What’s the future of education?

While the pandemic, hopefully, has come to an end, the impact on offices, restaurants, transportations, etc, is leading us to the “New Normal” that people get used to remote working, food delivery, online shopping, and virtual events. A lot of startups and innovative solutions have been playing major parts in those transformations. And there’s one industry that has accelerated its adoption of technology that might also drastically change the system, which is education. Before the pandemic, the investment in edtech has reached almost $19 billion, either in language apps, video conferencing tools, or online learning software.

Recently based on CNBC, Coursera, one of the biggest online education platforms, filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, while its total registered users grew 65% year over year in 2020. And Google recently announced a few updates on its Google for education tools, including Google Classroom, Google Meet, and the next generation of G Suite for Education, now rebranded as Google Workspace for Education.

With all these, what’s the viable future for online education?

In the past, online education has been recognized as a way to obtain new skills after graduating from school, however, it’s very hard to let corporations recognize it as a professional skill or hire an engineer based on their few certifications on Coursera or Udemy. However, due to the lockdown, students start learning at home. The differences of return between an online course on Coursera or an online course provided by decent universities are becoming ambiguous.

However, the benefits of Coursera are quite obvious including cost-effectiveness, flexibility, accessibility, time-saving, etc. But gaining credibility is a critical problem to be solved if Coursera was any close to being one of the mainstream education systems. A man holding a combination of Coursera certifications equal to a University degree. As we can see, Google is making it happen, by stating that the three paid courses, first announced last August, are available on Coursera and allow people to earn the equivalent of a four-year degree in as little as six months.

But no, I don’t think online learning is going to replace the traditional system.

This isn’t a zero-sum game, with the online gaining legitimacy which will force the system to rethink and revise the curriculum or maybe even the fee, so that the possible future will be either a merge of format between two of them or students are able to pick the way of learning based on their personality and situation.

However, it’ll be pretty cool to see in the future when asking people where you graduated from, and the answer could be “Google”.