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This year has been truly unprecedented. As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept across the world, it has resulted in seismic shifts in our everyday lives.
Nowhere has this been seen more than in education, and in education technology in particular. Figures published in October by AdEPT Technology Group show that the adoption of educational technology has soared by 131% this year compared to the whole of 2019. The pandemic has also transformed the learning experience of so many – of all ages – emphasising and highlighting a growing desire for digital transformation.
In many ways, as in other sectors, we are seeing an acceleration of changes that already existed. Online learning, for instance, previously a key point within a university’s five-year roadmap, has now become an integral part of courses underway right now. Jacqueline Daniell, Chief Executive of Wey Education, which runs online school InterHigh, believes the pandemic has accelerated global adoption of edtech in schools and colleges by about five years – while others suggest it may have advanced its development yet further still.
With this acceleration, the benefits of edtech are becoming increasingly well-known. As our partners, Owl Ventures (the largest edtech focussed fund in the world), recently set out in their 2020 report, there is a digital revolution rapidly unfolding in the education and workforce-development sectors:
The global education market is set to rise from $6 trillion in 2020, to up to $25 trillion in 2030. It is estimated that the next decade will see an additional 800 million K-12 graduates and 350 million post-secondary-school graduates more than today; and — with unprecedented demand for upskilling and reskilling — there is a surge in the value of education in the workforce. With historic market challenges — of infrastructure, capital and talent — being rapidly removed, we are now in a time where there is a fundamental acknowledgment that education technology will have a profound effect on the billions of worldwide learners of all ages.
By the middle of this year, edtech funding for 2020 had already reached $4.1b. This doesn’t include a recently closed $200 million funding round for India’s online education startup Byju’s, from investors including BlackRock Inc. and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. as demand for such classes skyrockets during the coronavirus pandemic.
It is evident that edtech is highly in demand, and very much here to stay. Institutions will require yet more complex and sophisticated edtech solutions to make this work. This year’s lessons won’t be quickly forgotten, and as we emerge from the other side of this health crisis it is very likely that we’ll see edtech used less as simply a means of ensuring education’s continuity, but instead realising its potential to enrich the learning experience of all students.
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