educational essay

educational essay

The Impact of Technology on Education: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to the Role of Technology in Education

The success of any society stems from education, because it is through education that participants acquire skills and innovate sharp objects into sophisticated tools. With recent technological advancements, education maintains its fundamental role as the vehicle through which human capital becomes prosperous. Such social groups need to manage the existing tools, and innovative thinkers need to grow future tools; this school of thought would propound a few acclaimed benefits of innovations such as computers in the education delivery. While this is evident, the impact of classroom technologies may not be universal across educational levels. The outcomes may even be different if students are using the technology at varied levels of education. As a result, research on technological change in the classroom is scarce and requires in-depth investigation in order to provide more insights.

The role of technology in education has been an area of particular interest amongst researchers, policy makers, and the educational establishments in recent times, given the volatile nature of technology. Feelings have been mixed over the benefits brought about by technology in enhancing educational outcomes. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the role of technology used for educational purposes from the perspective of the levels of the education system. The impacts and the gaps that emanate as a result of not addressing the impacts are highlighted and strategies to leverage the potential benefits are discussed. Some insights to policies that should be pursued and future research direction are further provided.

2. Benefits of Technology Integration in the Classroom

The integration of technological tools is now easier and more practical as well. The cost of equipment has been significantly reduced, and powerful tools such as handheld devices, with a variety of functions and features, are now available for both student and teacher. Finally, many educators piloting handheld devices, wireless technologies, laptops, and stand-alone computers are now using handheld devices to access the Internet. In sum, the ease with which learning can occur anytime, anywhere is an extremely compelling reason to provide teacher support for effective integration of technology into educational activities.

The impact of technology has significantly influenced elementary and secondary education in recent years. The barriers experienced by early adopters have given way to innovative and effective uses of technology. The challenge for educators is to support methodologies and teaching strategies that reflect new roles and styles, away from simply delivering facts, to learning environments that support inquiry, collaboration, and problem-solving. As long as the teacher continues to be the central component in educational activities, applied research and analysis must be utilized to assist in the dissemination and acceptance of technology as a support tool in effective learner-centered education.

3. Challenges and Solutions in Implementing Technology in Education

In the first decade of this century, 50% of the world’s knowledge would be created. Even now, knowledge is not concentrated in any single country. According to Education Movement Plans of UNESCO, education in the forthcoming years in a number of developed countries has to handle these problems. The Global Education Market has emerged mainly due to globalization, technological revolution, the establishment of a single market in Europe, new attitudes towards government and market, and privatization. The development of satellite technology and the internet has also allowed an expansion of communication possibilities, making global learning a reality. There are a number of commercial organizations engaged in providing technology-driven solutions to education in developed countries. These commercial institutions are devices at self-paced learning, asynchronous medium of learning, and take the student-consumer as the unit of the lifelong learning process.

The technological changes have been mainly in the usage of technology. Substantive implementation of technology in education is rare. However, the recent ICT movement has the capability of altering this mental map. Currently, both private and public educational institutions face a number of challenges that are holding them back from its effective use. Unless these challenges are met, technology implementation will be shallow and have little impact. In this chapter, we have identified a set of challenges in implementing technology heavily in the educational system. We have also suggested some solutions for meeting these challenges. Most of these solutions require partnership with the industry. However, for educational institutions, only one part of the challenge is quantitative. The qualitative challenge is a tougher question to answer.

4. Emerging Trends and Future Directions in Educational Technology

The rapid evolution of technology brings the web beyond individual corpora, as the web becomes a combination of text, multimedia, and mobile. It also brings the evolution of the shift from web 1.0 (population access to information) to web 2.0 (population participation), and even to web 3.0 (semantic learning platform). Inevitably, the semantically nudging collaborative educational technology tools will be the future horizon. These features include: personalized, aligned with learning objectives, five dimensions of individual, ability to score, iteratively improving over time with learning data. Educational technologies integrated with semantically nudging learning tools will stand as the future. The aforementioned technology developments not only enhance the capabilities of the educational technology from a single source of information but will also encourage personalization.

In a digital world of “Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow” and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), the lavish landscape of apps, games, and interactive learning tools has evolved at an unprecedented speed. The number of schools that implemented one-to-one computing programs grew 46% in 2011-2016. Leveraging the growing open education resources from MIT, OpenStax, and Khan Academy, there are no longer geographic and cost barriers for many learners who want to obtain a higher education. As a reaction to the rules of “No Child Left Behind” and “Common Core,” the innovative development and implementation of educational technologies have fueled growing connections between the future trends of virtual learning, adaptive learning, and mobile learning and the new learning paradigms under the context of how emerging theories and concepts support the new learning paradigms such as now-being-dominant AI (Artificial Intelligence) and contextual educational technology models for the individual.