EdTech | AI Transformation | Teaching the Teachers
According to ZipRecruiter’s (a SaaS based job search engine) future of work report, one of the key findings is that employers across several industries have begun offering more on-the-job training to prepare for tomorrow’s job market. AI is creating more jobs and will continue to create new roles and new jobs for everyone in every industry. Countries such as UK has been facing issues with digital skill gaps for few years now and it is known fact that there is impact seen on the business and economy and one of the measures taken was towards fixing the digital skill gap in educators.
Education system is one of the potential domains where both student and teachers need to embrace digital skills. Its foremost important that teachers need to be exposed and upskilled as a first step. If we promote the culture of teaching the teachers then they can be inspiration to students, be a role model to teach the student community.
In this startup era, we see innovation interms of various forms of training/assisting products whose major focus is to upskill the student and make student life easier. However, there are handful of products which focuses on educators in general.
Our objective is to bring out the need for digital upskilling for teachers and aspects that can be motivating the educators to come forward and take up digital upskilling initiatives. To add further McKinsey report has indicated that 20-50 million new jobs will be created in the technology sector by 2030.
The primary driver for the need of digital upskill is the changing landscape of technology itself and lack of adoption of the technology or latest trends in education system. There have been trends of adopting the collaboration, communication tools and applications. However clearly there is reluctance in general seen in adopting the AI based solutions towards automation, tutoring and many more.
There are several aspects that can serve as motivation to embrace digital upskill among educators. Listing down some of the most key aspects.
Awareness is one of the important aspects. Institutions must take steps and plan towards creating awareness among its staffs, teachers on the changing environment in tech industry and how it can bring impact to the individual level if upskill is not done. Teachers must attend industry led conferences and start writing blogs and articles to circulate among the educator’s community on the trends and enable awareness which will be also used by the student community.
Continuous Learning & Training Platforms are mandatory and not an option anymore. The one-time sessions are not going to solve the larger issues at hand. There is a need to have a continuous learning, training, certification and upskilling platforms which can provide in depth topics (granular level) with real time examples from the subject matter experts in the field with measurement models.
Technology & Data is the king in the era of AI. Educators/Institutions needs to be aware the data they have in hand and the role of technology in curating and providing very meaningful insights which can be used for various purpose, which is limitless. One of the purposes would be to help bridge the skill gaps in educators to large extent.
Automation such as process or workflow which are time consuming needs to be identified and automated with the help of AI driven software and tools. This initiative will help save lot of time, effort and energy which can be redirected towards upskilling by using the continuous learning and training platforms.
Collaboration with industry, within educators are critical for the success of digital upskill plans. Industry connect on regular basis, partnering with industry pioneers, startups who are exploring new technology is key. Setting up joint Artificial Intelligence research lab will be a great move. Colleges/University who have vision towards latest trends and technology have been adopting this for some time now, What about schools and colleges in tier 2/3? It’s time to embrace the trends in large scale to reap the benefits that AI transformation will bring in.
Simulation models can be very useful in helping not just students but educators as well, it’s time to apply what is being learned and taught as well. Partnering with companies which are transforming the learning experience through the use of simulation models will be a great initiative.
Finally, Strategy will be key, Institutions needs to have a clear strategy towards all emerging trends not just AI, need to come out with a clear plan on how they are going to strategize, plan, budgeted, adopt solutions and measurement metrics in order to ensure that core objective of digital skill gap gets addressed time to time.
