Social responsibility is a must for EdTech: How technology and learning environments shape each other
Education is an important part of our cultural environment. We spend most of our lives learning in one way or another. Learning starts at our homes in early childhood and continues in kindergartens, schools, universities, vocational and professional institutions and in a broad variety of courses, activities and everyday situations.
But also, modern life is unthinkable without technology. Technology permeates all spheres of society and education is not an exclusion. The role of technology in the education process has been growing in recent years, just like the number of education technology (EdTech) providers.
On the one hand, EdTech is expanding as a vertical market. On the other, it is expanding as part of the everyday learning and cultural environment, as a new social practice — a new routine. This text talks about the social responsibilities of the EdTech business and the ways technology and learning environments affect each other.
Rapid EdTech market growth affects the ways people learn worldwide
Working papers of the National Bureau of Economic Research reported as early as August 2017 that the market of PreK–12 (preschool) software alone exceeded $8 billion in the US, while the projected estimated value of the EdTech industry worldwide was expected to reach $252 billion by 2020.
The recent Grand View Research report is less ambitious in its estimates and argues that the overall global EdTech market size is valued at $76.4 billion in 2020. The researchers suggest that the market will be growing by 18.1% per year and should reach $285.23 billion in revenue in 2027.
However, once we consider the changes COVID-19 has brought to the global education market, the numbers might grow significantly. Post-COVID update to HolonIQ’s Global Market Sizing report suggests that EdTech is growing at 16.3% and will become 2.5 times bigger from 2019 to 2025. HolonIQ estimates that EdTech will reach $404 billion in total global expenditure in 2025, which equates to 5.2% of the global education market.
While the estimates vary, each study expects that education technology services and products will grow rapidly in the near future. This means that the way we learn will be shaped by EdTech even further worldwide, which opens new prospects (growing access to education, personalized learning, international collaboration) and also new challenges (lack of socialization, increased anxiety, further inequality between the poor and the rich).
Education is a big business, but it is also an environment where people get socialized in particular ways. Along with innovation, technology brings cultural change, which can be both positive and negative for various groups and regions. This is one of the reasons why EdTech providers have to be socially responsible and account for what they market, how they market it and to whom.
Our learning habits are affected by a variety of technological solutions and EdTech platforms
The times of blackboards, notebooks, pens and pencils are almost gone. The learning of tomorrow now resembles old-time sci-fi novels and movies.
Students can access learning materials instantly from any location and from almost any device. Medical students and doctors can practice surgeries via VR without leaving their homes; classrooms can be transformed into historical venues and scenes with the help of AR; AI is used to personalize learning materials and adapt courses to students’ learning habits and capabilities.
EdTech is not just a combination of these features; it is also focused on solving particular tasks in the educational process. For example, workflow optimization platforms assist teachers with routine class administration tasks (automated notifications, scheduling meetings), machine intelligence-based platforms enable learning personalization, e-learning platforms for business help organizations create corporate educational environments to organize individual and collaborative specialist training and to individually adjust learning pace and load.
As a result, education as we knew it has been transformed significantly. It’s also becoming increasingly accessible globally with a variety of new technologies and learning approaches becoming part of our everyday lives.
However, not everyone can benefit from technological innovation, as major economic, political, and social disparities across the globe preclude EdTech from being used equally and by all.
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