EdTech is evolving fast, and students’ wants are growing even faster. If you ignore them, you will always be catching up with other e-learning projects. It will turn out that your competitors already have cool technical features, but you haven’t even thought about them.
To avoid catching up with competitors, you can check what technical EdTech trends will increase your profits in 2024. Our article will help you implement all the necessary innovations during your educational app development.
Key points
EdTech trends 2024: personalizing learning through AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Personalization of education is a long-term trend, but now, individual educational trajectories can be built through AI-based tools. And perhaps one of the most important developments over the past year is recommendation systems. Thanks to them, it is possible to automate a separate approach for each group of students. A special place was taken by AI tutors, who help both schoolchildren and students study material and prepare for exams.
Khan Academy can serve as a vivid example of how AI works in learning. Khanmigo virtual tutor, powered by GPT-4, integrates into all processes where students, parents, and educators may need help. Chinese company Squirrel Ai Learning is also developing AI assistants. The Socratic app from Google can analyze a problem in which a student has difficulties, explaining the logic of the solution and its variability.
AI assistants will continue to evolve, and their integration will become more widespread. Also, AI assistants will adapt to teachers and students. A new wave of personalization of educational trajectories will allow for all nuances: level of preparation, interests, need for microlearning, etc.
The share of quality answers and prompts from AI tutors is expected to exceed 90%. This means that AI will be fine-tuned along specific educational lines, and the hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) will be leveled. Perhaps soon, AI-based assistants will be able to coordinate students and educators throughout a course.
AI also helps to tailor curricula and recommend educational courses based on a particular learner’s data. Adapting a program to a student’s level can be seen with Duolingo, where gamified assignments are tailored to specific tasks. Content recommendations also appear. Education platforms like Coursera customize course recommendations through AI, which are collected based on learning history and interests.
LLM-based virtual assistants are coming to education from other fields as well. For example, Woebot was originally envisioned to be a psychotherapy chatbot. As a result, this technology helps students manage their study load and cope with stress, all thanks to the inherent principles of cognitive behavioral therapy.
EdTech trends 2024: engaging in learning with gamification
Gamification is the expected trend of 2024. Nowadays, everyone is trying to present complex material in a game form. For example, a student performs tasks and earns bonus points, unlocks achievements, fills out a progress bar, and participates in a rating. This is interesting not only for children but also for adults, who learn more actively if there are elements of gamification.
These gamification elements will be trending in 2024:
- Characters with development. A student gets a character to which he or she adds personality. This includes developing skills and some sort of visualization, like changing their appearance.
- Game levels. Here, it’s the same as with characters – people are interested in seeing progress and opening new locations and tasks.
- Points and reward system. The student has a scale that shows his or her progress. Here, it is important not to give rewards just for fun to keep people interested and motivated.
- Storylines. Learning is not just a series of assignments but a whole story. As homework is completed, the plot is revealed.
- Competitions and rankings. Tasks for which you can get additional rewards and become the best in the end. Ideally, rating tables are supposed to motivate, including the competitive effect.
- Mascots. They are needed just as a vivid visualization of the prompts.
According to 2020 research, students who were educated with challenge-based gamification raised their performance by up to 89.45% compared to those who only received lectures. This fact demonstrates, one more time, that gamification is indispensable for EdTech.
EdTech trends 2024: learning through VR/AR
Interactivity and realism are smoothly moving into the educational environment. Within the framework of studying the impact of MR (Mixed Reality) on educational experience, a study was conducted using Microsoft Hololens 2. The results showed that with Microsoft Hololens 2, student engagement increased by 35%, and test scores improved by 22%.
With the new technology, students can gain hands-on knowledge through holographic instruction and assessments, and teachers have freed up time – working hours have been reduced by 15%. In addition, using Microsoft Hololens 2 allows students to conduct research and lab work more efficiently and gain skills in a more structured way, such as in medicine.
In April 2023, Coursera announced partnerships with Duke University, Peking University, and Washington University. Virtual reality technology has made new opportunities available to students in Chinese language courses, human physiology, and public speaking. VR complements existing video lectures and other materials and changes depending on the student’s level, personalizing the program. Virtual reality tools can be used both on the student’s own computer and with a special VR/AR headset in educational institutions.
Google Expeditions is another available virtual reality platform. With it, you can interactively explore various locations worldwide, including museum expositions. The application is used for entertaining virtual tours and more in-depth study of the area and culture.
EdTech Trends 2024: Storing Degrees in blockchain
Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize education by increasing trust and transparency through smart contracts. In addition to tuition contracts, smart contracts can empower students, for example, to provide ownership of their academic achievements.
Blockchain is a secure and proven mechanism that can identify users without bureaucratic complexities. For teachers and employers, such a tool changes how educational achievements (degrees, certificates, etc.) are tracked and recognized.
We can already see the University of Arizona utilizing the MyPath tool for degree compliance and then using Pocket, based on a distributed registry, to map the path of students after graduation. Pocket serves as a digital wallet where accomplishments are stored.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed Blockcerts, a blockchain-based technology for creating, issuing, and certifying degrees. This is how the reliability of academic documents is certified.
A new form of payment for education has also become possible. Over 35 educational institutions accept tuition fees in cryptocurrency.
EdTech trends 2024: educational marketplaces
The model of marketplaces has been very popular in recent years. It drives the growth of the e-commerce market because it creates maximum comfort for the buyer. Instead of searching for individual online stores and spending hours studying their assortment and comparing them, you can solve the problem of conditionally buying dishes or a monitor in one place.
As a result, marketplaces began to appear in various industries – including education. The e-learning market is projected to achieve a steady annual growth rate of 3.22%, reaching $65 billion by 2027. Furthermore, 47% of schools have increased their spending on online programs.
The GetCourse site can be called a marketplace. Although this project is better known to many as a tool for creating an educational course, it also serves as an aggregator. More than 500,000 courses from over 15,000 schools are collected on the site now.
The emergence of marketplaces for EdTech projects is not something new for 2024, but now the trend is starting to gain momentum. Aggregators can become one of the stages of the user journey, making it easier to find a course when a student doesn’t understand where and from whom to look for the right program and wants to compare all options on one site.
Conclusion
As we watch the opportunities that come from new technologies, it’s safe to say that much of the innovation will also be adapted to the education sector. Using VR and AR, students can accurately and safely learn anatomy and practice in medical schools. Microlearning and gamification tools are helping to restructure classic programs and make them more effective and engaging. AI assistants are automating the personalization of education. In 2024, we may see even more decisive steps in the digitalization of education.
If you are looking for a reliable IT partner with whom you can confidently develop your complex project, our SoloWay Tech team is your best choice.
