Educational Technology – Are our traditional educators ready?
With so much money coming in to educational tech I thought this was really interesting to see what market leaders are saying on Education Technology.
The system of education is changing and it certainly needs to change.
Education is actually starting to take place online in real examples. The old paradigm of online learning not working in traditional education is no longer true. Every day people engage on a level of education technology online. People learn about products and educate themselves using websites.
I often talk to our customers about the need to educate and collaborate with visitors to their website to ensure they are gathering more leads. This process always works and always increases conversions in every space we have done it. Just by choosing to be an educator.
I have observed that in formal education there seems to have been a struggle to embrace education technology and it seems to me that online engagement is key to a turn around this thought. All of the key learning products I have reviewed are being used to help attract some pretty amazing content creators to the online space and finally formal education is catching up.
Being interactive and not just speaking at your users is helping significantly with webinar technology becoming more affordable.
Making your course and lessons be reduced into smaller bytes of consumable data is also helping educators communicate points more directly. The use of Interactive webinars, not ones where someone just speaks at you and answers things in a chat, but real interaction with students and instructors from the education provider are some excellent methods that bring amazing results.
Are we ready for a shake up? I think so. Online learning does not need to be self paced learning but can be more interactive and engaging than a traditional model when combined into class structures.
Can we really get training from the “best people” in the world for every student? Yes. We can . How? Your class instructor does not need to be that “best person”, the person who writes the content they are learning from is the “best person”, the instructors who facilitate the learning environment to engage with students are skilled at providing discussion points online and moderating the online learning space. This brings personality to Educational Technology with low instructor to student ratios.
One area for me, being an Australian, is that we always refer to teaching children when discussing Education Technology. In Australia we have a real need for older people to be re skilled and Education Technology is going to help us with the re-skill of an aging workforce and providing innovation in years to come.
At M R K we are working on more and more educational technology solutions for non traditional educators. Im certainly hoping our traditional educators begin to engage with this new model and embrace the future that Educational Technology is going to provide.