How are mobile apps helping students and teachers?

Educational reformer John Dewey once said, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” Since education is the key to transformation, it is essential that students are exposed to new and innovative methodsof learning that better their educational outcomes. In a world where there is great potential for technology-driven improvement to learning, we should build a future in which quality education can be accessed conveniently – at any time, and from anywhere.

Consider the impact of the digital revolution.Every industry is being redefined as the digital age transforms the expectations of both producers and consumers.Even in education, the traditional methods of memorization, recitation, and written examinations have taken a backseat. These days, there is a greater emphasis on improving the conceptual understanding of the world.

New technologies in the classroom have led to inquiry-based learning, continuous and comprehensive evaluations, as well as differential problem-based learning. This has become possible as technology has allowed superior quality educational content to be accessed and consumed at the click of a few buttons.

While legacy educational institutions have been slow to adapt to these new technologies, students and parents have taken to using feature-rich educational applications to supplement their learning.

They have allowed students and parents to discover the best tutors to supplement their learning and improve their performance. With peer reviews and ratings, finding the best and most convenient home tutors has helped improve student learning while avoiding the pressure and effort students have to put in to commute to far-flung tutorial centres.

Tutors can also deploy a suite of technological tools, using online and offline content to improve their pedagogy. With real-time monitoring and constant updates, applications are becoming the backbone for enhanced parent-teacher communication and transparency. In this manner, the right use of technology can help teachers add value to lessons and inspire students to achieve their goals.

Even for students studying without guidance, applications provide a lot of functionality that enhances their capacity to learn. Content with live tutorial interaction on various subjects, instant query resolution, and access to comprehensive question banks and interactive tests helps them learn faster, understand better, and remember more from their lessons.

Feature-oriented educational applications on smartphones are enabling students to learn at their own pace, allowing them to direct their own efforts into understanding difficult lessons. Virtual lessons can often overcome the more challenging or boring parts of a topic or subject, using multimedia to make it easier to understand complex ideas and make boring subjects more palatable.

These are massive improvements over legacy teaching pedagogies. While integrating technology has made learning more interesting and fun, there continues to be great potential in the future for technology to optimize education. In the near future, the introduction of AI and machine learning in education would help students use data to understand their weaknesses and suggest corrective measures to plug learning gaps.

It will also take over the time-consuming task of grading and record-keeping, freeing teachers up to focus more on teaching and give more personalized attention to students. AI can also help educators and tutors understand learning requirements of their students at the individual and at the classroom level, giving insights that can lead to more targeted lessons to ensure that all students are improving and learning well.

Thus, AI’s ability to monitor performance and provide intelligent, high-frequency feedback is in a great way helping students and teachers achieve their learning and teaching objectives, respectively.

The author is Co-founder and Director, Genext Students

By Ali Asgar Kagzi