3 Education Trends Emerging in 2018

With 2018 upon us, I have been getting a lot of questions about where our education system is heading in the next year. From my conversations with education leaders over the last few months, I have put together a tangible list of the top emerging trends in education. The ability to feel market pull around tech trends - especially in education and child care - has enabled me to stay ahead of the curve.

Share your thoughts in the comments below and let's have a discussion around the future of education in 2018.

For more thought leading discussion on education follow me on Twitter @pacutler.

Multi-lingual Classroom Interactions

As we move towards a more international and global society, it is clear that interacting with other people around the world has never been easier. With the emergence of technology that takes spoken audio and translates it to text or spoken word in another language has permitted classrooms to connect with other classes across the world. With Microsoft introducing their Speech Translator API, it now allows anyone to introduce this technology into their app or website. We are seeing more and more education applications of this technology.

With international students making up over 50% of the students in many of our schools, the ability to provide our educators and students with tools to seamlessly communicate in many languages is absolutely critical.

Expect to see the emergence of more tools that facilitate multi-lingual classroom interaction in 2018. 

One-to-One Instruction

It has become increasingly clear that the more one-on-one personalized time that a student has with an educator, the better that student performs and higher their academic confidence is. This idea is far from new - since the 90s schools like Fusion Academy, Brightmont Academy and Halstrom Academy have provided one-to-one schooling for the wealthy.

One-to-one learning is now financially viable in all schools, leveling the playing field for every student ensuring they can reach their full potential independent of the socio-economic situation.

Financially, this has been completely impossible for our public schools to provide this type of support. At GradeSlam, we have been participating in helping schools and districts achieve their goals around personalized learning. With tools that focus on leveraging technology to eliminate inefficiencies that drive up the cost of one-to-one learning, software solutions making the one-to-one experience students receive at Fusion or Brightmont available to everyone at a thousandth of the price.

When Laguna Beach Unified School District announced they would be introducing GradeSlam district wide, it opened the portal to the public school system. Expect to see much more movement in this area in 2018 as both independent and public schools look to stay on pace with their peers and introduce one-to-one learning and tutoring for everyone. 

Measuring EdTech ROI

• Schools have quickly moved towards introducing technology from pre-school to college. Whether hardware or software, our education system has invested billions and billions to provide access to tech tools - however in most cases, the investment was made without the tools to measure the impact of the investment.

Schools and districts are now requiring many of their tech vendors to measure engagement and usage to provide an ROI.

We’ve seen companies like BrightBytes grow as they help schools understand what technology is being used and what isn’t. In 2018, expect schools to require their tech vendors to start providing more in-depth engagement analytics that help them understand whether their money is being well spent. This will hurt many of the legacy solutions that have been renewed annually, but will open the door for truly impactful and innovative tools to enter the market. 

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We are at the precipice of an educational change. With many young and ambitious administrators and educators taking the helm of our schools and districts, they are ready to take huge steps forward towards revolutionizing education. We have to provide these individuals with the resources and support necessary to transform our K-12 and higher education institutions to meet the needs of today’s students and tomorrow’s world!

Happy New Year and all the best in 2018. May we make huge steps forward and remember that education is the foundation on which our society was built. 

Philip Cutler is the Founder & CEO of GradeSlam. He is also the the Chairman of Laurus Lifestyles and City Councillor in Westmount, QC.