Join the bandwagon of ed-tech

The fourth industrial revolution may bring far greater changes than we expected. The educational industry is also experiencing the ed-tech wave, combining education and technology. According to CB Insights, a Silicon Valley market research agency, the global ed tech industry raised $2.984 billion in investment last year, five times more than the investment in 2011.

Until now, e-learning and smart learning was limited to incorporating PCs and smartphones in classroom instruction. But ed-tech is different. It uses big data to provide personalized instruction and real-time lessons for different situation and timing. A more formidable technology is artificial intelligence, or AI. Private educational companies already worry that Amazon’s AI service Alexa and AI speaker Echo may create a world without teachers. What’s more worrisome is that this imagination could come true sooner than we think. AI is rapidly evolving through deep learning.

There are is a lot to solve for Korean ed-tech companies to compete in the global market. Each company uses its own e-learning platform and creates flash-based contents, and uses unstandardized methods with vulnerable security. They cannot respond to the “mobile first” era or create effective learning content that can be marketed in the global market.

Lately, Chinese education companies have been providing HTML-based contents in multi-device and multi-browsing environment, and I thought China would get ahead of Korea. Korean ed-tech companies should make efforts to increase global competitiveness by providing services and contents that use internationally standardized technologies.

In developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, the government offers strategic support for the ed-tech industry.

Korean government should also remove technological and administrative obstacles to actively help companies expand abroad so that Korean companies can enter the rapidly growing global market.