Top 7 Trends of Education Technology for 2020
Technology is rapidly changing the way we live and collaborate. Education is lagging in terms of technology adoption. Education is something that can change the world in positive way.
Education technology can help to eliminate current barriers of providing quality education to all across the world. We have compiled some of the key trends and technologies that can define trends for the coming year.
Here are top 7 trends for Education Technology
1.Online Education
When things like ticket booking, watching TV shows, ordering food is becoming online, education is still behind in terms of online education delivery.
Number of internet users is increasing rapidly with increase in smartphone. It has provided good opportunity to deliver education online.
Online education is slowly and surely becoming popular with interest from working professionals to learn new things, technology. More number of organizations like Byju is emerging to target online education.
- According to credible reports from KPMG and google study, it is predicted that online education in india is likely to be 2 Billion USD industry by 2021.
- Around 28 Crore students are going to be enrolled to schools by 2021
- More than 75 Crore Indians would be using internet ( second Highest behind China)
Coming year would see increase in online education and it’s aligned services. Online education is useful to remove barrier of classroom based learning. Students can easily revise key subject/ topics.
Internet penetration in rural India is increasing as we move forward. Mobile app based services like Whats App, Youtube are becoming popular. There is scarcity of quality teachers in rural India.
Rural students are looking forward to consume digital education in the form of videos, documents.
There are 3 key Segments for digital education K12, Higher education and Professional Education.
Adaptability for professional education, executive management courses is on the higher side as many working professionals opting for the courses which they can easily learn, subscribe sitting at office or home.
Higher education is also slowly adopting the digital era. Online certifications, value added certifications are becoming popular in the college going students. Most of such courses are targeted to improve employability of the students.
More such courses can help to make online education popular in India.
Barrier of Digital Education
Currently online education is not regulated by govt to the large extent. Most of the times students or professionals are looking to complete course from some certified / Govt approved education entity. It can help them to get job after completion of the course.
Online education course providers are offering courses which are autonomous , private. Those case certainly help individuals but its acceptability or scaling to mass market is limited due to non regulated segment.
Service Providers like Khan Academy providing exceptional knowledge for free and individuals are taking advantage of it to improve their knowledge.
Coming year would see Govt regulations for digital education , Govt would start process of formalizing online education with rules and regulation framework.
2.Digital and Comprehensive Online Assessments
Evaluation of students is one of the key area of academic curriculum. Success of education largely depends on type of evaluation done. Evaluation of the students has largely been focused on analysis of theoretical knowledge of the student. Students usually write theory answers in the exams and it is being evaluated by one of the evaluator.
Limitations of current Assessment or Evaluation of students
- Evaluation is human dependent
- It is biased and not standardized for all students
- It is prone to error
- It does not take into consideration practical aspects of the knowledge
In the coming years there would be more focus on evaluation of student for practical knowledge of particular topic. Proportion of theory exams would be reduced.
Out Dated Syllabus
Knowledge is becoming dynamic and changing quickly due to the era of the internet. Things taught in the education institutions might become obsolete or outdated in a quick time. Here is the quick video about why indian education universities need to adopt dynamic syllabus with new technology.
As an educator or institution, focus should be to teach things which are practical, industry oriented and it should help students to become employable.
Knowledge management and collaboration tools and features can help institutes to improve practical knowledge of the students. Such tools would become more useful and many institutions are likely to adopt it in the coming years.
Evaluation or assessment of the students can be improved with the help of technology.
AI Driven Assessments
AI driven assessments, personalized assessment of the students can be done using online examination systems. Such systems can provide useful insight of the student performance, group analysis and individual analysis for each topic / sub topic.
As assessment of the student is done using online tools and techniques, bias associated with manual evaluation can be eliminated.
Assessment tools usually focused on evaluating practicality of the subject rather than theory knowledge of the student.
Online examination system like Eklavvya.com provides subjective exam assessment as well. Students can write their answers using online editor provided , for each question or exam there is timer. Students are not allowed to switch to other applications during active online exam.
There is facility of auto authentication of the student using photo capture facility . Online examination system can also monitor student using video streaming.
For objective exams results are instantly provided. It eliminates barrier of manual evaluation of the student performance.
In the coming year assessment of the knowledge would be based on new factors
- Practical Implementation
- Ability of innovation
- Problem Solving using knowledge
- Conceptual Application of the knowledge
Digital assessment can help unbiased and error free analysis of individual performance. It would be able to provide personalized feedback for the individual. Such feedback would be able to set right path for the student progress in terms of knowledge acquisition.
3. Blockchain Technology
Blockchain is emerging technology. It is going to dominate innovation across many businesses in the coming decade.
Many articles are written about Block-chain technology. It is useful when there is need of collaboration, distributed database/ information. Block-chain is useful for many areas of education including examination management, student credentials verification, certificates verification etc.
Maintaining Student Academic Records
In the current scenario, maskheet of the individual students are maintained by respective universities.
There is no way where any third party authority, employer can validate if marks or degree obtained by the student is valid and as per records of the university. Process of verification has to be done manually.
Blockchain technology can help to eliminate such issues where information collaboration, validation can help to validate credentials of the student degree or marks obtained.
Coming year would see more new concepts and ideas of collaboration oriented processes in blockchain for education sector.
Storage of certificates of the students
Blockchain technology can also help to store digital copies of the student certificates in the distributed and collaborated environment. Each university can act as node or validator where any authority can validate student documents by requesting for verified information of the students.
Such collaborative approach can help solve many issues like lost of original degree certificates or marksheets, authentication of student education records etc.
4. Personalized Learning
Traditional classroom based learning is becoming obsolete. Consider examples of online or on demand streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. It is providing us personalized and on demand television experience.
It is removing location, device and timing constraints. Television shows, sports events are being streamed in the personalized manner.
Similar to it, education delivery or learning process must be personalized. Traditional classroom based lecture process may not help each individuals.
Every individual has some strength and weakness and pace of understanding particular topic is different for everyone.
It also depends on individual students liking for particular subject or topic. Personalized learning using technology is one of the trend that would dominate in the coming year.
Advantages of personalized Learning
- Ability to absorb topic and understanding increases due to personalized learning
- Personalized learning can help student to learn, understand topics as per individual speed
- It can be done from any location
- It is classroom independent.
5.AI based Personalized Analysis of Individual
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is latest buzzword in the world today. Not only technology sector but all sectors including finance, manufacturing and healthcare are going to be revolutionized due to implementation of AI.
Education sector is also likely to get more ideas, implementations using AI.
AI can help providing detailed analysis of student performance in the examinations. Feedback from teachers (human) has some limitations in terms of ability to comprehend student performance while taking into considerations historical performance.
Personalized learning and analysis of the learning is possible using AI driven assessments of the students.
6.Revolution in Exam Management
Exams are still conducted in traditional manner with exam centers, exam invigilation, answer sheet evaluation etc.
AI can bring lot of changes in current exam management. AI based proctoring or auto remote proctoring can enable institutions to conduct exam without any need of infrastructure or logistic.
Remote Proctoring technology can enable students appearing for exam sitting at any location. System can track , monitor remote user using advanced video, image, audio streaming with intelligence to do analysis if student is appearing for the exam in fair manner.
Here is the introductory video of Remote Proctoring to Invigilate Online Exams
Currently this service has been successfully adopted and implemented by higher education institutes and universities for conducting entrance exams. It has helped them to remove infrastructure requirements and huge administrative cost of managing such exams.
AI based Remote Proctoring is going to be in demand in the coming days.
7.Virtual Reality (VR) in education
Virtual reality is popular in gaming. Concept of VR is becoming cost effective. Many other sectors have started using VR for many critical things.
Consider below analysis of information retention. When it comes to classroom based lectures, Knowledge retention is lowest. In case of audio/ video/ visuals , knowledge retention improves drastically.
There is science behind it, when user mind is able to see something in action its retention is better. VR not only provides opportunity to see something but also experience something.
Usually user need to wear 3D glass and experience something as if person is standing in front of that event/ scene etc.
VR implementations targeted to education, training would see good growth in coming years. As an educator you should not ignore this technology for sure.
Here is the video released by National Geographic using Virtual Reality
Checkout above video.You may get feeling as if you are also climbing the hill . You can get 360 degree view of the surrounding. Such technology can help students to understand particular topic easily. Complex concepts and things can be taught using Virtual Reality.
Traditional lectures has lowest knowledge retention rate whereas technology like VR can increase knowledge retention to significant level.
| Sr No | Education Delivery | Rating |
| 1 | Lectures | Traditional lectures have least knowledge retention capability among the students. It is not personalized.
Education Institutes should focus on making it interactive or form of knowledge discussion collaboration agenda.
Lectures have less than 10% knowledge retention |
| 2 | Discussions | It is better compared to the traditional lecture forum.
Students are able to retain a certain % of knowledge in this mode. |
| 3 | Info-graphics, Images | Do you remember to text or image from the books? Have you observed how kids do the study? They are shown big pictures of relevant alphabets related words so that they can remember things quickly.
The human mind is designed to remember knowledge in the form of pictures.
Knowledge retention increases rapidly if it is provided in the form of info-graphics or images.
It is also one of the reasons why emoji are becoming a popular mode of communication. |
| 4 | Videos | Videos are currently the go-to medium for educational content. Many education institutions and universities are focusing on videos for teaching students about new technology and knowledge.
Knowledge retention is high with video as a medium
|
| 5 | Interactive Gamification | It is taking video content to the next level by adding gamification. Interactive things are easy to remember. The learning process can become easy with this approach.
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| 6 | Virtual Reality | Virtual Reality or VR is the next big thing in the education sector.
Virtual reality can eliminate all barriers of education and can provide a feeling of things in front of us. Imagine if you want to learn geography and using VR you are shown desert in front of you.
VR can take learning to new level and it would be demanding thing in the coming year for sure. |
Education technology is buzzword with adoption of new things, solutions by Indian Universities.
Impact of COVID
The recent COVID19 outbreak has impacted the education sector. There is forceful adoption of technology with live classes, learning, proctored exams taking off in a big way.
The education sector is likely to change drastically in the coming days with large scale technology adoption for Schools, colleges, and universities.
Here is one video which analyzes the overall COVID 19 impact
What do you think about future of EdTech in the coming Years?
About the Author
Swapnil Dharmadhikari
Swapnil has more than 15 years of experience in the Information Technology sector. He has been working on digital platforms in the education sector. Swapnil is an avid reader and writes articles on technology and leading developments in the education and IT sectors.
Swapnil is the founder of Splashgain, an Education Technology company from India working on various innovative EdTech platforms for examinations, proctoring solutions, digital admission process and more. Splashgain has been working with many educational institutes and universities for AI-powered innovations and solutions to transform the education sector.
Splashgain has also filed a patent for an innovative product based on AI.