Technology that redefines education sector

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When talking about technology innovation, automatically we tend to talk of industry or service. What about education? Technology is becoming more and more ubiquitous in all educational campuses. It has become integral to the process of learning. We have online learning; interactive digital classroom. This impacts students, professionals undergoing skills enhancement or new skills acquisition as well as those imparting education. Like any other organizations, higher education institutions too must adopt technology to remain innovative.

Here is a set of technology trends relevant in this context:

1. Smart Campus – What is a smart campus? This is a digital or physical space in which smart devices and humans interact freely. Some are in the preliminary stages. But this will become a de facto phenomenon in the coming years.
2. Personalization in delivery – Like insurance or banks that personalize a product specifically for an individual based on a lot of factors, more and more personalization will happen in the way education is delivered. Take for example “Nudging.” This is about using data for driving certain behaviour in order to make learning fun and help the students succeed. The data can be used to make time for swimming or sport in between classes or prescribe good habits with examples to a lab session interspersed with studies.
   
   
3.  Credentialing tech - Eliminating fraud in education space is quite critical. Technology can help in creating and securing digital credentials. This will be quite useful for the educational institutions in admission process as well as recruitment.
4. Life cycle and career Management - Students should continue to have a centralized outlook into their educational path. This should be the case as the students move from one phase of their educational journey into another. More integration of cloud based business applications with learning management solutions will become the norm. Institutions will have more hybrid platforms to deliver, assess, measure the entire life cycle of learning and administration. This will also help in career aspirations of the students across different streams.
5. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) – Imagine the various wireless presentation technologies that allows users as well as consumers to project materials from a device onto a screen via wi-fi. More and more institutions are adopting BYOD policies and seamless integration of the existing systems should follow. 

Indian higher educational institutions like universities, centre of excellences, research labs have shown appetite for technology. A lot more needs to be done by others in the next level. But to truly succeed, we must inject technology starting from primary schooling in order to expand the base at the bottom of the pyramid. For that, both the environment, infrastructure and reskilling of current teachers’ eco-system are required to be done.