The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the Indian edtech sector. Since people were locked at home, educational institutions began transitioning to online education. Since 2020, there has been a 50% increase in users willing to pay for online courses. As a result, the education system itself has been changing. Before, it was enough to record a simple video course, but new trends have emerged. We will address these below.
Fast learning
Technologies are evolving rapidly, and newer, more complex ones are replacing outdated methods. To keep up with them, you must constantly – and most importantly – quickly acquire new skills. Short-term training will soon emerge as its separate niche, including courses that allow you to fully master a profession or a skill and immediately begin to put it into practice in just a couple of months.
Soft Skills
It has been scientifically proven that a person’s soft skills affect their career: even if an employee has excellent hard skills, there comes the point in their career when they cannot grow financially and professionally without good soft skills.
And due to this, developing soft skills – communication, teamwork, and leadership skills, cooperation, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, creativity, and many others- will also be needed. Recruiters and interviewers will look for these soft skills more closely in addition to a candidate’s hard skills, so it’s crucial to develop them as soon as possible.
Gamification
An excellent way to increase student engagement is by introducing game mechanics into learning and working environments. Good examples are badges, leaderboards, bonuses, quests, and competitions. Gamification helps increase sales, retain customers, promotes employee loyalty, and creates a learning process with maximum engagement.
Product quality
The number of available online courses is steadily increasing – to compete with rivals, EdTech market players need to improve the quality of products and services they provide significantly. This will become one of the main criteria for users when choosing a particular educational program. Only educational ecosystems with a quality product, a strong community, and a well-developed IT infrastructure will succeed.
Personalization
Last but not least, a trend that will only grow in the coming years is the personalization of learning. It is training explicitly tailored to your needs. Unlike online courses, personalized learning implies that you only need to learn things you do not yet know. It is becoming more popular as time is a precious source and people tend to go for time-efficient learning.
Personalized education involves individual learning with an experienced mentor who assesses your level of knowledge and selects a program suited to your strengths and weaknesses, and allows you to strengthen your expertise. Programs like this can be found in Boostly, a platform for finding industry experts for one-on-one mentorship in the IT field.