।। ओम ।।
The Future of
Technology in Education

For me, it's clear that technology will play a
central role in our lives and it’s estimated that
by 2020 there will be 1.5 million new
digitised jobs across the globe.
The changing times and the advent of
technology implies that the education
methods shall also change. Technology’s role
in schools shall evolve from a contained
computer class into a versatile learning tool
that could change how we demonstrate
concepts, assign projects and assess
progress.
In the traditional classroom, the teacher is the
primary source of information, and the
learners passively receive it. This model of the
teacher has been in education for a long
time, and it is still very much in evidence
today. However, because of access to
information and educational opportunity that
technology has enabled, in many classrooms
today we see the teacher’s role shifting to the
“guide on the side” as students take more
responsibility for their own learning using
other tech-based methods to receive
instruction. Schools and universities across
the world are beginning to redesign learning
spaces to enable this new model of
education, foster more interaction and small
group work, and use technology as an
enabler. The Khan Lab School — Khan
Academy’s experimental private school
without homework or grades or all-day direct
instruction — uses video lectures to provide
instruction to students instead of books, and
the class for other more important things like
discussion, robot-building, and so on. Video
lectures allow the child to move at his/her
own pace and not be forced to adhere to a
strict timeline.
Technology in education shall also help
expand education beyond linear, text-based
learning and provide to engage students
who learn best in other ways. One such
method is the gamification of concepts.
Game-like simulations that put students in
roles like city planner, journalist, or engineer
and ask them to solve real-world problems,
not only make education more fun, they also
help in developing skills that cannot come
with the traditional academic model, because
creative thinking does not come about just by
knowing the right answers to a test. Digital
simulations and models can help teachers
explain processes that happen too quickly or
too slowly, or are too big or too small to
demonstrate in a physical classroom. Virtual
reality is a hot topic in education. With brands
such as Oculus, Samsung and Google
innovative learning resources are now
available, capable of immersing students in
their chosen subject.
But technology shall also have other
advantages in education, the prime one
being that bags shall no longer be heavy. It
shall also lead to significant cost reduction as
everything is now available online. And
finally, technology shall revolutionise
education by normalising lifelong learning. It
shall be key to facilitate today’s knowledge-
driven society, prevalent demands for
continuous professional development, and
the changing nature of employment where
keeping one job for life is no longer
expected.
We're exiting what you could call the
industrial age  and we're going into this
information revolution. And technology is
going to take over the labour and information
processing classes of the society, leaving only
the creative class — the entrepreneurs, the
artists, the researchers — for humans. We thus
need a society where we have a large
creative class; where almost everyone can
participate as an entrepreneur,  an artist, as a
researcher. And it is not even utopian. With
technology to make education more fun and
concepts stronger, we can have a society
where everyone gets there. And when you
think of it as just a citizen of the world,  it's
pretty exciting. Think about the type of equity
we can we have,  and the rate at which
civilisation could even progress.  And so, I'm
pretty optimistic about it.  I think it's going to
be a pretty exciting time to be alive.