Technology is rapidly transforming how students and teachers adapt to the online learning and teaching model. Education has come from traditional classroom teaching to more flexible and non-intrusive formats.
This very year, we have seen a noticeable shift and a positive encouragement towards more and more parents being open to digital learning. The focus of education institutions worldwide has swayed towards continuous learning anytime, anywhere.
The proliferation of laptops, smartphones, tablets and other devices enables students, like never before, to meet their diverse learning needs, thus allowing them to prepare for future careers more realistically.
Students and teachers both benefit from upgraded technology-driven online learning. It helps students deliver collaborative and personalized learning and thrive digitally. For teachers, it allows them to monitor student’s progress in real-time, get access to student data quickly, provide more relevant content and keep them engaged.
How is technology Shaping Education?
The Edtech space in India is growing at lightning speed, and the critical focus lies in addressing significant concerns on how these technologies can shape a child’s perspective and make education accessible irrespective of their skill levels and geographical location.
With the proper devices, technology in education can help students better prepare for technical and career skills. It allows them to hone their problem-solving and critical thinking skills; a must in the 21st century. Organizations worldwide are coming together to build a 360⁰ learning approach by creating a safe and robust IT infrastructure to help educational institutions achieve their vision of transforming learning.
5 technologies that are transforming traditional learning:
1. Immersive Virtual reality and Augmented reality
Virtual reality connects students and educators with technology-based educational models focusing on deeper learning. VR technologies are allowing educational institutions to combine physical. Digital and biological worlds in an unprecedented way. This provides engagement in areas like engineering, science and technology in newer modern methods. Students can now practice lab skills to complete virtual experiments and visualize scientific concepts that would have been impossible.
Virtual and augmented reality help students comprehend complex concepts of science and bridge gaps. A recent study conducted in Beijing shows that students who learned via VR methods scored an average of 93 per cent as against students who scored 73 per cent via traditional learning.
2. Artificial Intelligence for personalized learning
Artificial Intelligence has long been applied in the education sector to provide outstanding solutions to the 1:1 tutoring format, which has long been overdue. AI has the great potential to transform personalized learning, allowing deviation from conventional classroom learning and bringing students closer when tackling challenges.
In many ways, AI is helping educators to redefine ‘engagement’ through real-time data and analytics around student interaction. It also helps to identify learning patterns, predicts student behaviour, and gives possible outcomes based on the study. Artificial intelligence has also helped the education sector by generating personalized learning plans, providing real-time feedback and assessment and helping teachers to enable extended learning to students beyond the classroom.
3. Adaptive learning through Robotics
Robotics provide a unique platform for students and teachers to learn through one-to-one support, adaptive learning algorithms, and real-time feedback mechanisms within K12 schools. ML-powered robots can adapt themselves to students’ learning styles through interactive and game-based methods. Many schools and universities are leveraging this technology to provide a visualization-based and progressive learning environment through virtual simulation settings.
4. Digitization of education through apps/video
Many Edtech companies are collaborating with app-makers to roll out learning through apps. It makes it an easy-to-install, on-the-go platform which can be given easy access via smartphones and logins enabled accordingly. Video-based learning allows for a more visually enhancing experience that results in better retention. The video was extensively used for collaboration and continued education during the global pandemic. With steady internet connectivity to live stream or download to watch it later, digital technologies are making learning accessible to every student worldwide.
5. Cloud facilitates continuous learning
Cloud has long been helping shift education from physical to virtual resources, allowing learners to explore the vast possibilities of innovative education methods. Cloud enables access to resources and brings agility and cost savings to education institutions while providing scalability and secure data storage. The cloud has become the de-facto delivery standard for edtech startups, which are now at the forefront of innovations.
Edtech startups in India, such as Impartus, support schools nationwide through their virtual classroom model at no cost. It has enabled learning for approximately 530,000 students through 32,000 teachers. That \’s equivalent to 13,000 physical classrooms. Impartus leverages the AWS cloud platform to onboard more than 90 educational institutions, including the premier A-leagues institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology–Delhi (IIT Delhi), Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS, Pilani), and Narayana Schools, and more to deliver education virtually quickly.
Conclusion:
The education system is seeing a time of change. The future of classrooms will be an amalgamation of both digital and face-to-face learning. To cater to the growing needs, breaking the norm and extending EducationEducation beyond the school is the right way to move forward. Technology empowers students and teachers at every stage of their journey and promises to cater to the demands even more soon.
