Learners Across Environments Need EdTech

 
EdTech existed before COVID, but COVID really brought the rise of EdTech to the forefront of
classrooms to help learners across environments. It seems the increased use of EdTech may be here to stay. According to
EducationWeek, 58 percent of teachers in the U.S. reported they developed a more positive
opinion of EdTech after COVID surfaced.

So, what will the future of EdTech look like and how can we determine what EdTech best fits
all learners across environments?

On today’s episode of The Voices of eLearning, Hosts J.W. Marshall and Leena Marie Saleh are
joined by Smita Bakshi, Senior Vice President, Academic Learning at Wiley, to talk more about
EdTech research and implementation as well as the current and future state of EdTech for
various disciplines.

EdTech is such a hot button topic today that there is even a journal dedicated exclusively to
research and development in educational technology.

Bakshi commented on why this type of research is so important. She says people need to “keep
doing research to figure out what’s relevant for the student and what’s working.” She added,
“And what we do in accounting maybe is going to be different from what we do in math and
what we do in computer science, and even computer science to IT is different, and physics is
different than chemistry. So, I feel the courseware, whatever we are providing to students, needs
to be fantastic. Why should we have a great user experience here [our phones] and not in the
education software we use?”

Marshall and Bakshi also discussed…

• How educational technology, educational courseware, and the tools in higher education
will transform in the future

• Why computer science is an essential area for all learners and disciplines

• How EdTech research has evolved over the years from the pre-production phases to the
build and how research is used to convey value

Bakshi emphasized that computer science is incredibly cross-disciplinary. “I think it’s
technology married with another discipline, is where the need is. And kind of where the futures
are. So, if you think about it, something simple like UI/UX, just being able to design an interface,
you really need to bring together design and some technical expertise. And the best UI/UX
designers, they have that. They can think programming, they can think all the basics of computer
science, and they have that passion and skill in design.”

Bakshi is Co-Founder & Sr. Vice President of Technology & Engineering Careers at Wiley and
is CEO.CO-Founder at zyBooks. She has over 15 years of experience across product
management, business development, engineering, and education in software industries. Bakshi
earned her Bachelor of Computer Engineering from the Delhi Institute of Technology. She also
has an MS and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of California Irvine as well as an
MBA from Harvard Business School