It is expected that the emerging AI technologies embedded in educational chatbots will be able to provide personalized assessments on eLearning platforms. From offering feedback during eLearning courses to fast-tracking of the learning process, altogether it facilitates a student-oriented approach.
There is still a huge impact across the globe of Covid-19, cases are still increasing and recoveries are happening at a slow rate, while all this is happening, there are more than 1.2 billion children in 143 countries affected by school closures due to pandemic. With the sudden shift from the classrooms to e-classrooms, in several parts of the globe, everyone is wondering whether the adoption of online learning will continue to persist post-COVID-19, and how it would impact the worldwide education market.
Before Covid-19, the growth of adoption in education technology had already started increasing. Global education technology investments had already reached to US$18.66 billion in 2019, and the projected reach is US$350 billion by 2025.
Language applications, virtual tutoring, video conferencing, online learning application and software, there has been a significant surge in usage since the pandemic started.
How the education sector is responding to COVID-19?
In response to remarkable demand, multiple online learning platforms are offering free access to their premium services. Many online learning platforms are bolstering capabilities to provide a one-stop-shop for both teachers/ tutors and students. Like Lark, a Singapore-based collaboration suite was initially developed by ByteDance as an internal tool. Online learning platforms started offering teachers and students unlimited video conferencing time, auto-translation capabilities, real-time edits on projects, smart calendar scheduling, subtitles of the conversation and reliable connectivity.
Multiple online platforms have developed their system to function well in a larger remote area, companies like Alibaba cloud has deployed more than 100,000 new cloud servers within 2-3 hours, to set up rapid capacity expansion.
How E-learning will evolve
While the bigger companies like Alibaba Cloud, Byju’s and Lark are building up better system and wider cloud servers, there is still drawback like teachers as well as students are there with no or less training, insufficient bandwidth, and fewer preparations from both the students and teachers side might lead to poor user experience as well results. Some of them believe, a new hybrid model of education will rise, with significant benefits.
“INTEGRATION OF IT AND AI IN EDUCATION WILL BE ACCELERATED AND E-LEARNING WILL EVENTUALLY BECOME AN INTEGRAL PART OF SCHOOL EDUCATION.” SAYS WANG TAO, VP OF TENCENT CLOUD.
Advantages of E-learning
It is relevant, self-paced, and content. All these needs are fulfilled with the online mode of learning that is e-learning. Here students can learn at their own comfort and requirement. It accommodates everyone’s needs, lectures or sessions can be taken multiple times; it can be revised n number of times. Saves times as students and teachers do not need to travel to the institutes. E-learning enables educators to get a higher degree of coverage to communicate the message in a consistent way for their target audience. It is environment friendly as well, as it is a paperless way of learning, it protects the environment to an extent. As per a study done on e-learning courses, it is found that distance based learning programs consumed around 90% less power and generated 85% less amount of CO2 emission as compared to traditional schooling.
Conclusion
It seems quite clear that the pandemic has utterly disrupted the education system. Major world events are often an infection point for speedy innovation – a nice example we should be considering is the rise of e-commerce post-SARS. While we are not so sure whether the same can be applied to e-learning post-COVID-19 or not, there are still a few sectors where investment has not gone down. But one thing is clear from the pandemic scenario is the dissemination of knowledge across borders, companies, organizations, and societies. If e-learning plays a nice role here, we must explore its full potential.
