Technological trends that made learning a better experience

As the world steps into the fourth industrial revolution, driven by advanced technology, the world of education has taken a swift turn, making learning simpler, easier, and accessible for everyone across the globe. In recent years, technology has brought a paradigm shift in the ways the teachers impart education and students learn in classrooms, which are no longer limited to four walls. This rapid technological influx in education came as a silver lining to the Covid pandemic, provided by Edtech companies raising the overall standards of education and redefining its goals.

Here are the Top 7 technological trends that have made the learning process engaging and effortless for students, courtesy of the Edtech industry.

Personalisation:

The goal of personalized learning is to have tailor-made instruction cut out to meet each learner's unique needs, interests, and skills. Each student receives a learning plan that is based on their prior knowledge and preferred learning styles. Since each learner is different, achieving a personalized learning model is highly important and easily achievable using technology in the Edtech domain. It also enables higher student engagement. To facilitate the same an institution can use data analytics concerning students' data, providing insights and recommendations for each learner, promoting a separate dashboard, which is dynamic in nature. Education powered by technology helps in elevating the whole learning experience.

Live streaming & recorded VoDs

The educational institutions of the current era have invested in powerful technology to facilitate the ease of learning for students' convenience. These include live streaming courses and events delivered on robust platforms, offering synchronous and asynchronous learning options. It enables institutions to invite a larger audience to watch and even participate in the respective event/ seminar/ class. Using live streaming technology also powers teachers to add quality and context to the content or certain topics by bringing related activities from other countries or real-life instances into the classrooms.

With the reduced cost of internet connections, live streaming is saving students' money and commutation time, which they can use to invest in other creative activities or pursuits. Live streaming on Mobile-apps has taken learning to another level. The success of the approach has nudged learning-solution providers to take the mobile-first approach as it allows students to take their courses at their own pace, anytime and anywhere, at their convenience.

Mobile apps

Mobile apps have added a new dimension to education and pedagogical practices as they directly impact students and their psychology, which enables them to grasp the material and perceive it from a new angle. The software helps students comprehend the ideas by offering them difficult challenges, brainteasers, and educational activities.

Gamification

Gamification is the smart blend of instructional design and game design, initiated to make learning engaging and exciting. Edtech companies invest heavily to gamify the learning experience by including learning milestones, time-based challenges, and score sharing to enable healthy competition with other learners and listing on leaderboards afterward to help students gain confidence in their performance.

Dynamic Dashboard

It offers data access and interpretation, which are the two significant barriers to collecting student data and subsequently using research-based teaching strategies to enhance learning and performance outcomes for children's welfare. These two barriers are eliminated by dynamic student dashboards.

New-Age Technologies

Artificial Intelligence in education has a lot of benefits as it helps students not only in customizing their educational experience but also in realizing their interests, aptitude, and true potential. In addition, the application of Machine Learning allows each student to have individualized learning, giving them and teachers clarity about their strengths and the areas where they are required to work. It also helps students assess their growth accurately as the machine computes their progress and the assessment even reveals to the learners their success prospects and career paths that they can explore.

Technology has also transformed the role of a teacher from being a mere tutor to a guide and mentor who guides students on the best path to learn, set personalized goals for each learner, and compares learners' progress not with other students but with their past performance. It presents them with correct assessment and a student-friendly learning path for further success.

Data analytics

In higher education, data analytics is quite helpful for identifying trends governing a certain industry, types of skills in demand, and which skills are better suited for a particular student. On these bases, teachers are even able to chart out a fool-proof learning plan for students, considering their respective abilities, making them future-ready. Data Analytics is increasingly used to automate student gap analysis, helping institutions further manage individual learning paths and outcome-based teaching methodologies.

Furthermore, software plugged in to support online quizzes, topic-specific assessments, and practice tests helps students to gauge their preparation strategy and reinforce a better understanding of different topics. New-age student learning platforms, which have dashboards, video annotation & bookmarks, along with access to blogs, and advanced search features, have made the process of learning more flexible and personalized. By virtue of technology, most educational institutions, both schools, and higher education centres, have transformed the face of learning with advanced education ecosystems, benefiting students and teachers alike.

(The author is the CEO, Toprankers.com)