Don Knezek, the CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, compares education without technology to the medical profession without tools “If in 1970 you had knee surgery, you got a huge scar,” he says. “Now, if you have knee surgery you have two little dots.”
It is apt to state that education technology means the use of all kind of modern media and materials for maximising the learning experiences. Education technology is suggested by expert as one of the potential means of impairing education effectively and efficiently.
Economists identify three factors that lead to growth which is based on increased human capacity.

Capital deepening – the ability of the workforce to use equipment that is more productive than earlier versions

Higher quality labour – a more knowledgeable work force that is able to add value to economic output

Technological innovation – the ability of the workforce to create, distribute, share and use of the new knowledge.
These three productivity factors serve as the basis for three complementary, somewhat overlapping, approaches that connect education policy with economic development.

The Technology literacy approach -Increasing the extent to which new technology is used by students, citizens and the work force by incorporating technology skills into the school curriculum.

The Knowledge deepening approach -Increasing the ability of students, citizens, and the workforce to use knowledge to add value to society and the economy by applying it to solve complex, real-world problems.

The Knowledge Creation approach -Increasing the ability of students, citizens, and the workforce to innovate, produce new knowledge, and benefit from this new knowledge.
Burdon (2012) stated that the use of technology in education is to encourage far higher levels of active student engagement, where knowledge is obtained by sharing, problem-solving and creating, rather than by passive listening. This classroom enables both active engagement and equal access.

Technology in use in class rooms:

Computer in the classroom: Having a computer in the classroom is an asset to any teacher. With a computer in the classroom, teachers are able to demonstrate a new lesson, present new material, illustrate how to use new programs, and show new information on websites.

Class blogs and Wikipedia: There are a variety of Web 2.0 tools that are currently being implemented in the classroom. Blogs allow for students to maintain a running dialogue, such as a journal, thoughts, ideas, and assignments that also provide for student comment and reflection. Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, are more group focused to allow multiple members of the group to edit a single document and create a truly collaborative and carefully edited finished product.

Wireless classroom microphones: Noisy classrooms are a daily occurrence, and with the help of microphones, students are able to hear their teachers more clearly. Students learn better when they hear the teacher clearly.

Mobile devices: Mobile devices such as tablet or smart phone can be used to enhance the experience in the classroom by providing the possibility for professors to get feedback.

Interactive Whiteboards: An interactive whiteboard that provides touch control of computer applications. These enhance the experience in the classroom by showing anything that can be on a computer screen. This not only aids in visual learning, but it is interactive so the students can draw, write, or manipulate images on the interactive whiteboard.

Digital video-on-demand: Digital video eliminates the need for in-classroom hardware and allows teachers and students to access video clips immediately by not utilizing the public Internet.

Online media: Streamed video websites can be utilized to enhance a classroom lesson.

Online study tools: Tools that motivate studying by making studying more fun or individualized for the student.

Digital Games: The field of educational games and serious games has been growing significantly over the last few years. The digital games are being provided as tools for the classroom and have a lot of positive feedback including higher motivation for students.
There may many other tools being utilized, however depending on the access to both physical and financial facilities.

Challenges of use of Education Technology in India

Despite early implementation of technologies in Education system, India still faces teething problem for the new technologies in education. Some of them are:

• Not enough or limited access to computer hardware & computer software in education institutes
• Lack of time in school schedule for projects involving use of technologies
• Lack of adequate technical support for education institutes
• Not enough teacher training opportunities are there
• Lack of knowledge about ways to integrate technologies to enhance curriculum
• Education technologies integration is not a priority
• Students and Teachers do not have access to the necessary technology at home

There is also a negative facets of new technologies used in education. Many ethical questions and issues arise with this use of the latest technologies in education.

The Copy and paste syndrome – Schools and universities have more and more problems with students who prepare essays/ project/ presentation by using material from websites or blogs. Often, students just copy pieces of information that look relevant and paste them together, without sometimes even understanding them, let alone citing them.

Distortion of reality – When students are looking for some information on the website, they usually employ a search engine. This will give them a ranked list of often incredibly many search results. There is the real danger that their view of reality is distorted by the website, by the fact that someone with enough money can influence what is written or ranked.

Too much trust in the information found – When searching for some information on the website students tend to accept what they have found as true information, often without looking at other sources and hence having no justification to accept the information at face value.

Loss of privacy and profiling – When students use services offered over the websites it is clear to us that they are making often information about us known to the service providers. The situation gets much more complicated if a company has a set of services so that combining all the information that potentially can be extracted gives a very detailed profile. There can be no doubt that some companies are collecting information or profiles on users, and on economic relevant developments. This may be done through stealth as described or from open social networks where many persons give away information that may well be harmful to them at some later stage.

Current trends in educational technology in India

It has been promised for a long time that technology will change education for better – make it more affordable and accessible. The promise of educational technology is more important in Indian context because we have a massive deficit of access to high quality education at the primary and high school level due to a number of seemingly insurmountable challenges, ranging from geographical distribution to socio-economic condition of the learners who attend a majority of Indian schools. Also, the cost of educating one of the world’s greatest populations has been steadily increasing, and there is expectation that technology may make education¬ affordable for those who are so far unable to benefit from the same.¬¬¬
It is estimated that about a billion people globally are now benefitting from education technologies. India has not been exactly far behind, with a crop of Indian entrepreneurs working on edtech targeted at indigenous problems. For policy makers, it is very important to understand where the edtech industry is headed and how it’s potential can be tapped into in order to change the stark realities prevailing in India with respect to education at the grassroots.

I. Classroom based technologies

1. Developing multimedia based study materials for effective student engagement in learning. India has a lack of content creators working on creating multimedia learning material in regional languages while there are some content creators when it comes to English and Hindi language although limited.

GOI at the center has been emphasizing on e-learning to be introduced in all schools, but the biggest challenge is of sourcing suitable multimedia content which is regularly revised and updated. If a number of high-quality content creators cannot be found to work on study material on a sustainable basis, e-learning will remain only a pipe dream in India.

2. Effective educational resource planning. It is schedule and communication management process to be adopted by the teacher.

Education Resource Planning or ERP softwares have been adopted in private schools, but government schools are yet to make any meaningful use of these softwares. This can be a very important source of growth in efficiency and resources utilization in government schools as far as India is concerned. There are several indigenous ERP softwares developed by Indian entrepreneurs that can be roped in for this purpose. The major efficiency gain can happen in terms of scheduling of classes, planned budget allocation and continuous communication with students through mediums like email, automated calls using cloud telephony and SMS. Mumbai University was an early adopter of this technology.

3. Performance management and tracking system
One major fault of the school system is that it does not measure progress of students systematically. The progress report is a tool of the past, much more innovation has taken place in this area.
For example, if a student is performing well in every subject except Geography, the school authority and parents should ideally be able to see all the data (exam scores, continuous evaluation performance, class participation, attendance etc.) related to the student’s performance.

It is very easy to collect such data and create automated reports, graphs, alerts and action points for the benefit of principals, education policy makers, even individual teachers. Students who need special attention can be easily identified, and performance of teachers can become measurable as well.

This is a major opportunity to improve the education system in India. Most importantly, the big data collected through such performance tracking can be used by policy makers to strengthen the whole education system, measure the effect of grants and public money being spent much better than present standards, and make much better policies. Many states and school districts in the US have adopted this kind of technologies.

4. Homework and assignments tracking systems
Getting students to do their homework is probably the most difficult thing for a teacher. Homework could be made more interesting, with games for young kids to be played on internet and smart phones. Even for senior students, reading, retention and application can be tested online, and data over the year can be collected to measure the track record of a student if assignment, correction and doing the homework can be taken online on a software based platform. This is what many software have achieved. Even several Indian edtech entrepreneurs are working on this aspect, and many private schools have adopted such systems. Such systems can also be part of an ERP or broader performance tracking systems.

5. Classroom based distance learning
This kind of technology became very popular in late nineties and remained in use throughout last decade. Satellite beaming of live classes or VSAT, study centers equipped with hardware where students interacted with a teacher teaching remotely became very common for a lot of private sector tutorials, especially for test preparation. Even Indian government has tried to promote this model in the past with help from IITs, and EDUSAT was a venture in this line. However, while low cost and high speed of internet have made this technology more viable and VSAT unnecessary, infrastructure cost of study centers and real estate prices work as a restraint on this model.

6. Social platform for a classroom to interact online
Peer to peer learning can be very important, and a class should continue to interact and learn collaboratively even after class hours. This idea led many social learning platforms to come up. Software is available and without any significant investment can snowball into a community of students preparing for entrance exams from small towns where there were no coaching centers. Learning resources like notes can be created and shared with each other. This will become the power of a social learning platform.

7. Classroom emulating online environments
Apart from technology that helps to enhance the classroom experience itself or is being used within the classroom, another major domain of technology is online learning environments where one can learn, give exams, attend lectures, get access to study materials and interact with faculty as well as other students, like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)

8. Online learning management systems
These are computer-based learning environments that are used to deliver content, track progress of learners and sometimes to administer exams. This is quickly changing the horizon of possibilities when it comes to affordable access to high-quality teaching. Live classes with teachers can be conducted on such platforms, and pre-recorded material can also be uploaded. However, broadband penetration is important for this technology to become relevant, and recent progress in broadband availability in India has made this accessible for a significant number of Indian citizens. However, adoption of this technology for primary and high school education remains very poor. The government may use this to provide supplementary material, standard lectures, and deliver other content on a regular basis directly to every student in a state or even the country as long as they can have access to a computer.

9. Mobile based learning management systems
Typically in India, more people have access to smart phones with internet as opposed to computers with broadband connections. This is a big cause of investing significantly in mobile based learning technology. In the higher education courses administered by iPleaders, almost half of the users preferring to use our courses on smart phones and tablets while the rest prefers computers. There is no doubt that putting learning resources in the phone itself turns it into a very useful tool. Mobile based courses have to be optimized for a smaller screen, lower computing power, and slower internet. This is a difficult task, but several Indian startups have got this right.

10. Gamification system of learning
Gamification is one of the most appreciated approaches to technology-driven learning and is a potentially revolutionary idea. The biggest challenge in education is to engage students in a meaningful way, and make them genuinely interested in the subject. Gamification attempts to make this possible by reducing drudgery of studying and chances of getting distracted by embedding a lesson itself inside a game. Also, introduction of leaderboards, awarding of badges on completion of tasks, showing daily graphs of progress, breaking down learning in small tasks and so on tend to make a lot of students more interested in studying. Gamification can increase learner engagement to incredible levels, to the point of learning addiction. This is a phenomenon similar to a Facebook addiction, which is also a gamified platform.

II. Course development environments

1. Open education resources – course development systems
While there are very good course delivery platforms available, software that helps the teacher to create and curate courses effortlessly are fewer in number. However, this is a very important aspect as well. If good teachers are enabled to create courses that can be used by other teachers elsewhere, the shortage of quality content discussed earlier can be solved to a great extent. Keeping this is mind, some organizations have tried to create software that helps teachers to create a course. Google has taken some initiative in this regard. However, Projia is a leader in this space with its software that can help a teacher to rapidly find open education resources without copyright restrictions.

2. Adaptive teaching platforms
Not all students learn in the same way. Not every student’s weaknesses and strengths are the same either. Still, all modern education systems deliver the same content for everyone. This can be changed to customized learning by use of Adaptive learning platforms, where one can adapt its content and delivery according to the needs and abilities of the student using the platform. This is a very advanced idea and can change the life of many students. Perhaps a technology like this can reduce the aversion a large number of students develop towards studying from an early age.

3. Rapid content authoring systems
Creating engaging content is very difficult. However, rapid content authoring systems help educators to create online content very quickly. Powtoon is a prominent example of a rapid content authoring system which helps to create simple animated videos very fast by anyone who knows basic functions of a computer. Without this technology, a teacher would have had to hire an animation studio to achieve the same.
There are many rapid content authoring tools available in the market for very reasonable prices at present, but adoption in Indian education space remains low. It is a great idea to train Indian teachers to use such rapid content authoring tools and to give them incentives to create great e-learning content – this will make the e-learning eco-system in the country flourish.

4. Classroom delinked technology
There is also a lot of technology and e-learning business models that do not rely on traditional education system or the classroom at all. A great example is that of Duolingo, a language learning app available on android that is used by millions of people to learn several languages for free. I am myself an avid user of the same and have learned Spanish up to intermediate level using this app in about 6 months. Let’s explore some of these technology that is thriving in the global education market today.

Learning apps
Educational apps are very popular with millions of android and iOS device users all over the world. It is not unusual for parents to let toddlers or primary school going children to play educational games and using apps on iPad or android tabs, and even mobile phones. My tiny nephews spend hours on their mother’s iPad playing memory games, word games and puzzles that improve language skills and knowledge of grammar, and even learning foreign languages. It is amazing how stress-free the entire experience is for both parents and children. There are apps that can help one to increase reading speed, or reduce the fear of maths. There are apps developed to make children more hygiene and health conscious which are being adopted by state governments in the USA for use of school children.

Diagnostic tools and differentiated lessons
This is an amazing technology which is still under-utilized, especially in India. In other countries, this is being used in the testprep space and this is taking over all other teaching models inexorably. The idea is that not everyone needs to same lessons. Some people already know certain things, have certain weaknesses or can learn at different speeds. Hence, it is not appropriate and very inefficient to teach the same material to every student. One size does not fit all, and software can first diagnose what is the existing level of a person on any subject through diagnostic tests, and then create a customized study plan. I would eagerly look towards implementation of this technology in India, starting with the testprep industry.

Online alumni associations
This is a great way to make alumni associations actually work. The alumni can join a social network restricted to the alumni, interact with current students, other alumni, and faculty. This can be a great way to enhance recruitment networks for any institution, source of mentorship, as well as funds or donation for the educational institution from the alumni. This is relevant for both schools and colleges, and can generate great value for the institution as well as its alumni.

References

Durham University News, 2012, ur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=15991
Education and Technology in India: what exactly can be achieved with edtech? http://startup.nujs.edu/blog/education-and-technology-in-india-what-exactly-can-be-achieved-with-edtech
Role of Technology in Indian Education Mr. Chinmoy Goswami Research Scholar and Teacher Assistance Humanities and Social Science Department, Techno India University http://www.ipedr.com/vol79/002-IC4E2014-1-003.pdf

Assignment

1. Review the research activities in the field of educational technology in your institution and prepare a review report.
2. Enlist research gaps keeping in view the present education systems of your state.