When you focus on possibilities you have opportunities!
We hope that you have found some time to breath, reflect and catch your thoughts over the Easter break after the frenetic activity that preceded the holiday period. Most importantly, we hope that both you and your families are safe and well. We are of course acutely aware of the pain and suffering that this virus is creating in its wake and our thoughts are with those who have been impacted or have lost loved ones.
As we look towards the summer term and the challenges of continuing to teach remotely, we know that you will respond in the diligent, professional, inspiring and creative way that teachers always do. Students across the country are lucky to have you during what is undoubtedly, now the world’s biggest online learning experiment.
At this point, we thought it would be an appropriate moment to analyse some of the macro changes that have occurred in the global education system because of the coronavirus. The educational paradigm has very suddenly and abruptly shifted, never since the introduction of formal education has so much changed so swiftly in such a compressed period of time; Take this quote from Carla Aert’s X Report written in January 2020;
Fast forward around 200 years. The world is totally different, yet in education, not much appears to have changed. Classrooms and lecture theatres still look pretty similar…Whilst technological storms and digital disruption rage, the revolution appears to have stopped at the school gate.”
That today, only weeks later, classes are being delivered via Zoom across the world highlights the swiftness of change that the coronavirus has imposed on education globally.
Into this maelstrom a number of players have emerged to help schools meet the systematic challenges of delivering global education to the world’s 1.5 Billion learners.
Many of the Ed Tech companies that we work with pre-empted the crisis and were able to fleet footedly offer e- learning and curriculum content, for free.
This trend first started in January, in China, where a series of huge Ed Tech firms reacted quickly to the lockdowns imposed to control the spread of the virus. The rapid uptake of subscribers to their platforms has seen an acceleration of their share prices in contrast to the rapid decline in stock value of the FTSY 100. Stand-outs include China Online Education Group (51Talk), Koolearn and GSX Techedu, which are up 162%, 82% and 83% respectively since the start of 2020.
In the UK, there has been a surge in demand for the services Ed Tech companies offer and we have seen countless examples of teachers creatively responding to the testing circumstances by utilising their products to deliver content.
Please also be aware that in being forced online you as individuals will certainly have developed your IT skills and heightened your knowledge of remote learning and web based software solutions.
As we move forward through the crisis, although the job market is slow, it will be fascinating to see if these Ed Tech companies can convert the millions of free users they have quickly acquired into paid subscribers. If they can, then we could expect to see increased job generation in this sector as their influence grows during the social distancing measures that look set to be a part of everyday life for some time to come.
