Education Technology Accessibility Benefits Students, Faculty, and Schools

The education industry is currently experiencing a technology revolution of massive proportions. What seemed impossible during the days of chalkboards, erasers, and chalk dust, is possible today as students now have the ability to personalize their own learning through competency models complete with interactive elements and virtual reality capabilities.

Educational technology is the use of both physical hardware and educational theoretics to electronically teach via internet connectivity. Used as a supplement to a classroom course, or developed as a stand-alone curriculum, electronic learning allows students to complete activities and obtain data usually not available through more traditional face-to-face training approaches. And students are not the only beneficiaries of this teaching platform—districts, schools, and educators alike can reap the various benefits of eLearning:

• Meets student needs via different learning styles
• Convenient access to student training material
• Promotes better engagement between instructor and student
• Measures student cognition throughout learning period
• Recycles training data until obsolete
• Reusable technology reduces teaching equipment and operation costs for overall training funds savings

Two studies recently conducted found that nearly 100% of all U.S. public schools have Internet connectivity, with 77% of those with access to broadband—and the federal ConnectED initiative aims to bring broadband to 99 percent of all U.S. schools by 2018. It’s estimated that over 73% of all U.S. teenagers have access to a smartphone, and 70% of middle school students and 75% of high school students use laptops or tablets for educational purposes, with more than 69% of those students wanting to use their mobile devices to automate tasks that they already do now, such as note-taking, schedule checking, and research.

Based on this kind of data, and driven by rapid advancements in technology, the IoT, countless new EdCo startups, and billions of funding dollars, the education industry is gearing up to increase learning accessibility to any type of student no matter where they are.