Technologies in education: what will teach us in the future?

Today’s Internet space provides a huge amount of information that is incomprehensible for a person to process. More than a thousand books and millions of articles are published online every year. We need to extract useful information from all this variety of information. The problem of the lack of obtaining knowledge is no longer there. Today’s problem is an overabundance of information. 
There is so much information that it was hard for me to choose relevant information for my essays. That is why being a student I decided to write my paper with help of qualified professionals.

Computer Science class

At the end of 1970, the first PLATO e-learning system for students was developed at the University of Illinois. Its main purpose was to help students write term papers. PLATO has not become particularly popular in the educational world, although it has set the right vector in the formation of e-learning.
Rapidly developing, IT technologies have increasingly begun to enter the educational environment. All over the world, a modern educational institution could no longer be imagined without a computer science class. Teachers teach children digital skills, coding, and create applications. At the Essa Academy, young people have been using Apple products in their classes since 2009. Singapore Nanyang Technological University allocates each of its students an iPad for classes. Teachers together with students exchange ideas for extracurricular activities in chat rooms, use applications for mastering educational materials, hold discussions on Skype. Singapore is probably one of the most technologically advanced countries today, but it is no exception. Schools and educational institutions in the United States, China, and several other countries support the initiative to introduce new technologies into the educational process.
In addition to the development of new technologies, the curriculum is also changing. The child is already being taught to use various gadgets, introduced to Internet portals, and installed chatbots. Pushing for the study of new things, the modern system of pedagogy needs to reconsider the choice of subjects of study.

What should I teach?

The upcoming 4th technological revolution should push the educational system towards training technical personnel. The largest IT companies in the world are already putting the popularization of programming and engineering into their strategies – Apple is launching Swift playgrounds to teach programming to children, and the creators of the largest organizations are sponsoring the online platform code.org. 

In 2014, Osmo developers created the game Osmo Pizza, which taught children the basics of programming. It was included in the list of the 25 best inventions of the year according to Time Magazine. And Tynker plans to introduce a program to teach children the basics of coding through programming Parrot drones to more than 60,000 US schools. It is quite possible that soon we will see kindergartens where teachers with tablets in their hands will teach children foreign languages, mathematics, and programming. 

The world of the future — today

If we return to the problem of an overabundance of information, it is worth noting that without the help of modern technologies, a person is unlikely to be able to obtain high-quality knowledge. This year, artificial intelligence will be increasingly involved in the field of education. With the help of studying Big Data technologies and machine learning, we will be able to curb the continuous flow of information and derive useful things from it. Today’s study of these technologies will allow young specialists to become in demand in the labor market of the future. 

The transition to the use of new technologies not only on a large scale but also in everyday life is becoming more and more noticeable. Students are already using bots to get a quick response on their smartphones. Tools such as Google Home, Amazon Echo (Alexa), and Siri help students find the necessary information faster in the question-answer format. 
Artificial intelligence helps not only students but also teachers. Universities are already introducing modern technologies into educational programs. A teacher at Georgia Tech University uses a chatbot as an assistant to help students with online answers. Students can not only complete tasks faster, but also conduct extracurricular activities online. Thus, the appearance of virtual tutors will begin to displace real ones. 
Modern technologies speed up the learning process and also help ready-made specialists in their work. And this applies not only to the introduction of artificial intelligence. Shortly, virtual reality technologies will help medical students perform practical operations without harm to the patient. The company Next Galaxy is creating a single social VR platform CeeK. 

Sitting at home, the student will be able to attend class classes only by wearing glasses. 

Problems of Internet education

A huge amount of information will increase every year. According to forecasts, the volume of information will double every two years over the next eight years. One of the main factors of this growth is the increase in the share of automatically generated data to more than 40% in 2020.

However, the share of useful information for a person will be less than 35% of the total amount. It will be harder and harder to get the necessary knowledge using the Internet.

The average user of the world wide web spends more time not getting the necessary information. There are more and more Internet-dependent people who can spend more than 18 hours at a computer and gadgets. In 2013, the predominant number of high school students and schoolchildren falling into this group was noted in Japan. And in 2012, Russia came out on top in Europe in terms of the number of Internet users.
Today, we should see the line between teaching children in the digital space and completely immersing in it. Global companies are creating more and more servers for big data and they constantly need specialists who can process them with the help of technologies. However, changes in education with the development of IT technologies are inevitable.

Does the future belong to the machines?

Despite the large amount of data in the global network, it will be people who will have to monitor the quality of information. But technologies are already coming to their aid today. Teachers of educational institutions, conducting classes for an average of 30 people, are forced to follow the educational program without stopping at the laggards. In countries such as China, Japan, and India, it is difficult for thousands of young people to get an education due to a lack of qualified teachers and an overabundance of students in classes. Artificial intelligence flexibly adapted to each student will be able to help them get the necessary knowledge.
Google adapts the search results by geolocation, Amazon recommends purchases based on previous ones, Siri analyzes the user’s commands. Today’s artificial intelligence already understands human needs. Just as it identifies these interests by selecting a product for sale, artificial intelligence will be able to analyze the student’s abilities by adjusting an individual training program. Machine learning algorithms can collect testing data and user progress to give the right tasks at the right time. In the next 10 years, we cannot predict the exclusion of the human factor in the educational environment.

However, in the long term, artificial intelligence will be able to replace not only teachers in schools but also private teachers. Services such as Duolingo and Carnegie Speech use the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) speech recognition system and NLP for remote learning of a foreign language.

Today, using services like Coursera, millions of people get the information they need without leaving their homes. Education is moving towards openness and accessibility. We can assume that very soon anyone will be able to master even the most complex disciplines remotely. If we look far into the future, the very fact of receiving a world education will become an ordinary thing.
Speaking about the automation of teachers, we must understand that every machine is taught by people. The introduced knowledge base is integrated into artificial intelligence by today’s teachers.

The profession of a teacher will grow into something else. A person will need to master a new tool-augmented intelligence, which has already become an integral part of most people’s lives. It is imperceptibly present under the hood of many convenient services necessary for searching and processing important data in the information flow. His role in our lives is rapidly increasing imperceptibly. We are happy to install applications that make life easier. It is our desire for simplicity that generates the demand for augmented intelligence and raises the bar of competence for teachers. This is an inevitable development of the profession, the same as changing the wooden accounts of accountants to Microsoft Excel.
In the long run, we must understand that a conversation with a human, and not with a machine, will be much more appreciated. Employees of major companies such as eBay, Google, Yahoo today send their children to schools without computers, because they suppress creative thinking. A living teacher of the future will be able to receive a lot of money just for being ready to give a student valuable experience and unique knowledge. But at the same time, the requirements for professional qualities will also increase due to fierce competition with cheaper automated labor. Competition with machines is likely to be able to withstand only teachers by vocation. Even in the distant future, it is still impossible to imagine a technology that can replace true talent and creativity based on love for their work.