Digital technologies change the world as we know it, influencing how we create, translate and capture information.
The same relates to the way students and everyone interested in self-education learn, raising more and more questions for teachers and educational soft developers:
- How can we motivate them?
- How to adapt educational standards to learners’ new needs?
- How to change schools and universities, as well as training platforms accordingly?
And last but not least, what educational practices to develop to improve the overall education system?
Given that technological innovations development happens too fast, we need to be on top of them and transfer knowledge about advanced-tech tools and the latest trends in education to people of all ages.
As for 2022, these trends are the following:
1 – Gamification
The main advantage of game training is that a student gets feedback immediately. According to Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, it motivates people when their training takes place in a video game format: getting some extra points, they want to develop skills, and they see correct answers and mistakes at once.
It works best in learning games now. Thus, Kidaptive creates cartoons with integrated games, allowing a kid to continue watching only after he completes some tasks. The tasks aren’t universal but adapted to every learner’s creative thinking and skills. For this, developers used machine learning with the data from applications and mobile devices such as smartwatches.
The top learning technology that makes an educator’s life easier today is chatbots. Students answer questions, and a chatbot tells if their answers are correct. In case of wrong answers, it shares links to videos or articles a student can check to learn a piece of course information better. This tech is not that difficult to implement into a training program. Experts in custom software development can design and test if it behaves as intended.
2 – Total digitalization
Classrooms and campuses take a back seat. More and more students attend lectures, complete and submit assignments, as well as pass tests or exams distantly now. Even universities like Cambridge become closer, launching online courses that would allow more applicants to enter and complete training.
Thanks to digitalization, even those students experiencing tough times in their countries can continue academic training.
As P.J. Gunsagar, Co-Founder & CEO at Kidaptive, told at #EdCrunch last year, the 4-year online education program for Lebanese schoolers that cost $125 per person allowed those kids to return to traditional schools with the same level of knowledge as their peers.
3 – “Digital” doesn’t equal “data”
The “life of learning” era, when a person studies during his whole life, borders on such concepts as “educational standard” and “job marketplace” today. While 78% of schoolers and adults check their mobile devices at least once per hour, most parents and educational experts are against cell phones in classrooms.
When speaking of an educational environment, we mean a building with projectors, electronic accounting, and Wi-Fi. But what about data that help educators understand learners and develop better programs for teaching them? Where should we find it?
Such borders give birth to a new profession in the educational sphere: a digital trail collector or, as people say, a fixer.
It’s a person who helps educators collect all sorts of data about students and transform them into knowledge of how to develop a training program for every trainee. Fixers are the link between the old-school approach to education and adaptive systems.
4 – Adaptive systems
Adaptive systems in education are those adapting to each person’s online training individually. As we know, there are several types of learners, and all perceive information differently. And while it’s enough for one student to read a paragraph and remember it, another one spends weeks and learns it by heart to understand.
Unlike a typical course, adaptive learning is a network with a student at its center. It’s a student who decides how exactly he will master a course: where to start, what topics to skip, what parts to examine once again, etc. In the case of traditional schools, it’s their teachers who choose the adaptive system that could fit a student’s academic learning style and needs best.
So the learners master the course gradually, and the program checks from time to time if they understand the topics well and need to do additional tasks. The adaptive system will recommend how to build a course program accordingly.
The primary example of adaptive systems today is CogBooks. The platform provides courses on different subjects, all developed by academic researchers.
Yes, technology can’t displace teachers. But today, educators should not just transfer knowledge but also show students that the world is open to them and tell them how everything learned can be used in practice.
