9 Tech Trends That Will Redefine Education In The Next 9 Years

Year 2010. Edtech was barely making a buzz. I was consulting on building learning apps with one of USA’s largest education giants and publishing conglomerate. The management had just realized that just publishing great books will not keep them competitive. They need to repackage content for a digital first generation. And while they still did not think paperbacks will go away, the publishing giant wanted to be prepared; despite several contradictory voices from within the company which discouraged falling to fads.

10 years down the line, I am sure the visionary execs at the publishing giant, who gave a go-ahead to a project for appifying books, may be feeling redeemed. Because technology in education or edtech has moved from being a ‘fad’ to taking centre-stage in learning. The forward-thinking  educators, publishers, institutes have been building technology infrastructure to repurpose learning for a digital world. And for the ones that lagged in the tech adoption curve, COVID proved to be the ultimate black swan event spelling out the ‘tech or die’ message to the education industry.

Here are 9 tech trends that will be driving innovation in learning in the next nine years of this decade:

Syndication – As content explodes meaningful syndication and curation will become imperative. We will see equivalent of vertical news reading apps focused on education. Learning will be primarily consumed on the go on mobile devices and syndication apps will focus on surfacing personalized learning bytes tailored to your needs. With a proliferation of e-learning market places and service providers, hyper learning marts integrating learning inventory and vertical search engines focused on learning will soon emerge.

AI and Hyper-personalisation – AI and Data Science will be the anchor tech driving edtech. These techniques will deliver adaptive learning paths, personalized skill-based learning and help learners sift through a huge gamut of content to find the useful bits. AI will also be used in delivering auto-generated videos, script extraction from media, auto-translation and other services helping re-purpose content for the fast-paced digital world.

AR apps – All the world’s your book – Want to learn something new? Just wear your google glasses and go out in the world? The interactive AR will bring historical buildings, road-signs, milestones alive with little snippets of information. AR will drive the next wave of immersive, experiential learning. The value of AR in edtech is predicted to surpass $5.3 billion by 2023. (Source eastern peak)

Simulated class rooms – The pandemic has locked students out of the class rooms and the long drawn out period may cause some permanent shifts in learning habits. If students cannot go to the class-rooms, the class rooms will go to them. And much like VR technologies brought the sports field to you (Think of the WII gaming consoles), they will also now be simulating your class rooms. IIT Bombay recently held their annual convocation virtually with 3D student and teacher avatars. Video classes are also getting augmented with more features including Q&A sessions, black boards, discussion forums, teacher-student interactions. While nothing can really replace the school campus, technology is trying very hard to make up for times when learning on campus is a health hazard or economically unviable.

Gamification – Gamification in learning has been around for sometime now. But in a post pandemic, hyper digital world gamification takes centre-stage.