In the wake of the coronavirus crisis and resulting lockdown, educational technology has come into its own as a way to manage school closures as well as enable personal and professional development for everyone, despite self-isolation.
Jessica Jackson, Investment Director at GC Angels, discusses how EdTech is innovating through COVID-19.
EdTech has a crucial role to play in ensuring that schools, universities and workplaces deliver learning and training through means that resonate across generations and are intended to augment existing in-person delivery.
Most of us have probably used digital training at work or in our personal lives, perhaps to learn a second language (we’ve all dabbled with Duolingo from time to time) or even how to code.
Yet as we enter this unchartered territory of lockdown at home, without access to the classroom, educational institutions and training delivery businesses have had to fully rely on technology as a means of delivery. That is, if they were even using any at all.
Joe Wicks has been delivering PE lessons over his YouTube channel live stream to get kids (and adults) active during the COVID-19 lockdown, ensuring that we get 30 mins of activity a day to keep ourselves sane.
But how are schools delivering their curriculum? How will universities justify course fees for students studying remotely, and more importantly, deliver content that is engaging and augments learning over and above reading textbooks? How are we all keeping in touch with our workforce to check up on their mental wellbeing before we consider digital delivery to train our teams?
Thankfully, organisations already working with educational institutions and workplaces were poised to support in these key areas and are already working hard to meet the rise in demand.
Immersify Education is a company building the next generation of immersive content for universities using AR and due to release its first app in April for students studying dentistry. While universities were already seeking new ways to deliver education in order to accelerate students’ learning capabilities and improve how they are teaching the curriculum, they probably didn’t expect students to have to suddenly work remotely. This gradual shift in universities changing their teaching mechanisms has now become an overnight reality.
