5 EdTech Trends for 2022

Pandemic, variant, hybrid learning, are words that we have all read and heard far too often during the year 2021. There is no reason to imagine their sudden disappearance. For all that, the mission of the universities remains intact, while the expectations of a student population that has been badly affected by the health crisis and isolation are as strong as ever. To learn and learn better, to face the world of tomorrow, to express their talents and propose their ideas to all the actors of our societies. This is what everyone wants with impatience. This is what drives the progress of schools, teachers and EdTech companies who together imagine the solutions of the future.

We meet these actors on a daily basis and our exchanges with them enrich us every day. They allow us to discover innovations, uses, and issues that can change the world of higher education and make teaching methods evolve.
In 2022, we believe that 5 major trends will be at the heart of the conversations and projects of the key players in higher education and research.

While everyone is talking about the metaverse, the virtual universe in which everyone reinvents themselves and finds themselves in order to escape their reality, the learner still needs to learn. To learn from reality, in the sense that his knowledge, his skills and his future usefulness depend on it. Whether at home or on a university campus, immersing them in the reality of a professional context, of a simulated situation, of a mission to be accomplished, can now be imagined through the visualisation of images, 360° and interactive videos. In a helmet, everything is possible and, above all, without limits.

Why is this essential? What are the benefits of this cognitive immersion?

On the one hand, researchers have demonstrated the quality and importance of the impact of such experiences on the human brain, and on the other hand, virtual or augmented reality is a perfect response to the constraints of distance that we experience. Reducing our travel, facilitating access to the most difficult experiences to reproduce, optimising the quality of the knowledge delivered, are major challenges for higher education. However, immersive technologies require means but also a high level of mastery to be effective. This is why we believe in the development of this market, well beyond the fad that some have denounced. Simulating an open-heart operation, repairing an electric shutter motor or piloting an evacuation operation in a building, allows you to experience real-life situations with all the benefits of memorising the gestures or practices to be followed. There is a definite gain in attention for those who are « immersed » in these simulations, which has quite rightly become a crucial subject for teachers.

Learning gestures, postures, words and understanding the issues at stake in different contexts is a strong requirement of our educational system. Making the learning experience immersive will make it easier to access and more effective.

As we wrote a year ago, playing is a learning engine for human beings:

We learn to play from an early age. Many games are considered educational, allowing us to learn while having fun, acquiring skills without even realising it. And yet, the older we get, the more this playfulness in lessons is lost, until it disappears completely. The digital transformation in higher education, which we are currently experiencing, is expanding the possibilities for learning, creating engaging and playful interactive environments.

Read our article on gamification here

So why will gamification still be a trend in 2022?

If the fundamentals do not change in the face of crises, it is also because what most easily brings a community together is the playful experience. Around the game, there is conviviality, exchanges, friendly and benevolent confrontations. Playing is also about loving life. Thus, it can be particularly useful to use games (board, video or role-playing) to disseminate, illustrate and explain a concept, but also to create game mechanisms around learning. Nothing seems more attractive than an emotional reward to stimulate learners’ brains!

A number of players will therefore continue to investigate gaming techniques to enrich educational systems. This is an expectation expressed by all those who wish to motivate students who have become very attached to gaming. In the United States, for example, with more than 100 million monthly players, the Roblox game platform is now even more important than Minecraft. It is used worldwide to teach programming and game design.

In France, pioneering academics such as Jérôme Legrix-Pagès at the University of Caen-Normandy and Laurent Aldon at the University of Montpellier are already creating their own games.

Microlearning is one of the hottest trends in e-learning today. Organisations need to know not only what microlearning is, but also how to create it and what best practices to employ. It is not about cutting a 3-hour course into 3-minute chunks. Instead, it is important to understand that this technique allows the learner to focus on one concept, one key topic to understand and remember before moving on to the next step. Sequencing of learning is a new technique that is particularly suited to distance learning and disparities in availability. Devoting a few minutes each day to learning a language, or a computer programming manual, allows everyone to progress at their own pace. Remember that microlearning uses all formats of knowledge dissemination: video, text, audio, etc…

The immense freedom afforded by microlearning should broaden the learning public and multiply the educational effort. The idea of building courses by episode, by season, is naturally inspired by the development of « series » consumption. Discovering the next episode is a source of pleasure for those who want to learn. One might think that microlearning is more geared towards a lifelong learning audience, but the various higher education institutions are increasingly considering this learning technique as a complement to more traditional teaching methods to enable students to revise in a different way.

Wooflash is one of the leaders in this emerging market, for an example of use by a medical professor with his students:

One of the keys to learning remains assessment. Measuring allows for progress. But traditional methods are often called into question, at a time when acquired skills are valued. But do these assessments correspond to expectations and needs? Should we continue to test knowledge acquired when what we really want is for students to acquire skills?

Mobilising the skills of our peers who have certain knowledge and skills recognised by their profession, in order to disseminate or evaluate them among learners, is a new avenue to explore. More neutral, more up-to-date, more respectful, peer-to-peer sharing has many advantages for the future. Computer science schools such as Ada Tech School and Ecole 42 have implemented these tutoring-like techniques but warn that peer-learning is not the magic answer to teaching.

For its part, ChallengeMe, a digital peer review platform, defends this idea by emphasising the benefits of collective intelligence and knowledge sharing for the learner. Several universities have already experimented with this approach in the context of certain courses, such as Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University and the University of Lorraine.

Its co-founder, Ludovic Charbonnel, explains his vision in an interview we published last November:

Technology is undoubtedly bringing more flexibility to our professional lives and the same can be said for our lives as learners. A new expectation expressed by learners is naturally that they should be able to freely dispose of their time and no longer be constrained by rigid, time-limited courses.

Even if there are already possibilities to modulate the learning time for some degrees, this is usually reserved for specific audiences, in particular circumstances. Nevertheless, some degrees, most often delivered online, are opening up to greater time flexibility for their learners. This is notably the case for the MBA (100% online) of the Birmingham Business School, which can be taken over a period of 2,5 years to 5 years, depending on the learner’s choice. With the development of more streamlined e-learning tools and the use of video conferencing alongside other tools, Mr Andrew Parker, Director of Digital Education and Distance Learning at Birmingham Business School, believes that « people will be able to continue their education when, where and at the pace that suits them best ».

However, when we talk about this notion of flexibility, it is important not to focus on the courses but on the new technologies to be deployed to enable the pedagogy to be better adapted to its audience.

In conclusion, we wish you agility in 2022, as the context and situations are changing. Fortunately, technology is advancing rapidly and enabling all higher education actors who wish to do so to meet the challenges they face. It is still up to those who drive the knowledge economy to follow or create the trends, and universities are at the forefront of this!

Covid-19 crisis brought a lot of changes in our daily lives. Behind their screens, everyone tries to focus, lost in a throng of remote meetings, or classes. As a massive wave, digital learning surges into students and teachers courses, becoming the only way to pursue schooling in Higher Education.

Through this tough transition, we observed that a lot of EdTech solutions were already there, and just needed to be handled. Among them, Mobile learning, which is a growing market  supposed to progress to a compound annual growth rate of 22% by 2025, according to TechNavio Survey

Mobile Learning, also called M-Learning, is a new educational tool based on experience and flexibility, which can be used on any digital devices, mostly on smartphones. It represents the perfect way to meet new educational technologies, needs from the new generations and significant growth of learning retention. 

The expansion of M-Learning is directly related to technology’s evolution, while 70% of the internet traffic comes from mobile devices in 2020, according to a survey of BlueCorona.

How does it work ?

Mobile learning has some similarity with e-learning, but it can bring a lot more involvement. It’s not only about being able to reach your digital form classes documents, or to follow your class from home. It’s also a mix between AI, video learning, immersive technology, and gamification. Our robots love to highlight how all those latest technologies can impact higher education in a positive way. We talked about some of these subjects in our french blog, sorry if you’re not a frog eater, you can still follow us on our social media to reach more english content about Ed Tech and universities lives.

What about learning Any Time, Any Where, Any Device (ATAWAD) ?

With mobile learning, you can follow your courses from your phone, your laptop, or any other device. It creates flexibility, and allows a personalised way to achieve your learning process, in giving you the choice of the better method for you to learn. Study wherever you are, whenever you want is the promise of this technology.

This technolgy creates an access to a huge online platform where students can find very different resources, and improve their knowledge as they attempt to, with personalised contents. It’s also about personalised data, which is driving the users experience and helps them to focus on their goals. They can identify  their point of improvements more easily with Artificial Intelligence. The algorithms analyse their learning preferences, content patterns, and give them quick feedback on exercises or interactive study sessions. The more they get trained, the more accurate their Algorithms will be.

The french company Teach on Mars, propose a tailored made mobile learning app you can customise, where users achieve in a personalised way their training programs, reach personalised contents, communicate and interact with their learning environment and create their own mobile learning resources with an authoring tool : 

What about creating engagement and interaction ?

According to the neuroscientist and president of the french Scientist Council of National Education, Stanislas Dehanea, the main pillars of learning are attentiveness, involvement, feedback during the class and strengthening the studying with regular training.

With these connected areas, your phone, laptop, tablet, which are often a distraction when you’re in class, become your main tool to learn. Mobile devices used in the classroom, like Kahoot or Wooclap, are based on games mechanisms. Challenges, competitions, achievements, immersive simulation, rewards, game designs are all about creating engagement. 

Students become the main character and create a simulation in their learning which improves their retention rate to 90% against 75% with usual learning methods, according to Edgar Dale’s learning pyramid.

The game design and the storytelling improve the attention with an attractive simulation and a challenging goal, also made to give a quick feedback on users experience which allows learners to focus and train on their needs.

In classrooms, teachers often use quizzes, or team challenges, creating interactivity and a ludic way to use the students skills and create involvement. Exemple with Wooclap :

Mobile Learning is a good answer to a big part of the needs of students, who are used to digital content and to reach information online, with their smartphones, whenever and wherever they want. It’s also improving their learning because of the involvement and interaction it can bring.

If we have to be carefull, be sure that students can access these technology devices, and to watch out for the numeric fraction it could generate, smartphones are now taking a main role in our everyday life, and Higher Education has everything to gain in implementing it!