Study Reveals Effects of the Pandemic on the Usage of EdTech Solutions in 2020

Ouriginal, Europe’s leading provider of text-matching solutions for plagiarism prevention and text-similarity detection, published its latest study this week. Using numerical analysis of the usage patterns of Ouriginal’s solutions, the study reveals how lockdowns and the forced digitalization of learning environments have affected education worldwide. The three metrics chosen for the study indicate that whereas EdTech solutions have broadly increased their overall acceptance level, students do need their teachers’ guidance and encouragement even more in digital learning surroundings.

A Look at The State of Digital Education from an Originality Software Perspective

The sudden digitalization of the classroom in 2020 is certainly a unique testing ground for remote teaching and learning for millions of educators and students worldwide. Within this setting, EdTech software solutions have also seen a sudden change in their usage and importance. Ouriginal’s software solutions were among those.

“It is without question that the sudden move from a traditional classroom teaching setting to a fully remote and digital environment has been a stress test for educators and students alike. From an EdTech solution point of view, we were curious to see if there was any measurable effect of the pandemic on our product usage patterns,” says Andreas Ohlson, CEO of Ouriginal. “We wanted to know: Would we see more documents being checked during times of lockdowns or less? Would it affect the length of student’s assignments and papers? When looking at the numbers, we were actually amazed at what we found.”

Evidence That the ‘Human Factor’ in Teaching Cannot Be Overlooked, and Acceptance of EdTech Solutions Is on the Rise

The study used a numerical approach to Ouriginal’s solutions’ usage patterns, comparing three key metrics in 2020 with those of the previous year 2019.

Summarized, the three key findings of the study are:

• The steady increase in the usage of EdTech solutions over the few last years jumped suddenly to a much higher degree when the pandemic started. High usage continues to persist, which indicates a breakthrough in the usage of EdTech solutions like Ouriginal’s.
• During the pandemic written essays become shorter, but this effect was not long-lasting and was most probably linked to homeschooling periods.
• More and more data volumes are being processed by EdTech solutions indicating the increasing importance and role of technical tools in education worldwide.

The full study is available in the newsroom for download.