TECHNOLOGY
campusreview.com.au
Tech in the year ahead
What’s in store for educational
technology in 2018?
By Jeff Rubenstein
Indeed, educational institutions across the world are
undertaking significant transformation efforts to enhance the
student experience.
Here are my thoughts on some of those enhancements that
I foresee taking centre stage over the coming year.
DATA-LED STUDENT INTERVENTION
D
igital transformation and the rise of millennials are
dominating headlines in the Asia Pacific region (APAC).
Rapid advancements in technology are drastically
improving the way we do things.
As millennials come of age, modern students will be adept with
technology, using it in virtually all aspects of their personal lives.
It stands to reason that these digital natives would expect these
tools to be available in the classroom. To achieve optimal learning
outcomes, a change in teaching methods, complemented by
educational technology, will be necessary.
This issue is especially pertinent to APAC. According to consulting
firm Accenture, approximately 60 per cent of the world’s millennials are
expected to live in Asia by 2020. Mirroring what is happening in business,
I anticipate digitalisation to sweep through campuses in APAC in 2018.
22
There has been significant groundwork around the creation
of systems and standards to facilitate the collection of student
data. Data is a crucial tool to identify under-performing students,
allowing educators to proactively intervene and provide
necessary academic support. Doing so helps to ensure a
higher student retention rate, a key determinant of success.
Data collection systems work in tandem with standards
such as xAPI and IMS Caliper. These standards enable the
collection of student data across multiple systems, and
interpret them in a standardised way. Without this data flow,
it wouldn’t be possible to make sense of the vast tracts of siloed
student data.
The good news is that a growing number of vendors have
already adopted these standards and are creating edtech
tools that wrap intelligence around the data – for example,