Current trends EdTech

The beginning of the year is the time of forecasts. So we could not resist the temptation of virtual time travel in search of the future of EdTech.

EdTech is a young trend, it is 20 years old. It develops rapidly, absorbing everything new, and not only. EdTech instantly integrated the work of the past, incorporating both insights and unsolved tasks. Therefore, we will begin our journey through time with a short excursion into history.

EdTech's predecessor, distance learning, appeared in 1728, when Professor Caleb Phillips, a teacher of shorthand, submitted to the Boston newspaper an announcement about recruiting students from across the country to study shorthand through correspondence. In 1840, the idea of ​​distance learning was revived by the British stenographer Isaac Pitman, who sent his lessons to everyone by mail.

This is how the first distance courses from leading experts appeared. In the modern format, their analogue XSeries from edEx is in high demand all over the world.

Very quickly, the idea of ​​distance learning was evaluated and institutionalized. In 1856, C. Tousen and G. Lanchensteidt founded an institute of correspondence education in Berlin, sending students educational materials and examinations.

Coursera in the modern online space was the first to implement a similar approach by offering courses, grading and certification to a mass audience.

Almost immediately (by the standards of the past) specialized courses appeared after the Institute of Correspondence Education. In 1873, Anna Eliot Tiknor established the Ticknor's Society, a postal education system for women. The prototype served as the English program "Society for the Support of Home Education" ("Society for the Encouragement of Home Study").
Reputable players in the educational sphere turned on a little later. In 1874, a postal education program was proposed by the University of Illinois (Illinois State University). In 1892, the University of Chicago created the first distance program, and in 1911, an analogue launched the University of Queensland (University of Queensland) in Brisbane (Australia).

Today we are seeing an increase in the number of university online programs. The last 2-3 years there are not only applications for full-fledged online degrees, but also the first installations: Udacity and Georgia Tech launched the first fully online Masters in Computer Science.

Australia was in trend, but still lagged behind in time due to its territorial distance from the leaders. But she solved unique problems. In 1914, a remote elementary school program appeared in Australia. Students at the Melbourne College of Education taught children living in remote areas by correspondence with them. This practice soon spread to secondary schools and technical schools. Similar systems for schoolchildren began to be used in Canada and New Zealand.

More than 100 years ago, the first experience of adapting and personalizing distance learning for the most demanding audiences, whose motivation to catch and retain is extremely difficult, appeared.

Adaptation and personalization and current trends today. Nowadays, the trend of asynchronous learning is again becoming popular, the format of which is convenient for super-busy online students. Asynchronous learning implies the possibility of delayed (usually a week) student access to teaching materials and tasks. The student is free to choose the time to read the theory and perform control tasks. The de facto trend of asynchronous learning is almost 300 years old.

After 1917, distance education began to develop in Russia. A special “consulting” model was created in the USSR. Studying in absentia, students could work. Twice a year, they were granted study leave for the session. By the 60s of the twentieth century, there were 11 correspondence universities in the USSR and many correspondence departments in universities.

Today, for some reason, this model is considered a new trend. Hybrid learning, combining online and offline forms, introduced Udacity two years ago.

Was in the USSR and its own system of remote work with students. In fact, it was the first Talent Management System (Talent Management System).

Perhaps some of the inhabitants of Habr remember the magazine "Kvant" and the Physics and Mathematics Olympiad from the leading universities of the country on its pages. Talented readers were asked to solve a number of problems printed in the journal and send a notebook with solutions to the university. After checking with the comments of the teachers, the notebooks returned by mail. To the most talented schoolchildren who have completed all the rounds of the Olympiad, leading universities offered preferential admission conditions.
Today Foxford offers a similar system of olympiads in Russia in the online space.

Distance education has always quickly absorbed new technologies. With the invention of radio, new forms of work with students have appeared. The first university to introduce radio into education was the State University of Pennsylvania. Shortly thereafter, in 1925, the University of Iowa began to lend for study on a five-year program of radio courses. And in 1934, the same university launched the first educational channel in the world, which still operates today.

With the advent of television, television courses became popular: in the 1950s, universities in the United States and Europe actively offered telecourses to students.

The Internet has opened limitless horizons for the development of distance education, creating the possibility of distance interactive learning. On May 30, 1997, an order was issued by the Ministry of Education of Russia, which made it possible to conduct experiments in the field of online education.

In 20 years, online education has evolved from digitizing individual lectures to educational high-tech ecosystems. And this happened partly due to the accumulated developments in the distance education system of the past.
Together with ready-made solutions, EdTech inherited and unsolved problems, the work on which sets the current directions of development today.

Feedback Systems

In the distance education system of the past, letters were often lost or arrived with a great delay, teachers did not receive feedback from students about the course.
The Internet has only partially removed these problems. Messages are not lost, but the lack of information about student requests hinders the more adaptive development of online learning.
Today, market leaders regularly analyze the most requested courses, ask students to leave reviews and give assessments, closely follow the posts of students on forums and blogs. But spontaneous single reactions cannot be the basis for serious development. Therefore, we are confident that in the near future, the leading EdTech players will pay special attention to the development of user feedback systems. Both technological solutions analyzing student behavior on the online resource, as well as new approaches (for example, projective ones) and services will be created to systematically gather the views of all stakeholders of the educational system. The first examples are already there.

Chinese resource XuetangX is actively developing the Xuetangxsay channel, where users post their own content. These are usually short videos - an interview about a specific topic. The mechanism allows you to identify and study the interests of online students, to increase their activity. The platform also has a Rain Classroom (Rainy Class), which is designed for a multilateral assessment of teaching technologies, the learning process, student feedback and methodological improvements.

At edX, in the Donate section (“Donate”), users are invited to make a targeted donation: students can vote for creating or improving a service, developing a course on a topic of interest to them.

Motivation and engagement tools

It is known that not everyone who starts an online course takes it to the end. Reducing the number of students who drop out is EdTech's most urgent task. For the sake of retaining students, online players will continue:

Experiment with the presentation of educational material. Pretty soon, educational online resources refused to post lectures in a general text format, or video and audio recordings. And they proceeded to the dosed presentation of educational material and the use of multimodal content.

An example of this approach is micro-learning: submission of information in fragments of 2–3 minutes with the possibility of interruption. Dosed information is better absorbed. And the alternation of text fragments with video and audio inserts or other interactivity further enhances interest and motivation. "Tichera Method" - a proprietary development of Puzzle English - based on the concept of micro-learning.

Implement adaptive learning. The approach is based on the principle of “nature conformability” (formulated in the 17th century) or the need to match a new student’s abilities and level of development. Such an “adjustment” for each student does not imply simplification of the material, but finding the simplest path to knowledge for each student. An individual approach must take into account many things: the current level of knowledge of the student, the rate of assimilation of the material, "weak points". “Personal Plan” - Puzzle English service is an example of how artificial intelligence copes with the task of organizing training according to an individual plan.

We are confident that adaptive learning will develop and not only through AI technologies. For example, Coursera is experimenting with the unification of students in mini-groups; in each of these groups there is a curator who responds not only to the training, but also to the motivational requests of online students.

We believe that in the near future, in line with the development of adaptive learning, we will see the growth of hybrid models (online + offline) and offers of flexible choice of learning formats (alone or with a teacher, synchronously or asynchronously, and their hybrids).

Apply high-tech solutions. EdTech platforms widely use gamification (Duolingo, Puzzle English) and simulations to engage in the learning process (interactive ABA English video dialogues).
For modeling the familiar environment - virtual classes (Udacity) and the Internet audience (Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
For maximum personalization - AI and neural network solutions: an electronic consultant for students based on the IBM Watson cognitive self-learning system (University of Deakin (Australia).
There are a lot of examples of high-tech solutions that promote the involvement and increase the motivation of online students, and we are confident that their number will grow.

Introduce social involvement mechanisms. Work in mini-groups (for example, an inverted-class technology: online students independently study theory, and in a virtual classroom they gather to discuss the material they have learned, to complete practical tasks and test knowledge), to combine students in pairs to collaborate on the material, cross-check, - close working contact with virtual classmates launches additional mechanisms of involvement (competitive motivation and competition for status in the group, the desire to demonstrate their abilities, responsibility for achieving a common educational goal, etc.).

We are confident that the set of social and psychological tools for motivating and involving online students in education will be expanded and actively applied.

Summing up, let's designate four key directions of EdTech development:

1. Manufacturability. EdTech is actively developing new technological solutions to improve learning. The technologies will allow attractively packing content, motivating online students, individually approaching the organization of training, minimizing the routine, ensuring interactivity, mobility, flexibility and comfort, and receiving feedback.

2. Personalization instead of mass. Online educational systems are moving from the principle of “equal content for all” to the principle of “unique content for everyone”.

3. Systematic instead of fragmentation. Online educational resources from sites offering training courses and programs are transformed into ecosystems of interest
- online students and universities (2U),
- online students and corporations (Udacity),
- online students, universities and corporations (edX),
- online students, universities, corporations and the state (XuetangX, China)
In an ecosystem, an online learner does not receive a separate course, but an Individual Development Program or a Career Development Program. Universities - a talent sourcing mechanism; corporations - recruitment and personnel development tools. The state is the preservation and development of intellectual and industrial potential.

4. From traditional learning (teacher-student) to self-study. The penetration of online learning into the system of traditional education is becoming more widespread. The country specific features of learning and the traditional model of knowledge transfer from teacher to student are blurred. Today, the student himself can choose what, how, in what rhythm, from whom to learn. With the accumulation of success stories of online students (successful careers, business development, income growth, etc.), the value of the culture of self-development and self-study will increase, and with it the demand for online education will grow.

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The article uses materials from the Global Education Network Network.