2020 put all of us, and especially our education systems, to the test. The challenges students and educators faced were not just academic, but social. In 2021, I’ll be looking at innovations meeting new demands unleashed amidst the pandemic, especially those aimed at fostering and maintaining connection.
Looking ahead, here are five big emerging ideas I’ll be tracking:
1. New—or moderately improved—academic engagement tools. 2020 laid bare a challenge that has long haunted virtual learning: building and maintaining student engagement. I’m hopeful that reckoning will yield greater demand for crucial innovations in online learning that optimize for engagement over traditional metrics like seat time.
First, sustaining innovations that improve upon the ad hoc Zoom classrooms launched last spring could offer some long-overdue technical improvements. These improvements align with what research suggests make for higher quality online environments: making it more seamless for educators to teach online, with more foolproof tools to organize a virtual classroom, and more intuitive systems for students to navigate coursework.
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