The depth of the change in teaching and learning in the last 12 months has been breathtaking. The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be the ultimate black swan event spelling out the “tech or die” message to the education industry — and innovation will not only continue but accelerate. While many of these innovations aren’t new, greater acceptance and investment will speed up the pace of change and ramp up scalability.
Drawing on recent features and discussions taking place in the education technology (edtech) industry, I believe there are six areas of innovation that will shape education technology over the course of this decade. These innovations will be propelled by three key market drivers:
Market Driver #1: Organizing Information Is Gold, as Focus Becomes the New Currency
For so many of us, locked inside during the pandemic, the ubiquity of learning and educational content online supplied us with a constant flow of new knowledge. However, the explosion of online content and the daily digital bombardment of information is leaving us mentally exhausted. We’re moving from an information age to an age of overwhelm.
At the same time, we have transitioned to a “one-click” society, where we expect everything to be available instantly. Most of us are not looking for more content to consume; we just want to arrive at point B as quickly as possible. The need for more focused learning and educational content, and at Twitch speed, will drive two key developments:
Innovation #1: Rise of Vertical Search Engines Specifically for Learning
The quantity of free and paid content will create opportunities for companies that can vet it; sort through and organize it; and suggest the best resources, playlists and learning paths to the people who need them.
When you perform a web search in Google, Bing or Yahoo, you’re using a horizontal search engine (also called general search). Those engines return results from across the entire internet. For some time, we’ve also had specialist vertical search engines that provide domain expertise (for example, travel sites like Kayak, real estate engines like Trulia and job search sites like Indeed and Monster).
The time is ripe for a similar platform in education. Curating the quickly growing amount of online learning and educational resources available could be one of the most appealing and cost-effective opportunities that traditional academic and training providers have.
The time is ripe for this disruption, because the first antitrust action taken against Google took place in 2020, signaling a shift in the search industry, which hasn’t been disrupted in over 20 years. In the wake of the antitrust suit, we’ll see new players enter this market for specialized information, including new online search aggregators in learning and education.
To make this innovation a reality and successful for providers, intelligent curation, which finds all the required learning content and organizes it to meet specific user needs, is imperative. Artificial intelligence (AI) opens possibilities for taking curation to new heights, which is the second key trend we’ll see.
Innovation #2: Intelligent Curation as a Differentiator
For a while, AI-based personalization has leveraged real-time data to deliver more relevant content and adaptive learning. However, this technology has arguably been operating at the fringes, complementing traditional offline teaching. Now, with greater investment, we’ll see organizations scale up this technology and the emergence of new capabilities that will help learners sift through a huge gamut of content to find the useful pieces.
We will also see the equivalent of news-reading apps focused on education. With these apps, learning will be primarily consumed on the go, through personalized learning bites tailored to individual learner needs. Providers will also use AI to offer auto-generated videos, script extraction from media, auto-translation and other services to help repurpose learning content for the fast-paced digital world.
Market Driver #2: The Increasing Commoditization of Learning Drives Search for New Sustainable Revenue Models
During lockdown, interest in free online learning soared to an unprecedented level. Offering products for free in hopes of earning sales later has long been a strategy for many edtech companies. But the uncertainty caused by the pandemic has made that approach riskier and more challenging. There is no guarantee that the influx of new customers will ever convert to paying ones, which means higher acquisition costs with little or no return. Customers grow accustomed to free products and become more price-sensitive and reluctant to pay; the “freemium” model can anchor that expectation.
Another challenge is that with so much free learning content, content becomes commoditized, and the need to differentiate and provide targeted content becomes essential for business survival. Investors are also eyeing those edtech businesses that can prove they have a sustainable revenue model and can generate paying customers. This market driver will see edtech entrepreneurs become more creative with how they generate leads and win new business:
Innovation #3: New Monetization Strategies Based on Free Trials, Not “Freemium”
While the evergreen freemium approach has long been a critical lead generation strategy, expect to see more edtech companies switch to free trials as a safer bet. While offering many of the benefits of the freemium tactic, free trials have a natural time limit that dissuades current customers from down-selling, as they know a trial is a short-term solution.
Free trials also provide a solution to the migration problem; customers sign up with the knowledge that their free time will be limited, so their upfront expectation is that they will have to pay at some point. In the pandemic-induced economic downturn, we’ll see more edtech businesses use these time-limited free trials to test the effectiveness of a free offering in increasing customer acquisition.
Innovation #4: Increasing Syndication and Consolidation
2020 was a busy one for edtech M&A activity, after relatively lackluster investment for several years. Expect the industry to be busier this decade. We’ll see a significant increase in partnerships, acquisitions, buy-outs and initial public offerings (IPOs) in the coming years, because every edtech founder is thinking about a new way to become differentiated in an increasingly saturated market. Edtech consolidation also brings the addition of value-added services, which companies can use to differentiate themselves and entice more customers to the fold.
Market Driver #3: Pedagogy Becomes a Product
When we look at the evolution of edtech, we can see that phase 1 was about workflow efficiency, producing big infrastructure companies. Phase 2 was about bringing content online, producing learning platforms and libraries.
We are now entering phase 3, which is about bringing teaching online. In other words, the next wave of successful edtech companies will be schools, not tools.
Online schools are not new; they’ve been steadily growing over the past few years, but they have been a niche. Expect new incarnations to emerge this decade.
Innovation #5: The Rise of Tech-led Private Labelling of Education
One interesting development we’ve seen emerge during the pandemic, particularly across Asia, are “pop-up” online schools delivering learning through live video streaming that meet the needs of an on-demand audience who also crave the human touch. Now, these schools are “one-man band” set-ups, where anyone wanting to offer online lessons is no longer reliant on an intermediary like a publisher or a school. Technology has put the power in the hand of the teacher, the creator, the owner of the knowledge.
Expect to see more pop-up schools sprout up across many other countries, evolving into online “pods” and “micro-schools.” While there will be concerns about quality control, public rating and reviews will weed out inferiority, letting high-quality teaching and content thrive.
Innovation #6: Digital Classrooms and Virtual Campuses
Internet of things (IoT) will play a key role this decade in universalizing education and creating connected learning experiences. A remote teacher will demonstrate concepts on a remote blackboard, bringing concepts alive for the learners. We’ll see greater augmentation of live video classes, and digital assistants will double as learning buddies by providing contextual answers to learners’ questions.
Over time, with further advances and scalability in intelligent cloud infrastructure, we’ll see traditional campuses spin off into cloud avatars, with massive public or private learning clouds substituting or augmenting sprawling campuses. Teachers will create their own lessons in interactive virtual worlds. And as the next generation of “Gen Alphas” come of age this decade, they’ll be comfortable studying at these virtual campuses, with options for the occasional class picnics, prom nights and class social bonding sessions.
