Opportunities rife in education technology
Last week, this column had reviewed the market for learning management systems (LMS), which is one of the components of the much larger education technology or EdTech industry. The LMS industry is expected to grow to about $19 billion by 2022. Another component of the EdTech world is the e-learning industry and that is likely to be much larger. It’s estimated to be about $65 billion in value by 2023. This is based on the Arizton Advisory and Intelligence report titled E-learning Market — Global Outlook and Forecast 2018-2023.
The education industry is really just taking off. There is immense momentum to unlearn some of the old and learn afresh. The concept of getting a qualification and defining your work life on that basis is likely to change. Organisations are ruthlessly cutting resources that can be replaced by robots. In a brilliant report by the McKinsey Global Institute, Getting Ready for the Future of Work, Bob Kegan of the Harvard Graduate School of Education commented: “It used to be I got my skills in my 20s; I can hang on until 60. It’s not going to be like that anymore. We’re going to live in an era of people finding their skills irrelevant at age 45, 40, 35. And there are going to be a great many people who are out of work. What are you going to do about that? Or is work going to essentially become an elite setting for more favoured, privileged, complex people to live out meaningful lives? That’s a disturbing question. It’s hard for me to believe that we’re going to have a society in which half the people just don’t work. Work itself is intrinsically meaningful. People need to go to work every day.”
To look at the future of education, here is a proposed framework. The verticals would consist of LMS, corporate/continuing education and basic education. The horizontals would essentially be emerging markets and developed markets.
Academic education is what comes to mind immediately. However, the real value lies in training and corporate education sectors. In a typical 40-hour work week, only about 24 minutes can be allocated on average to training and education for employees (source: elogiclearning.com). However, this is critical for the ongoing effectiveness of the company. Hence, there is high premium on gamification and social learning preferably delivered through a mobile application.
Other statistics from the same source indicate that over 67 per cent of users now use mobile phones for learning. In terms of effectiveness, social learning delivers 75 times better RoI than Web-based training. Eighty per cent of learners would be more comfortable with gamification of learning rather than the current relatively unengaging process. This can clearly be seen with highly engaging platforms like Socrative (www.socrative.com). Academic experience suggests that the value of gamification is not as well utilised as it could be.
Simulation is another area that is rapidly advancing based on the convergence of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. As an example of how the game is changing, all the power of complex flight simulators is now ubiquitously available at a miniscule cost due to the advent of virtual reality glasses and the immense processing speeds of mobile phones and tablets. In fields as diverse as business education and medicine, complex real world situations are simulated and the learner is taken through a compressed and highly interactive journey. StratX Simulations and their MarkStrat set of simulations is highly regarded in the academic world as are the offerings available from Harvard Business Publishing. Codeacademy teaches people how to learn coding on their own.
At a corporate level, simulators and gamification enable companies to train and retrain large numbers of employees on complex new systems in areas such as engineering assembly, customer service, banking and a host of applications. McDonalds in partnership with City and Guilds Kineo came up with a well-received and some say addictive initiative called the Till Training Game to get staff at over 1,300 outlets up-and-running in hours.
At the other end of the spectrum, this column featured
Ustad Mobile which is designed to meet the needs of millions of learners without access to rich data and highend devices. Leveraging the same advances in computing power, such systems deliver content that enables the large youth bulge economies in China, South and SouthEast Asia to get a foothold on the education ladder. Byju, the e-learning app from India has been making waves. Techcrunch reported that China’s Tencent invested an undisclosed amount in Byju. Apparently Tencent estimated the value of the company to be close to the $800 million mark.
Over the next few weeks, this column will feature initiatives that are aimed at transforming education and learning in the region.
The writer is founding partner at BridgeDFS, a bespoke digital financial services advisory firm (www.bridgeto.us). Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper’s policy. He can be contacted at sanjiv@bridgeto.us.