The Education Technology business is heading toward 8x to 10x growth in the next five years, from an estimate of $700 million today[1][2]. It is attracting several expansive investors as the pandemic has resulted in massive adoption of online education—from schools to colleges. Special emphasis is being placed on online and digital education as part of the New Education Policy (NEP 2020), thereby leading to several new EdTech start-ups springing up. This in turn has resulted in more competition and further consolidation in the market[3][4]. Education technology is the best way to achieve scale as well as uniform quality across the market that includes higher education, primary education as well as professional skilling courses for continuous learning[5]. Virtual assistants and videos, artificial intelligence tools, virtual reality, IoT, and learning analytics are some of the focus technologies to be looked at in this context[2].
While the scope of education technology is humongous, several challenges stand in the way of its success. Specifically, here are some aspects that need to be addressed to make learning through education technology a reality, which in turn will drive the respective markets and thus calls for the attention of stakeholders.
In conclusion, education technology has attracted the attention of business enthusiasts, educational institutes, entrepreneurs as well as venture capitalists due to digital transformation in the education sector. There is a strong incentive to introducing cutting-edge technologies in the education system. Most importantly, this is also pertinent to Wipro’s current focus on AI, IoT, custom robotics, blockchain as well as data analytics, which are the key technologies that govern the EdTech domain.
Dr. Sujatha J is academically qualified with a doctorate from IISc, Bangalore, and has over 30 years of teaching, research, and training experience across various renowned organizations. Currently, she is a senior consultant with the CTO office at Wipro. Her work is centered on the areas of AI, cognitive systems, and Custom Robotics. Her contributions are through the research and development of POCs for solving problems that are of customer interest, team development, and patent/white paper generation. To her credit, she has 17 international publications, and 11 patents filed, out of which five have been granted and the remaining pending. In addition, she constantly interacts with academia for mutual benefits. Dr. Sujatha also serves as a member of the industry advisory board for academia and is a member of IEEE, IETE, and ISTE, India.
Ramachandram Vedula is an Enterprise Architect with 25+ years of professional experience. Currently, he is a part of the Robotics practice group of the CTO organization where he leads the Warehouse Automation and Custom Robotics initiatives. Ram has a Mechanical Engineering background as well as strong and diverse IT systems field experience across various industry domains including Manufacturing, Consumer, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Banking etc. He has published research papers and spoken at international conferences. He has also led and participated in working groups to define solutions in Robotics, Automation, and IoT. Ram holds a Post Graduate Degree in Software Systems and is a Cloud and TOGAF certified architect. He is also a member of the Fluid Power Society of India.
References