iClassroom: EdTech and the future of education

Brian Mann and Arfan Ismail at Education Software Solutions argue that growing interest in EdTech is a reflection of the vital role it now plays in UK schools

If the past is anything to go by, the future certainly looks bright for EdTech.

A recent report revealed that the European EdTech sector has secured $1.4 billion in venture capital investment thus far in 2022, 40% more than a year earlier (with the UK topping funding totals).

Schools the length and breadth of the country are riding a digital wave that shows no sign of cresting. Teachers everywhere now use EdTech to expedite crucial back-office functions to free up more time for teaching, improve educational outcomes and maintain pupil wellbeing.

EdTech and the challenges of the pandemic

To an extent, the recent growth will be a reflection of the challenges of Covid-19, which saw EdTech play a vital role. Indeed, early into the pandemic, the Department for Education mandated that schools change how absences were recorded. The aim was to ensure that rather than simply collect figures for how many pupils were absent, schools accurately charted how many were off sick with Covid-19.

This presented a significant logistical hurdle, but one that was surmounted thanks to Management Information Systems (MIS). Thus, rather than imposing a significant administrative burden on schools by requiring the manual collection and collation of absence data, a few adjustments to the back-end technology enabled teachers and leaders to quickly use MIS systems to collect Covid-19 data quickly and across entire schools.

But there is a more fundamental reason why the pandemic helped fuel the growth of EdTech. In an instant, schools were forced to empty: playground bells stood silent, computer labs lay idle and cafeterias remained empty, with pupils filing to fill not classrooms, but bedrooms.

Online education became the order of the day, with schools needing to find a way to ensure that pupils were only remote from school, not learning itself. To the fore again came virtual learning environments (VLE) and MIS platforms: the former allowed schools to provide online lessons, and the latter to help keep an eye on pupil wellbeing and progress, too.

The explosion of interest in EdTech, then, is a reflection of the now vital role it plays in schools up and down the country. To put it simply, EdTech – be it VLE or MIS platforms - has demonstrated its worth.

Continuing growth in EdTech

The key question, though, is whether the growth of EdTech will continue? Crucially, it seems it will be the demands from schools for ever-greater tech that will not only fuel the growth of EdTech, but also the shape of future innovation, too.

Personalisation is a hot topic in UK classrooms to the point we could, several years hence, see an evolution in virtual learning platforms, fully integrated with MIS, to enable pupils to receive individual, tailored lessons from teachers. And in FE colleges there is a drive to utilise virtual and augmented reality in lessons to offer more engaging opportunities.

When it comes to MIS platforms, this last point is instructive: the next few years will likely see increased collaboration between MIS platforms and third-party suppliers – be they video content creators or payment platforms. MIS, put simply, is an ecosystem; it is not a one-stop shop, but rather an effective network of partnerships – and one that will only grow further.

That is not to say that it will all be plain sailing, however. As with any technological innovation there will be challenges from within and without. Hybrid learning, for example, is clearly better suited for secondary schools, sixth forms and sixth form colleges, than it is General FE colleges whose vocational courses often rely on in-person attendance.

Artificial intelligence in education

And then we get to the question of AI, an area in which the sector seems ready for innovation. After all, though 97% of business already used AI in 2020, or had plans to, according to a report from Deloitte, the robots have yet to really arrive in the classroom.

This could be about to change, however. As schools grow ever-more accustomed to using data to not only tackle day-to-day challenges, but foresee and forestall them, AI could soon take hold, provided key concerns over algorithmic bias and the black box problem can be addressed.

Indeed, one way to successfully use AI is posited in Robot-proof by Joseph Aoun, President of Northeastern University. He suggests marrying together the processing and analytic capability of machines with the creativity of humans and our capacity to identify problems. This way, the problem is identified by human intellect, and solved by machines.

The human mind (powerful as it is) struggles to understand large-scale, data heavy questions of causation. This is unsurprising – AI, and in particular machine learning, should be used to trawl through the data and calculate which factors are critical and how spend corresponds to RoI, allowing for more advanced solutions.

Combining educational skills with data science

In education, children’s outcomes (and safety) are paramount. Data products that prioritise these two things can help solve numerous problems within education. Predictive and prescriptive analytics, for example, can help target attendance related issues such as persistent absence.

Data-engineering and data-science, combined with in-depth, first-hand knowledge and experience of education within the UK on a day-to-day basis, is an essential combination in the push to build data reporting software.

Intelligent insights will help to better student outcomes, with AI transforming general and abstract transactions into something idiosyncratic – bettering education establishments, from MATs to schools. AI, then, might not be a bridge too far after all.

We now live in a world bristling with technology, and our classrooms are no exception. And with schools growing ever-more accustomed to EdTech – itself evolving in line with demand – things do indeed seem bright for the sector.

Brian Mann is Head of Product, and Arfan Ismail is Product Manager, at Education Software Solutions

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com