The report highlights the near-term need for progressive or digital education, citing the following for the current situation:
- With the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools are turning to digital learning to continue educating children
- However, screen fatigue and the stress of adjusting to digital devices for long periods of time create problems in accelerating the learning process
- Tech readiness and use of innovative technologies can better prepare schools around the world for effective digital education
The three cutting-edge technologies of artificial intelligence, blockchain and robots have been applied in some countries. Check out each of them:Artificial intelligence and its growing relevance in education:
- AI can improve the digital learning experience by making it more interactive and adaptive by:
- It helps teachers gauge the different levels of attention and concentration of different students, and the areas where they get bored and where they pick up the pace
- Artificial intelligence can allow amateur teachers to perceive and understand the classroom in better ways, such as when to slow down, when to speed up, ask questions to stimulate passive classroom
- Learning Analytics helps create hands-on assessments and exams through simulations in professional settings
- AI technologies can help reintegrate learning and assessment, using real-time data and feedback to help students
The Role of Robotics in Digital Education:
- Effective use of robotics will require a major reshaping of the role of the teacher. The combination of robotics and artificial intelligence can help improve the teaching quality of human teachers by:
- Social robots are constantly being fed into the data stream and have enormous potential to disrupt teaching and learning.For example, when a person studies psychology on a computer, the computer can in turn measure how the student learns psychology and make the learning experience more nuanced
- The robot can easily complete some routine actions of the teacher.For example, it allows 2 students to go to a corner of the room for a 10-minute conversation in French while the rest of the class learns action verbs with a live teacher
The growing importance of blockchain:
- Of the three technologies covered in the report, blockchain is considered the most mature for adoption
- Blockchain could ease education system’s burden of maintaining decades of certificate and degree data
- Blockchain-verified qualifications can make the entire process of providing certificates and maintaining large amounts of data and records extremely smooth, simple and manageable
The OECD report concludes by highlighting the following points regarding the implementation of these technologies:
Relationship between technology use and learning outcomes varies by country
Teachers need to invest in learning to use AI and robotics and optimizing them in a humane way to provide the best possible education for their students
The technology produces the best results when humans are involved in using it and benefiting from it, not when they are left to their devices.