Author: Ryan Williamson
The educational sector had already been gradually embracing technology when the coronavirus came along. This substantial change has also accelerated the industry’s efforts to evaluate and embrace newer technologies. It offers the potential to lend assistance further and aid their many efforts to deliver quality education. This search has led to the emergence of new technology with immense potential for the educational sector: the Internet of Things.
Listed below are some of the key benefits of IoT for the educational sector to help demonstrate why it is quickly becoming a highly valued tool for the sector.
- Tailored learning: IoT enables educational institutions to monitor students’ performance and collect relevant data. It is then analyzed to help teachers understand students’ problem areas, where they need more practice and then adapt the course and material to help.
- Assisting differently-abled students: IoT helps students with special needs learn effectively at a pace of their choosing via devices such as text to speech converters, VR headsets, etc. Oh, and it also eliminates the need for developing different curriculum for such students, thus ensuring inclusion for them.
- Smart classrooms: IoT enables classrooms to be fortified with avant-garde technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and more. This, in turn, facilitates an immersive learning experience, helping enhance the effectiveness of the process via a variety of engaging media. And when the advanced tools in the classrooms are connected to the personal devices of students and that of teachers’, it becomes significantly easier to keep the former meaningfully engaged even beyond the confines of the classroom.
IoT has a lot to offer to the education sector. But before you rush to integrate into your educational offering as well, it is imperative to understand the key factors that affect the success rate of IoT in this sector.
- Policies: IoT in this sector means a significant change in the current education system’s fundamental structure. Hence, the support of policies is imperative for success. To boost the implementation of IoT in educational institutions, the relevant authorities must bring in policies aimed at accelerating and encouraging increased adoption.
- Security: Given that the concept involves children and the internet, high levels of security are non-negotiable here. Plus, the general privacy concerns and security of sensitive data must be tended to as well. And the endeavors in this regard must not end at simple assurances to parents and the institutions that rely on such technology-driven solutions. Service providers must also set up and ensure strict implementation of appropriate measures to safeguard security and privacy while using their offerings.
- Integrity: The final factor at play here is the integrity of the data, for which a carefully-curated selection of technologies is a must.
It is amply clear that IoT has a healthy future in the education sector. And any institution that intends to keep with the times and deliver A-grade education must adopt an education software solution fortified with technologies such as this one.