past five years, with 170 cases, followed by Australia (114), Russia (82), the US (45), Georgia (17), Ukraine (13), Finland (5), China (4), Egypt (2) and Austria (1).
In a written response in the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of parliament, Singh outlined several factors behind immigration authorities’ decisions across countries, most of which related to “violations of visa norms and non-compliance with host country regulations by Indian students”.
“Entry of Indian students had been denied by foreign immigration authorities on account of their carrying incomplete or inappropriate admission documents of their universities, failing to complete the administrative procedures required for enrolment in the universities, or for being unable to answer basic questions about their chosen field of study in foreign academic institutions,” Singh said, adding that common grounds for deportation included breaches of student visa conditions, such as unauthorised work, illegal business activities, or violations of host-country laws and regulations.
“Students have also faced deportation by foreign governments for failing to maintain the requisite financial bank balance in countries where they had been studying, for not paying university fees or for being unable to demonstrate adequate financial capacity to support their stay and studies, for having insufficient attendance in classes or for complete withdrawal from the registered academic programs or universities, etc.”
The data also showed two countries denying entry to Indian students, with the US turning away 62 students over the past year and Kyrgyzstan denying entry to 11 during the same period.
Embassy officials also visit universities and educational institutions in their jurisdictions to interact with Indian students and student associations and to assess any issue concerning the credibility or quality of courses being pursued
Kirti Vardhan Singh, MEA
Just this year, the US revoked visas and terminated the legal status of thousands of international students, with two high-profile deportation cases involving Indian students over their alleged pro-Palestinian advocacy amid the Israel–Gaza war also making headlines. Moreover, between January and May 2025, nearly 1,100 Indians were deported from the North American country due to their “illegal status”.
While the UK has stepped up action against international students breaching visa rules, with the Home Office now directly warning students via text and email about overstaying, Canada has long faced issues with Indian students entering on fraudulent documents, with dozens investigated for using fake college acceptance letters in 2023.
High numbers frrom Australia also indicate the impact of the country’s crackdown on cases of fraud and agent misuse, especially from certain states in India, with countries like Russia seeing their universities expel Indian students after “failing to meet curriculum requirements”.
When asked in parliament about steps to protect Indian students from misleading foreign courses and avoid deportations, Singh said the government gives the issue “high priority” and maintains regular contact with students abroad.
“Embassy officials also visit universities and educational institutions in their jurisdictions to interact with Indian students and student associations and to assess any issue concerning the credibility or quality of courses being pursued.
“Several Indian missions also issue formal advisories for Indian students under their jurisdiction aimed towards protecting their interests, welfare and safety in foreign lands,” stated Singh.
While over 1.8 million Indian students are studying abroad in 2025, MEA data shows that 1.254 million are pursuing higher education and a drop in university-level enrolments abroad from India after three years of growth.
The US and Canada still remain the countries with the largest number of Indian students, followed by the UK, Australia, Germany, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia.
This blog was kindly authored by Huw Vasey, a Principal Consultant at Oxentia.
For the past six years, I’ve worked across sectors to build an ecosystem that supports the commercialisation of research for social impact – not just profit. While existing schemes don’t exclude social outcomes, they’re primarily designed to attract funding for expensive technological or medical innovations. This often sidelines social value, which rarely offers a high financial return.
Focusing on SHAPE disciplines – Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy – has opened new possibilities. Unlike tech or biomedical innovations, SHAPE commercialisation typically involves service and process innovation, rarely includes protectable IP, and is often rooted in the deep expertise of a small group of researchers. These ventures are quicker to bring to market and require far fewer resources. This creates a unique opportunity: innovations with high social impact can scale sustainably, as long as they generate enough revenue to support themselves, without needing the kind of mega-investment required for a new drug or device.
A common counterargument is that SHAPE academics aren’t interested in commercialisation. They see their work as a public good, not something to be monetised. However, recent programmes have shown that interest grows when incentives shift. Initiatives like the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Healthy Ageing Catalyst, the ARC Accelerator, the SHAPE Catalyst, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Food Systems Catalyst have drawn hundreds of SHAPE academics into commercialisation by offering a pathway to scale and sustain the impact of their research.
So, we have a growing pipeline. But why should society at large embrace research commercialisation for social value?
This is a powerful mechanism for translating research into real-world change, both at scale and sustainably. Yet, it remains undervalued.
Policy makers and social scientists often focus on influencing policy as the primary mode of impact. While important, this is an indirect second or third-order influence. Commercialisation, by contrast, allows researchers to do rather than merely influence. It provides the practical demonstration that policy makers often demand: “How do I know this will work in practice?”
So why aren’t we harnessing this potential to meet our social challenges? Why isn’t it embedded in the UK Government’s missions or industrial strategy?
We overlook this opportunity at our peril.
So, what could be done at a practical and policy level? Here are three recommendations on how to keep the sector developing
Firstly, we need to keep funding SHAPE commercialisation. Few universities have the resources or staff to do this themselves, so this needs to come from elsewhere. That may be funders like UKRI, or it might be utilising models such as shared technology transfer offices (TTOs) to de-risk the cost of SHAPE commercialisation for smaller or less expert institutions. It also means growing and developing the community of scholars and professional support who provide the blood, sweat and tears which get these enterprises off the ground. Whilst the growth potential for SHAPE commercialisation is very high, as demonstrated by Abdul Rahman et al’s latest work, the ecosystem is still at an early stage in its life cycle and is unlikely to grow successfully without nurture.
Secondly, policymakers and practitioners need to keep celebrating SHAPE commercialisation and focusing its power on societal challenges. Events like RE:SHAPE are a great way of bringing attention to the potential of SHAPE commercialisation and showcasing its successes. Aligning commercialisation programmes to societal missions helps focus the power of SHAPE on our most pressing concerns. Not doing so was a glaring omission from the current configuration of the UK Government’s mission agenda.
Finally, we need to truly understand the value of commercialisation for social impact, by which I mean we all (researchers, senior university leaders, funders and policymakers) need to start to see social impact as being on a par with income when thinking about research commercialisation. That’s not just a mindset change, but one which also suggests we need to think about how we measure and demonstrate social as well as financial impact. Whilst some may be uncomfortable with yet more metricisation in research history and experience teach that, in order for a new approach to be valued in policy circles, it needs to demonstrate its worth in a way that is comprehensible for policymakers and that will likely require some sort of impact measurements
The Education Department had already canceled grants for MSIs before the DOJ released its memo.
In September, the Education Department said it would end roughly $350 million in discretionary grants for MSIs, arguing the funding was discriminatory because colleges had to enroll certain shares of racial or ethnic minority students to be eligible. However, the Education Department still disbursed $132 million in congressionally mandatory grant funding to MSIs.
In a statement Friday, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the new memo from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.
“We cannot, and must not, attach race-based conditions when allocating taxpayer funding,” McMahon said. “This is another concrete step from the Trump Administration to put a stop to DEI in government and ensure taxpayer dollars support programs that advance merit and fairness in all aspects of Americans lives.”
Citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down race-conscious admissions in 2023, the memo found the following grant programs were unconstitutional and said that the Education Department may repurpose their funding:
However, the DOJ said the Education Department could continue the following programs so long as it set aside their race-based eligibility criteria:
The Education Department said it is reviewing the memo’s impact on its grant programs.
Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the House’s education committee, slammed the memo in a statement Friday, arguing it was at odds with the Higher Education Act’s purpose of ensuring that students from all backgrounds “can access an affordable, quality degree.”
“A college degree remains the surest path to financial stability,” Scott said. “This is particularly true for low-income students and students of color whose educational and workforce opportunities have historically been limited by intergenerational poverty and systemic racism.”
The U.S. Department of Education is pushing forward with innovations in the Nation’s Report Card, despite layoffs that ripped through the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the assessment, earlier this year.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, will be administered online and primarily on school devices going forward — as opposed to department-provided devices — after the department field tested that approach this year, according to a Federal Register notice posted Thursday.
The notice also announced a bridge study in 2026 to compare scores from assessments using NAEP devices versus school devices. In addition, the agency announced a grade 8 science assessment pilot in 2027 for around 12,000 students attending about 308 public and private schools nationwide.
“NCES continues to pursue cutting-edge innovations to maintain the Nation’s Scorecard as the gold standard assessment,” an Education Department spokesperson said in a Dec. 18 email to K-12 Dive. “Next year, the 2026 NAEP administration will be delivered via both school devices and NAEP provided devices — which will streamline the assessment for students, teachers, and administrators.”
This puts NAEP roughly on the same track for online administration as prior to the layoffs. By 2026, NAEP was expected to be device agnostic and the Education Department had said after a spring 2023 field test that it expected to pull a portion of its field staff.
However, remote administration — meaning offsite and device agnostic — remains elusive. While it was expected to be possible some time after 2026, a department spokesperson on Dec. 18 did not provide a more specific timeline for its launch.
NAEP’s planned innovations began under the leadership of Peggy Carr, the former long-time employee and commissioner of NCES fired by the Trump administration in February. The innovations were fast-tracked by the onset of COVID-19, which Carr said at the time provided “sobering lessons” when NAEP couldn’t be administered as planned in 2021 due to pandemic constraints.
The department’s latest update on NAEP’s innovation timeline comes after U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon gutted the NCES office, leaving behind only a handful of employees to oversee the assessment and analyze the results.
However, McMahon said in April, one month after the first round of layoffs that impacted NCES, that NAEP will continue as planned in 2026.
“The Department will ensure that NAEP continues to provide invaluable data on learning across the U.S,” said McMahon in a statement then. However, former NCES employees have expressed concerns that even if the Nation’s Report Card and other congressionally mandated assessments are administered on time, the lack of staff to oversee contractors and analyze data brings into question the data quality for future assessments.
“That would be my concern: that NCES does not have the expertise to ensure the quality implementation of the project,” Carr, who is doing consulting work for now, told K-12 Dive on Friday.
NCES staff would usually have handled issues such as regular and real-time troubleshooting with equipment, coordinating with superintendents and other district staff, and addressing any mistakes and challenges on the ground at schools during the administration of the assessments. The federal staffers would also oversee the scoring of the assessment and monitor that daily to ensure minimal errors.
With most of NCES staff gone under the Trump administration’s push to “end bureaucratic bloat” in the federal government and downsize the Education Department, this means school districts may have less help during assessment time, said Carr.
“It is all hands on deck during that six-week period,” Carr added.
The Education Department in April discontinued already approved funding for the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program and the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program that had been approved in fiscal years 2022, 2023 and 2024, saying they conflicted with Trump administration’s priorities.
The new grant priorities announced in July limited funding to hiring school psychologists rather than also funding school counselors and social workers, who often also provide student mental health supports.
U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson, in the Dec. 19 order in State of Washington v. U.S. Department of Education, took the Education Department to task for politicizing the grant program. “Nothing in the existing regulatory scheme comports with the Department’s view that multi-year grants may be discontinued whenever the political will to do so arises,” the ruling said.
The Education Department did not return a request for comment Monday.
The canceled grants caused “significant disruption” to the 16 plaintiff states, according to the judge. Nationally, the Education Department said the canceled grants totaled about $1 billion, according to court records.
Evanson found the Education Department had violated the Administrative Procedure Act multiple times through actions that “are arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.”
Specifically, the judge ruled that the department’s discontinuation notices to grantees in the 16 states that sued were “arbitrary and capricious” because they did not explain the reason for the cancellations. “The Department makes no effort to analogize the discontinuation notices or the process by which the notices were issued to the cases they cite,” Evanson said.
The permanent injunction prevents the Education Department from issuing new priorities or irrelevant information to judge the mental health grant applications. Additionally, the court said it will oversee compliance with the order. In October, Evanson had issued an order granting the state’s motion for a preliminary injunction.
The mental health grant programs began in 2018, after the school shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which killed 14 students and three staff members. The grants were continued and expanded over the years, including after the 2022 school shooting at Texas’ Robb Elementary School, where 19 students and two teachers were killed.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, who led the states’ lawsuit, said in a Dec. 20 statement the mental health grants helped schools hire 14,000 mental health professionals who provided mental and behavioral health services to nearly 775,000 K-12 students nationwide in the first year, helping to reduce wait times for students needing help.
“We’re facing a youth mental health crisis,” Brown said in response to the latest court order. “Making sure our kids have proper support should never be subject to political whim. This is why we stand firm against this administration’s utter disregard for the law.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, in a Dec. 22 statement, said the ruling “ensures that our young people are not unlawfully denied resources, including mental health professionals in schools, to help them navigate a nationwide mental health epidemic.” Massachusetts was among the plaintiff states.
Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists, said that NASP is “pleased to see that the grantees in these plaintiff states will be able to continue their work next year.”
She added that grantees still have a lot of questions and that NASP “will be working with them to get answers to them in the new year about the future of their grant.”
Myrna Mandlawitz, policy and legislative consultant for the Council of Administrators of Special Education, said the ruling could bode well for other plaintiffs suing the administration over canceled grants. “You can’t enforce against a grantee criteria that they didn’t know about when they applied for and received the grant. That doesn’t even pass the laugh test if you ask me,” Mandlawitz said.
Joining Washington and Massachusetts in the lawsuit were the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
Friday’s policy change carried out UNC President Peter Hans’ promise earlier this month that the 16-college system would soon adopt “a consistent rule on syllabi transparency.”
He publicly announced the forthcoming change in a Dec. 11 op-ed for The News & Observer after multiple UNC campuses received enormous public information requests this year from at least one conservative organization.
In July, the Oversight Project, a conservative activist group that spun off from The Heritage Foundation, submitted a massive request to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, seeking course materials for over 70 undergraduate and graduate classes, ranging from topics on business to urban planning to nursing to African American studies.
Course titles included “United States Latino/a Theatre,” “Gender and Sexuality in Islam” and “Diversity and Inequality in Cities.” From those classes, the group requested “all syllabuses, lecture slides, course materials, or presentation materials presented to students” that include terms such as “sexuality,” “diversity and inclusion,” “implicit bias” and “cultural humility.”
UNC-Chapel Hill declined to fulfill the request in August, on the grounds that it would infringe on instructors’ intellectual property.
An hour away, however, administrators at the UNC Greensboro ordered faculty to submit spring 2025 syllabi to fulfill a similar records request, according to WUNC, the public radio station operated by the university.
Hans said this month that a single, campus-wide rule would “ensure that everyone is on the same page and similarly committed heading into each new semester.” He argued that public syllabi would enable students to make informed academic decisions and allow UNC to “stand behind our work” amid “an age of dangerously low trust in some of society’s most important institutions.”
But Hans‘ edict prompted swift backlash from faculty.
Two professors at UNC Charlotte — Caitlin Schroering and Annelise Mennicke — protested the forthcoming change in an op-ed published by NC Newsline the same day.
“Publicly posting required course content and course objectives can lead to the weaponization of this information,” the pair said. “This will produce a chilling effect where faculty feel pressure to self-censor the content of their courses to avoid being pulled into the political spotlight.”
Schroering and Mennicke also raised concerns that publicly posting syllabi “in an era of political extremism” could risk the safety of those on UNC campuses, citing the wave of disrupted lectures, faculty doxxings and politically motivated shootings.
“Publicly posting course syllabi only increases access to sensitive information by bad actors. This is a real security concern that can be avoided,” they said.
In his op-ed, Hans acknowledged that the policy change would open campus up to critique “in a time when healthy discussion too often descends into outright harassment.”
“There is no question that making course syllabi publicly available will mean hearing feedback and criticism from people who may disagree with what’s being taught or how it’s being presented,” he said. “That’s a normal fact of life at a public institution, and we should expect a vibrant and open society to have debates that extend beyond the walls of campus.”
But he ultimately argued that the benefits outweighed the costs.
“We will do everything we can to safeguard faculty and staff who may be subject to threats or intimidation simply for doing their jobs,” Hans wrote.
The North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors also pushed back on the change. The group urged Hans to ditch the policy in a petition that garnered over 2,800 signatures as of Monday afternoon.
“If your concern is to guide students along their academic journey, then ask that syllabi be accessible only to students,” the letter said. “Faculty want what is best for their students and go to great lengths to make sure they have what they need, but do not want people who are not in their classes accessing their syllabi.”
But making syllabi available publicly, the petition said, instead appears to be a “politically motivated” move with “no evidence of any accrued benefits for students, nor of goodwill being generated between the university and the public.”
“Instead, providing public access to syllabi during a period of heightened partisanship and rising political violence looks like partisan pandering with a cost to faculty and no benefit,” it said.
