From K-12 to higher education, the demand for educational technologies and people with the expertise needed to develop and implement edtech systems continues to grow. In January 2018, TechCrunch reported that in the first 10 months of 2017, investors put a staggering $8.15 billion into edtech companies around the world. This means that edtech jobs, which include educational technologist, instructional designers, implementation specialists, as well as people with expertise in machine learning, are also currently on the rise and expected to continue growing over the next decade. This article details just three factors driving the current upsurge in edtech and explains edtech jobs will grow over the coming decade.
Three Reasons Edtech Jobs Will Grow in the Next Decade
Emerging Economies Are Embracing Edtech
There are multiple factors currently driving the growth of edtech jobs on a global scale. To begin, edtech offers scalable educational solutions. Offering a traditional classroom-based course to 100 students rather than 20 students can be a challenge. Space, available instructors, and even textbooks may pose an obstacle to quickly scaling up the size of a course. Online, most of these obstacles vanish. In heavily populated areas of the word, including Africa and Asia, and especially in nations with under-developed K-12 and postsecondary education systems, new tech-driven educational solutions are being embraced as a potential way to respond to the need to rapidly scale up educational offerings. Evidence that edtech is being embraced as a solution to the global demand for quality education can be found in Africa’s booming eLearning sector. Several NGO projects, including targeted United Nation Technology Innovation Labs (UNTIL) initiatives focused on edtech, also reveal that increasingly the NGO community is turning to edtech to ensure that children and young adults around the world have access to the educational opportunities they deserve.
Private and Public Sector Support
Another key reason the edtech sector continues to grow is related to its investment base. Many parts of the tech sector rely mostly or entirely on private investment. While this is certainly not a problem, it does mean that future growth is contingent on continued interest and a strong economy. By contrast, edtech is an industry that continues to receive a healthy mix of private and public sector support. Among other advantages, this mix of investment support means that even if the economy slumps in the future, edtech companies are likely to continue thriving since at least part of their base comes from public funding sources.
Good points, it goes to show, when we move beyond our comfort zone (narrated powerpoint) quite a bit more can be accomplished. The difficulty often lies in the design, not so much the execution of the tool. Speaking of tools, don’t forget to let your readers know that there are other options out there like Lectora and dominKnow that can easily be used to develop this type of content and bring their own pros (and cons) in terms of capabilities.
Another thing for developers to start thinking about is designing these items as responsive so they can be easily interacted with on smaller and larger devices and stepping away from “shrink the page” designs/tools. At dominKnow – we developed one such sample interactive video based course that was responsive which may be of interest.
https://www.dominknow.com/samples/firesafety/
Just ran across a tool called Badgr that seems like it might also be a good fit for this. It looks like it can create pretty sophisticated branching pathways that even have a tech-tree look and feel. Very familiar to those of us who grew up playing games. Looking forward to checking it out.