By Karan Gupta, Co-Founder, Assessprep
Education provides life-long foundational skills and knowledge. With the way we ‘teach and learn’ evolving at a rapid pace than ever before, it has become inevitable that the education landscape shifts in response. Therefore, it is imperative that educators and schools support students in preparing for the challenges and careers that may not exist at the moment but can be expected in the near future.
Some of the emerging trends in the education industry are:
Introducing digital literacy programs: With the rising emergence and adoption of technology in education, parents have become more involved with their child’s relationship with technology. It has been estimated that every one in three internet users globally accounts for those under the age of 18. Schools in India have become increasingly responsible with technology adoption and have also been steering a hybrid-model deployment of curricula to utilize digital technologies whilst also following prevailing pedagogy.
Connecting parents & teachers using technology: Indian parents have always participated enthusiastically in their child’s education. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased this participation with parents assisting their ward with online learning modules, digital assessments and overseeing their safe online interaction. The pandemic has certainly acted as a catalyst for building technologies that let parents and teachers engage, communicate and collaborate with one another thereby helping students improve their learning outcome.
Blended learning as the way forward: Classroom learning would be supplemented with high quality content already available online or be made available and could be seamlessly integrated into coursework to enhance the learning experience and outcome. Students can thus study at their own pace and attend classes in person on fewer days. This would also give students ample time to appreciate the information that they have explored as well as the resources that their teachers have directed them to use.
Bringing qualitative enhancement to training teachers: Teachers shall be trained for teaching online. EdTech trainers could help teachers with varied technology experience become comfortable with unfamiliar technology and seamlessly switch between online and offline modes of teaching following best practices. This would enable teachers deliver impactful lectures and in turn become excited about their involvement in the learning process.
Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Learning Management Systems (LMSs) for personalized learning experience: AI-enabled LMSs capable of making suggestions to students on the content to follow based on their use-history helps do away with traditional classroom dissemination of information that often does not appeal to all students alike. AI suggestions could pique a student’s unique interests. Blended learning can thus enable students with varied interests engage with multimedia and assimilate content that appeals to them thereby enhancing and encouraging personalized self-study.
Teachers become ‘learning facilitators’ rather than ‘knowledge-providers’: They could resort to innovative pedagogy to weave in collaboration. Online assignments could save teachers time from rigorous exam paper type-setting while encouraging them to develop and adopt techniques that enable their students to interact and collaborate with one another despite remaining physically apart yet stay webbed together through the world-wide-web!
