edtech – Providing Professional Development to Support Innovative Teaching and Learning

April 20, 2021February 11, 2022

Challenges are Hurdles to be Overcome

What drives growth and innovations in education, and by extension, the corporate learning environment? There are three: worldwide education challenges, the pandemic, and process automation and digitization.

Education Hurdles

Education is full of challenges. Budget, accessibility, educational quality in remote or underserved areas are just some of the many obstacles to success. While these realities could be considered problems, they’re actually opportunities that edtech/technology startups are poised to solve.

Problems give way to solutions by creating opportunities for tech businesses.

Pandemic

The global pandemic and post-pandemic recovery caused a growing demand for educational technology, tools, and services.

Over 1 billion students around the globe were affected by school closures. The sudden loss of face-to-face instruction possibilities left many institutions scrambling for the right solution that would allow them to continue teaching while maintaining strict adherence to safety protocols. Remote learning was the key and companies that specialed in this brand of edtech have seen a growth explosion.

Automation and Digitization

Digitizing and automating processes creates measurable efficiencies and optimizations and improves the overall end result. It’s common sense. A computer can do repetitive “build” tasks faster and more accurately than a human being can. This real-world need for automation and digitization has allowed for EdTech solutions to advance in both education and corporate sectors. For example, content delivery through Codecademy or Masterclass; video-conferencing through Zoom or MS Teams; and education analytics through BrightBytes or Civitas Learning.

Education Technology is constantly rising up to meet the challenges of a modern world that has been thrown into varying degrees of chaos. These challenges are hurdles to be overcome and EdTech has so far met or exceeded them all.

April 14, 2021February 11, 2022

Edtech – The Future of Business

The education market is a consistent first adopter for new learning technologies, and it has a long history of vetting new learning technologies long before they reach the corporate environment.

Case in point, the LMS. In 1990, SoftArc created the first LMS as a tool for classrooms. And that really hasn’t changed…the largest LMSs are all designed with education in mind. It took nearly 10 years before LMSs began to be adopted by corporate L&D departments. In the late 1990s, corporate learning departments took what was designed for the classroom and developed it into specific LMS systems specifically designed for corporate training.

So if you want to know what trends corporate L&D can expect to encounter in the next few years, look no further than what the current trends are in edtech.

At the top of the list is AI. While this technology is already being used across many businesses, it has yet to gain significant traction in L&D. But in education, it’s a different story. Edtech solutions are increasingly leveraging AI to drive learning efficacy and personalization, and offer automation that eases instructional burdens. For example:

As AI becomes more pervasive in education and other businesses, it’s only a matter of time, and money, before L&D will begin to explore what they can do with the technology within corporate training.

Interactive Video and Social Learning

Educators are also embracing new interactive video platforms and technologies that enable social learning. Due in part to the acceleration the current pandemic has caused in the evolution of remote learning, these tools combine all the learning benefits of video with the engagement benefits of discussion, collaboration, and self-direction. With these platforms, rather than passively watching a piece of content, learners can actively participate – posing and answering questions, commenting, and discussing the content with their peers and instructors all the way. Here are just two examples of interactive video tools at work within the education space:

AR and Voice

While still largely on the fringe in corporate training, AR and voice technologies are beginning to gain traction in education. Educators are using this unique technology to better explain abstract concepts and engage students where they’re often most engrossed – their smartphones. Additionally, colleges and schools are using voice technology, like Amazon’s Alexa, to improve student engagement and, in turn, success rates.

If you’d like to learn more about these new ways edtech is being utilized in the corporate world, or would like information on how Teach Smarter can help your business, please contact us.

April 5, 2021February 11, 2022

Edtech Helps Businesses Succeed

Edtech specialist stands addressing team at training seminar.

Edtech has been evolving rapidly over the past decade to involve many industry-specific use paradigms that have grown beyond the classroom. Finally, edtech, short for education technology, has become more mainstream in the corporate world…a clear indicator that learning and self-development don’t stop on graduation day.

Office workers spend nearly 2,000 hours in front of computer screens every year, more this past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Countless others have become highly dependent on their tech devices so it makes perfect sense for business owners to integrate technology into every aspect of their operations, including training. Learning through edtech provides an efficient and convenient platform for businesses looking to train their employees, evolve their workforce, and prepare to grow.

Some companies already use edtech in some form, the popularity and implementation of those capabilities will only continue to grow as we become more reliant on using technology to increase efficiencies and enhance the bottom line.

Edtech has and will continue to change business training as we know it by satisfying demands and expectations of an increasingly tech-savvy generation of new employees; boosting data absorption within an organization; promoting increased and collaborative teacher/student dialogue; and allowing individual business to map out staff progress at a pace of their own choosing.

Edtech is here to stay. It can help your business much like it’s helped teachers and students in elementary, secondary, and higher education.