Edtech is a growing industry. After a long time being simply a branch of regular software developing, it experienced a boom and went mainstream in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caught the world by storm. There has always been a need for advancing the way we learn, especially in overcoming the old ways of traditional classroom management, and with the perks of the world health crisis the innovative solutions for new age learning made their big breakthrough to the educational institutions.

The public attention and the money that is being invested into edtech ventures is almost equal to the whole hype around it. It is estimated that since 2014, nearly 4500 edtech startups have been founded, and have attracted more than a billion dollars in investments, way more than any other startup sector. Now, within all the buzz around edtech, there are some questions about the sustainability of digital learning.

So what’s the hype all about? Read on to find out.

The popularity of online learning and on-demand courses is consistently rising, due to the public dissatisfaction with the school infrastructure. The rigidity of the traditional school system is being harshly criticized for fostering inequity and misadapted curricula, citing the demand for a more individualized approach to learning.

As the digital age by default offers an opportunity to develop skills of personal choice, and not to be bound to studying predefined curriculums that are tailored for mass educational needs, it is quite logical that the format of the resources that are presented in digital learning modules should be a better fit for many.

Some hype terms such as personalized adaptive learning and AI are exactly what they say – they offer teachers greater flexibility to adapt learning to individual students’ needs, and save a lot of time and energy while still providing quality content for learning.

Due to the mass global use of mobile devices and transferring most of the communication to digital networking, it can be comfortably said that smartphones and tablets are the classrooms of the future and so they need proper technology to make the most out of it. The methodology of learning has significantly changed in order to fit the modern abstract formats, and the rise of edtech has come as a natural response to enhancing the whole educational process in terms of exploring the ways the digital world can be used to create very economical, but effective solutions for educational practices.

The usage of the Internet has not only increased the information flow and coordination, but also created a global workspace for connecting everyone involved in the education process, therefore contributing to the democratization of education. The digital infrastructure of the modern world has lowered barriers to access to the resources.

One of the most prominent features of edtech is that it provides a platform for interacting with different types of media, according to the needs of the educator or learner. Digital age has brought a significant innovation in content delivery and the educational system is increasingly exploiting that in an effort to revamp the whole learning process by integrating hybrid curriculums and technology.

Most edtech solutions on the market provide more or less similar options led by the new ways of learning concepts based on image/video content analysis, multimedia search, streaming and overall content delivery. Edtech leans on the fact that an incredibly large amount of multimedia data is being produced, therefore leading to a new demand to educate learners on interacting with the type of educational content effectively and develop better digital intelligence.

As the edtech industry is growing, there is a constant competition going on among both educators – in terms of resources, and developers – in terms of software delivery: who will create a learning platform that covers the quality of content delivery that matches classic educational methods, and simultaneously make it available for mass use.

Operating school systems is a demanding task and requires a lot of human staff and energy in order to maintain the quality of the service. It is, naturally, quite expensive because it is based on using human resources to do jobs that can be done automatically. Not to mention the expensive tuition rates of traditional schools and colleges.

Digital solutions for learning and management make that effort much less demanding in terms of labour and they save a lot of time. Online education, because it is fast and available to a large number of users at the same time, costs less money and it is a quick and in most cases affordable solution that is gaining more and more popularity.

Educational technology provides personalized support to learners and educators that developers and investors hope will drive the future demand for online education formats. Technology is developing every day and the digital world is coming up with new solutions, so we just might peek into the future and see that edtech sure is becoming the leading learning method of the modern world.