The Future of Education
Education is undoubtedly one of the markets most impacted by Technology and the whole teaching experience is changing. With more than 40 million views and a great sense of humor, TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity” by Ken Robinson, the British author and spokesperson for Education, proposes a radical learning revolution that goes from traditional methods to highly personalized learning. There are many reasons why this revolution is possible today. The current state of technology allows many initiatives to appear around the world and open new doors in this industry.
The profile of the new generation, called Millennials or Generation Y, also opens space to look at education in a different way. It is not expected anymore to attend lectures by teachers in a classroom with 300 people. One can now watch lectures from the computer and expects to find more practice than theory in interactions with the other students in the classroom. In the future, not only the content being taught in schools will change, but also the tools used to support learning will.
With eyes on this trend, a large number of startups are focused on the problems and opportunities of this industry. Some investment companies focus exclusively on this sector, called EdTech. LearnCapital.com, for example, directs all its investments exclusively on entrepreneurs with a vision for improvements in teaching and new ways to make learning smart. The fields are the most varied, ranging from tools that improve the management of schools to tools that bring novelties to the experience of students, teachers and parents.
Technology offers new ways of learning
With the spread of Internet access to even the most remote regions and the growing number of networked devices around the world, technology plays a relevant role in education today. Long distance learning is a pillar of growth in the industry and schools that do not offer this option of education lose competitiveness. In this context, smartphones or tablets are more than entertainment tools and serve today as education platforms.
Online learning platforms are definitely helping to expand knowledge at a cheaper cost to students. In the United States, prices for university studies and university books have increased 200 percent since 1996 and have become a concern for education. This is also a challenge for developing countries, including those in Latin America.
With more than 3.5 million students in Latin America (one million of them in Brazil), Coursera’s online platform offers content and courses produced by the best universities around the world at affordable prices. People who enroll in the platform are not just looking for new sources of online personal development: almost 70% of courses in Latin America focus on professional qualification. Among Coursera users, 40% of access to the platform is done using desktops or mobile devices, while 24% is done by mobile only.
The social component is present in online platforms and is key to a better learning experience. They offer new ways to exchange knowledge and also offer everyone the opportunity to teach, even to those who have never been a teacher before. Udemy is one of these platforms that offers all this and allows the distribution of teaching of any topic by uploading an online course. So if you have a unique skill and want to pass on, this is the place.
Many traditional schools are adapting their business model to try to seize the opportunity of teaching online. For example, UCLA, a traditional California school in the United States, through its UCLA Extension unit, offers more than 50 online Certificate courses in different areas of knowledge. What’s interesting about this is that 100% of the course is done online — classes and tests — and the credits of the completed courses also count as credits for courses in college or other undergraduate programs.
With key partnerships to offer these courses, the school offers students the online Canvas platform for access to materials, homework and interaction between students and teachers, and the ProctorU platform for the application of exams. With the help of the internet and a computer camera, ProctorU provides a robot that verifies the identities of students at the time of the test. In addition to sending a photo of the identity document, the student responds to a questionnaire customized by the robot to validate his or her identity — for example, the city or state where he lived, the street closest to where he lives, etc. An assistant accompanies the student during the entire process, the camera is turned on all the time and communication can be done via voice or chat messages. The student experience is really new: having the opportunity to complete a course without stepping on campus, without incurring in travel costs or wasting time in traffic, tends to greatly improve the teaching experience.
Innovation in teaching methodologies
We also find innovation in classrooms, whether in the physical layout of the classroom or in the learning methodologies used. In Brazil, some schools, such as UniAmerica, are adopting the active methodology of teaching, which stimulates criticism and reflection in the learning process. Classrooms have a new layout: instead of an auditorium full of chairs facing a stage, they encourage interaction among students, and have round tables and shared spaces for groups to organize.
In most schools, the method of teaching and evaluating students follows the same format. The content is the same for everyone in the room and the evidence as well. But new approaches are being considered. In the book Mindset, Carol Dweck presents the term “growth mindset,” which supports the idea that students’ abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work — and refutes the idea that brain abilities are fixed and can not be improved. This approach takes into account any customization that must be done so that each student can learn in his / her own time and with tools that best meet his / her learning profile (also known as adaptive learning) and meets the environment configured in the classes that follow the active teaching methodology.
School Administration
As learning becomes diffused around the world and accessible to everyone through the internet, competition grows and schools seek out tools that can support their growth. The scope is very comprehensive and new technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing are central to these solutions:
· Preventive Insights: Losing students costs dearly to schools, so tools that can identify potential course cancellations are very valuable to the business. The idea is that through intelligent tools, schools identify potential evaders and can take some action with them, promoting student retention. Some indicators can be a reference for these insights — far below average, very high average score, defaults, absence etc — but when combining data and intelligence, new indicators and insights are visible
· Predictive Insights: In the same way, data and intelligence together bring schools the power to understand much more about the student’s journey and fit with the course. It is possible to evaluate the fit even before the student enrolls in the course, preventing him or her from giving up later. The school may use more sophisticated tools to even suggest enrolling the student in another course within the same school, in case the student did not adapt well or disliked the course.
· Attracting new students: Another relevant point that new technologies seek to focus on is support for new sales. Insights from information about the individual, from systems or from social networks, from personal interests or related to professionalization, can serve as input for a better marketing campaign and approach to the target audience.
Innovation in the Education Market:
ClassDojo: Communication tool among students, parents and teachers to manage student behavior in the classroom. It is a classroom communication application that helps students develop social and emotional skills by creating simple ways for teachers, parents, and students to share what is happening during the school day through photos, videos, and messages (https://www.classdojo.com)
Edmodo: Global social education network with over 65 million users in more than 370,000 schools worldwide. Provides a platform with communication, collaboration, and training tools for students, teachers, parents and school administrators in a safe environment that engages the student and enhances learning (https://www.edmodo.com)
General Assembly: Offers full-time immersion programs that empower individuals to pursue the work they love. GA focuses on more accessible data, design, business, and technology courses, and the labor market education approach, providing the student with greater employment opportunities (https://generalassemb.ly)
education.com: Platform for parents, students, and teachers with educational materials such as spreadsheets, games, lesson plans, and activities designed to help children succeed. The platform provides a broad set of features that can be used both inside and outside the classroom.
Innovation doesn’t stop there. Data and intelligence are the core of future tools, but other advanced technologies such as voice recognition and augmented reality are expected to bring new insights to the industry. The challenge of making personalized learning accessible to all is what drives innovation. While this is a major challenge yet to be overcome by most in the industry, students already have a huge variety of tools that are improving the quality of teaching today.
Sources:
· https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/ed-tech-market-map-company-list/
· https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/periodic-table-ed-tech-2016/
· https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en
