Digital Trends and Innovations that are reshaping EdTech

Education was one of the most conservative industries till recently. Our schools and universities were operating nearly exactly the way they were operating in the times of Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes. The quality and quantity of disciplines changed, no doubt — yet the methods of teaching remained largely unchanged over the centuries.

The teacher stood near the blackboard and taught a class of 20–30 pupils or students one discipline at a time using the textbooks, and assigned them a homework to do in their workbooks. The lesson time was devoted to material delivery and all the questions had to be asked during the break or after school. Brick-and-mortar education at its best.

This is drastically changing now as the Millennials and Generation Z enter the scene. These hundreds of millions of people and children were born and raised in the computer era. Even the concept of learning without using their laptop, tablet or smartphone seems ridiculous to them, they require the education to meet their demands — and EdTech has to deliver this way to the future of education. Here is what Jimmy McDermott, CTO & Co-founder at Transeo has to say on the upcoming transformation of the education.

“The next 3–5 years are going to be filled with new innovations and ways to learn, thanks to the significant positive attitudes towards technology in the classroom. While I think there is great potential for AI & VR guided solutions, one thing is clear: EdTech will never completely replace the teacher. Instead, it will help supplement the learning gaps.

For example, I predict that we’ll see the emergence of digital trends and educational platforms that can help connect all of the moving education pieces together. However, the benefits that teachers bring to a group of students can never be replicated or replaced. Instead, I think we’ll see more districts moving towards technology-focused ecosystems that support teacher initiatives while also helping students learn in ways we didn’t previously know were possible.”

EdTech Trends that reshape the learning

These new generations are tech savvy and have access to the Internet, so they can receive any knowledge anywhere and anytime, not being limited by the confines of traditional classroom. Instead, they want to spend the classroom time communicating and collaborating with the teacher.

Many entrepreneurs chose the path of an education startup and created multiple EdTech trends to meet this demand:

• eLearning;
• Mobile learning;
• Machine learning;
• Game-based learning;
• AR & VR;
• Cloud computing.

These are the most prominent digital trends that reshape education as we know it. Below we take a closer look at them.

eLearning — flipping the classroom, changing the rules

eLearning or online learning, is an approach to teaching when the part or the whole course is taught online, through interactive videos and online quizzes. We have already explained how eLearning works in our article on why eLearning and EdTech pave the path to the future for modern day learners. The classroom is not the only space to gain knowledge, as the learners have access to the course materials whenever and wherever they want. Instead, the classroom becomes the communication and collaboration hub, with the material consumed online.

Why is it revolutionary? This is how Open edX eLearning platform founder, Anant Agarwal, the professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained this:

“My first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) had nearly 145,000 attendees. It was the online version of the Electrical Engineering course I teach at MIT. It is a really complex course, so the dropout rate was 92%. However, this means that nearly 7,000 people graduated from my course in just 1 year. As my average MIT class is 200 people big, it means I taught as many people online in a year as I would have taught offline in 35 years.”

And this is only one of more than 2,000 courses currently available on Open edX portal. These courses are studied by more than 30 million students worldwide for free, and the only fee is $25-$99 fee for issuing the digital certificate of completion, instead of thousands of USD for tuition fees. This is why eLearning revolutionizes the education today.

Mobile Learning — accessing the courses on the move

Mobile learning is aimed at adapting the course materials (mostly videos) for consuming from mobile devices. This means adjusting the frame rate, video size and longevity. Mobile learning is usually consumed in rather short chunks — while people have their lunch or commute. Thus said, the course materials should be bite-sized and last from 3 to 8 minutes in order to be relevant.

Machine learning is aimed at personalizing the course

Every learner is different. Somebody might learn at a slower pace in the beginning, but improve over the course of time. The other might need to repeat the material a bit more than the rest of the group. If the course cannot be adapted to the needs of such learners, they will eventually give up and the course creator will not get their money.

The best way to adapt the course is provided by using the machine learning (or robot training) based on Big Data, when AI algorithms can analyze the progress of each individual learner and highlight the best course of action to support them. As these machine learning models get only better with time, they are able to provide more personalized learning experience to each next course group, increasing the completion rate and the course creator’s income.

Here are some thoughts on how personalizing the education can lead to more flexible classes and better learning outcomes:

Michael Mades, Technical Project Director at Digital Promise

“In 3–5 years, I see EdTech becoming less standardized, and more personalized. Schools are now making a shift from non-traditional classrooms that are teacher centered, to flexible learning spaces where students have more choice. This will require a variety of technology devices that individual and small groups of students can use to create, collaborate and communicate both within and outside of their classroom.

This technology will include personal devices, such as tablets and laptops, and sharing devices, such as LCD displays. There is also a trend underway for flexible furniture which supports technology with plugs, power outlets, work surfaces; and, the furniture is more movable to adapt to individual, small group, and large group activities.

From my work with ISTE, I see that schools in Europe and Australia are far ahead of the USA schools in these reforms. What I am seeing are more classrooms with teams of teachers who are facilitating instruction for students of different ages and subjects. In some schools, this team has the group of students for an extended block of time, so essentially no schedule, just the standards students are too learn. Then, they have flexibility for personalizing learning to meet the needs and interests of each student.”

Alberto Silveira, Vice President of Software Engineering at Schoology

“ Today’s EdTech innovators describe a future state of machine learning-powered personalized learning experiences. In that view of the future, powerful software will reliably predict student outcomes, recommend ideal learning materials for continuous improvement, and immerse learners in personalized content and experiences.

The personalized learning vision is being driven primarily by the maturation of the learning management systems (LMS) market. In the early stages, many vendors were battling for LMS market share. Today, school districts select from market-leading products, and those products continue to gain market share and increase in completeness and quality. Educators benefit by selecting best-of-breed solutions that can integrate with existing technology investments. All that combined drives the need for industry standards and open LMS platforms that enable innovation in classrooms.

If you are asking will this happen five years from now — the answer is ‘maybe.’ Known cloud computing players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are making significant investments in building the machine learning foundation for such personalization engines. So maybe — hopefully — those investments will drive some common standards that will help foster adoption of these technologies and allow educators to deliver truly automated personalized learning to students without ever leaving their LMS.”

Game-based learning, or edutainment

Game-based learning, also known as edutainment or gamification, is the approach of presenting the material through a prism of game, with incentives like points, levels, achievements and other methods of learner endorsement and gratification. This also applies to the manner of material structuration and delivery, as human beings like to play greatly.

The Millennials and Gen Z have grown up with video games and enjoy the sense of contest and achievement that comes with winning a game.These two generations prefer seeing the elements of game in every activity they partake, including the education process. Various badges, points systems, limited-time objectives and personalized titles increase the level of learner engagement, and help mix the education with entertainment to form edutainment.

Using AR & VR in education

AR & VR have a huge potential in education, as both augmented reality and virtual reality enable the teaching in virtual labs, where the outcomes of the experiments are purely virtual, and no valuable consumables are spent (not to mention saving numerous lives of mice, frogs and other biology testing specimen).

Here is what an EdTech expert has to say on the role of AR & VR in education:

Michelle Goldshlag , CEO at Cultured Kids Inc

“I think that 3–5 years is too aggressive a time frame to see any significant tech changes within education. I look at new technology vs. new technology in the classroom the same way I understand human years to dog years; new innovation in homes or work environments will happen faster than we will see in education.

The schools that manage to move forward at the same pace as the average home or business will likely be launching higher-achieving youth from well-funded institutions that will become the next generation of software engineers to develop the killer apps new technology is still lacking.

While I could expand upon the benefits of VR/AI in the classroom, the new technology is a moot point without the funding to adopt it. Additionally, VR was consumer ready about 2 years ago and has yet to become a household norm which generally precedes school-wide integration.

CulturedKids exists to support teachers, schools, and districts as they navigate a rapidly changing demographic and the transforming system. We believe that outside organizations focused on education may be the catalyst needed to ignite the change within the system.”

To sum it up, AR & VR will eventually find their way into other spheres of our lives, from various home-centered applications, to virtual travels and augmented reality shopping.

Cloud computing in education

All of the digital EdTech mentioned above consumes lots of resources during the peak loads, but remains fairly unused at some hours. Deploying such systems to traditional dedicated servers will result in huge overspending, which is why cloud computing is the best fit for education industry.

Two major benefits of cloud computing are autoscaling and per-second billing. The customers pay only for the resources consumed and pay only for the actual usage time, which allows save a lot of money, as compared to renting dedicated servers to run 24/7. In addition, multiple digital tech products developed by education startups are cloud-native from the start.

Final thoughts on innovations and trends that are reshaping EdTech

Education industry is undergoing a major effort to transform and adapt to the changed requirements of nowaday learners. Any startup able to develop a decent education-centered app can succeed in this market. There still is a long way to go before the digital trends like eLearning, mobile learning, machine learning and AI, game-based learning, and Big Data, AR & VR reshape the EdTech as we know it.

As Anant Agarwal, CEO of OpenedX said once:

“My kids don’t believe we were learning without the smartphones or tablets. We had to read on the blackboard and write by hand — and we could not even rewind or mute the teacher!”

Modern education differs much from what it used to be for centuries. What do you think will happen in 3–5 years in this field? Please share your opinion in the comments!