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In 2010 SXSW Interactive has introduced a new event covering education and technology called SXSWedu. In its third year of hosting the SXSWedu Conference and Festival, the event has quickly emerged as a catalyst for the change in education. During its activities and numerous presentations from the education stakeholders and practitioners of all backgrounds, including teachers, administrators, university professors, business and policy leaders, the converge at SXSWedu is to connect, collaborate, create and change how
we teach and how we learn.
At this year offshoot SXSWedu conference held in Austin, Texas, US from 4 to 7 March 2013 there were a lot of new discoveries in education technology’s theories and trends. SXSW is massively popular and plays a big role in technology and education. The Edtech startups and top brilliant education gathered in the series of these 4 days, to discuss and plan the future of the education. There were panels, keynotes, and demonstrations, daily programed features’ special presentations from the 2013 keynote and distinguished speakers highlighting some of today’s leading trends in education.
Some of the few future trends discussed by the speakers were:
- MOOCs: In a special keynote conversation that was moderated by Laura Pappano, the award-winning writer at The New York Times, Andrew Ng, Co-founder of Coursera and Anant Agarwal, President of edX, it was stated that they will focus on massive open online courses (MOOCs), a rapidly growing interest in the education space. By being designed to offer large-scale participation through the web, these courses will have everything, from video modules to guest lectures to additional information and assignments and tests, with a certificate of completing the course successfully. MOOCs aim at reaching out millions of students by removing the physical barriers.
MOOCs keynote presentation - Gamification and Adaptive Learning: The recent changes in Edtech trends include the gamification. Everyone wants to put some enthusiam, fun in their learning. In the fast paced environment, boredom can come in minutes, so making education a fun experience with creating applications that lead to learning in a fun and gaming manner brings better results than the traditional methods. Many students learn more and are better motivated through these applications rather than through books that seem monotonous. Keeping a score system and winning brings enthusiasm, willingness to learn and gaining an instant feedback. Here is the Educator‘s Checklist for Game-Based Learning. Checklist for educators
As every student is different and has different learning needs, the concept of adaptive learning and personalized learning is introduced as a beneficial and better result oriented. The various tools for this type of activities like the well-proven in practice Knewton, Dreambox, and new ones like KnowRe were presented.
3.Creativity: One of the Edtech trends presented at the event was creativity and creating different and new environments for students to learn. Technology will lead to a higher premium by being placed on the personal, well-designed and handmade grounds. Everything will be customized, with a priority on the learners needs. Educators aim to implement different unconventional methods, in order to see how they will influences and increases the attention of the student.
4.Data and analytics: The consensus is that the most important potential is yet unrealized. Bill Gates highlighted in his keynote contribution that the technology to teaching and learning is the ability to extract meaningful insights from the myriad information that students generate, as they travel through life on their learning journeys. Their diagnostics, individualized goals and plans, demographic information, performance evaluations, from cradle to mortarboard should be utilized. Companies like Inbloom (earlier known as SLC), have been working hard on these concepts with a mission to inform and involve each student and teacher with data and tools designed to personalize learning.
Bill Gates’ participation at SXSWedu
- Virtual world: The aim is to break the barriers of school, colleges and the traditional unidirectional learning of a single teacher teaching dozens of students. The trend will come wherein students would prefer to share and discuss in order they learn more through the open discussions. At this very spot Connected Learning will take over its role. What one may know the other may be oblivious of it, therefore the accumulated knowledge is the best knowledge. As there will be no limitations, the students will be more driven and enthusiastic to learn more.
You can visit SXSWedu news to find out more about the outcomes of the event, the future paths of education development and the technology coping and supporting them.
