Edtech Advancements and its Future Prospective

John Ang, Chief Technology Officer, EtonHouse International Education Group

Edtech is common among schools to be used to enhance classroom and online learning. It is used by educators or administrators who could have tried an online product, or an app. Creativity is a key ingredient to help learning fun and more understandable.

A key differentiator to Edtech for classroom or online learning technology is personalisation. It starts off with using many available tools, but it is important to consider a few factors when using a tool.

1. Scalability of the product to customise or use it for different purposes.

2. Data Extraction to enable analytics purposes.

3. Any road map for the product.

4. Ability to interface with other system for added functionalities.

Based on these factors we should choose a product. There should always be a committee made up of teachers, administrators, & IT to look into Edtech product as a group. However, we should never stifle research and exploration. Everyone in a company should be encouraged to ride on a digital wave. If there is something useful to share, they can always bring up to the committee after their own experimentation.

“ We need to understand our current landscape, experiment new technologies, if applicable, we try on smaller scope of project.”

Another concern on Edtech or any technology is geopolitical tensions. At many occasions, we need different solutions for different countries. This will likely continue in years to come. We just have to cope with two sets of technology.

Edtech should also consider administrative system, for example, student management system, to be integrated too as many of times we will need to communicate within schools, with parents and students or external partners. We should also consider areas in-

1. Data Protection / Cybersecurity

2. Analytics – Data can differentiate our offering and bring about personalisation in learning journey.

3. Resource & Cost optimisation (Outsourcing vs insourcing, overseas vs local.

4. Own development or off the shelf products.

As we think through our Edtech landscape for ourselves, these pointers are a topic on its own. Own development has its pros and cons and can give us an edge if the company / users know what they are developing to be a key differentiator in the market and to meet frequent ongoing business needs which off the shelf product will be difficult to do as it serves a bigger audience.

Thinking back, we can easily be lost with all the new technology to be considered for implementation, such as artificial intelligence, AR/VR, using established tool – Kahoot, which other competitors are using etc. Let us be very focused that we need to plan on our own for each company what our own Edtech or IT plans is. We need to understand our current landscape, experiment new technologies, if applicable, we try on smaller scope of project, refer to how others are using but never be overly influenced to them that we are chasing after the latest technology even if your company has abundant resources both in money and manpower. It must be helping business to the next lap. Let’s not chase after technology. Apply technology within our company needs and boundaries / resources.

Let’s have a plan in how we want to do Edtech (within classroom or online) over a 2 -3 years plan. This will help us to understand what we want to achieve with a goal in mind.

EdTech