EdTech Trends That Disrupt Education in 2020
EdTech stands for educational technology. It is the practice of integrating IT tools into the educational process to create a more engaging and individualized learning experience.
In this article, we’ll talk about the trends in EdTech and the reasons why the industry is popular among investors.
Venture capitalists invest in EdTech for several reasons:
- Wide acceptance. EdTech platforms are created for those who teach and those who want to learn. Basically, every person who has access to the internet is a potential EdTech consumer.
- Untapped opportunities. Lifelong learning is the trend of the 21st century. People are eager to learn and polish their skills but often can’t do so within the traditional educational ecosystem.
- High ROI. EdTech market is already growing exponentially, which indicates profit over investment.
EdTech Industry Trends
Acceleration of online learning in COVID-19 pandemic
Imperial College London has already started offering a course on the science of coronavirus. It is now the most enrolled class launched in 2020 on Coursera. Zhejiang University managed to get more than 5,000 courses online just two weeks into the transition using “DingTalk ZJU.”
Personalized education
With on-demand personalized learning, you have 24/7 access to videos from renowned experts and can communicate with fellow learners and tutors online.
Immersive technologies
AR, in contrast, superimpose digital elements onto real-world objects and backdrops, for example, support textbook materials with AR examples.
Immersive learning involves the use of a VR headset, which allows students to experience everything from historical drama to environmental science. AR is more accessible as most students have mobile devices with cameras.
One of EdTech future trends is the use of chatbots that deliver lectures via conversational messages. This way, students get more engaged in learning because they are already used to this way of communication. Chatbots will also reduce the workload of human educators.
One of the most exciting and important results of the educational technology boom is that it provides access to all learners, including those with disabilities.
EdTech brings lots of benefits to students with special needs. Here are some of them:
- Electronic worksheets help those with fine motor skill impairment.
- Audio recordings and text-to-speech to assist visually impaired or dyslexic students.
- Video recording can restructure lessons to help students with behavioral or attention issues, for example, with ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
- Using one-to-one devices reduces the effect on those with mobility impairments and allow self-pacing.
ML algorithms are great at tracking students’ performance and understanding where they need more assistance. The algorithms also help educators to cut down course time.
Today, many schools already rely on online assessments that are flexible, interactive, and efficient to deliver. Schools will continue integrating more smart tools. Take a look at some automation examples:
- Face recognition technology to control attendance.
- Autonomous data analysis to automate administrative tasks, such as student registration, shortlisting of candidates, enrolment process, and the certificate generation process. Process automation will drastically bring down the workload for the administrative staff by minimizing all these manual processes. For example, once the students have applied for a stream of study, there’s no need for a staff member to manually check and process the application forms and shortlist the candidate. When pre-defined rules are configured (such as checking eligibility criteria), shortlisting of candidates becomes a faster task.
- Building costs control. Lighting and heating/cooling systems can be automatically controlled, as well as the school security system.
A digital curriculum is easy to update and finetune to individual students’ level. It empowers teachers with automatic class tracking, pre-made materials, and simplified classroom management so they can save time and help students learn.
Digital whiteboarding
A lot of classrooms already have interactive whiteboards. A step further is a digital whiteboard — a software solution that includes whiteboarding functions like writing, drawing, and annotating. Digital whiteboards have a number of advantages over their physical versions:
The shift to cloud computing has brought benefits to data privacy. According to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is mandatory to know how and when data was collected, stored, recorded, transferred, and deleted. It is also obligatory to inform users of the intended use for the data. GDPR also entailed data encryption to reduce security breaches.
The platform helps to create an online course, corporate learning program, or other types of training and education without licensing fees or user limitations.
The key advantage of our signature LMS platform is that it’s flexible and allows third-party integrations.
The acceleration of educational technology development is one of the positive things brought by COVID-19 pandemic. Personalized immersive and inclusive education, machine learning, automated schools, digital curriculum, and whiteboard, as well as improved data privacy, are only the beginning of a technological revolution in education. Looking forward to 2021. More to come.
Originally published at https://agentestudio.com.
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