EDTECH’S ACCELERATION

EdTech is booming with virtual growing in popularity. Though it may seem otherwise, the meteoric rise of this economic empire did not happen overnight.

While educational technology has existed in various forms for decades, the modern era of connected EdTech arguably emerged in the late 1990s as internet infrastructure, online learning platforms, and statewide virtual education systems began reshaping how instruction could be delivered.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 set the legal precedent that all students, regardless of geographic location, must have equitable access to advanced communication services. Rather than traditional tax dollars, funding for this “Universal Service” comes from Telecom providers, which all goes through E-Rate, the name given to the Schools and Libraries Program.

This was expanded in the early aughts with federal funding resulting from Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which sought to improve digital literacy and provide data-driven educational tools to all K-12 schools. By 2003, roughly 93% of class- rooms across the country were online.

Expansion of online tools increased dependency on devices, forcing educators to face the disparity in the number of computers to students. These discussions continued until the next major shift in technology; the iPhone hit the market in 2007, then the iPad in 2010. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement nearly solved this problem by allowing educators to reach students through their own devices, using technology like Kahoot!, which hit the market in 2013. This gamifies learning, keeping students in the classroom engaged in content.

Around the same time technology was increasingly embraced by educators, Chromebooks disrupted the landscape (2012), taking over some of the classroom market share. Low-cost Chromebook eco-systems accelerated district-wide 1:1 computing. Additionally, Google Classroom (2014), a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that aided teachers with organizational and communicational capabilities, reducing physical paperwork and digitizing the dissemination of lectures, information, and homework projects. This increased the push for a 1:1device-to-student ratio.

It wasn’t until 2015, with the expansion of Zoom’s user-base and later LMS adoption, that remote learning via the virtual classroom came into being. This, of course, was rapidly accelerated by the pandemic in March 2020, when nearly all U.S. K–12 schools suspended in-person instruction, affecting more than 55 million students nationwide.

Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) provided funding (a total of ~$190.2 billion) to rapidly accelerate digitization of the classroom by expanding 1:1 computing, strengthening LMS adoption, and upscaling cloud- based education systems across the nation. This period aided in normalizing the virtual classroom.

Funding began pouring into EdTech in the mid-1990s, but it was not until 2010 that the market truly started to see major growth. Estimates of the global EdTech market vary significantly depending on methodology and what products or services are included, ranging from software platforms and digital curriculum to classroom hardware, AI systems, and cloud infrastructure (see bar chart for statistics).

Notice a definitive growth trend when metrics became more easily calculable. However, after the boom created by early hype/adoption, there was a market correction in dollars invested specifically in EdTech. Market size in global EdTech continued to increase, in large part due to AI technologies entering schools.

For better or worse, schools across all sectors have rapidly transformed beyond that of previous generations. A professor sitting in a modest office in Tallahassee, Florida can now teach a live class to a student at a café in Perth, Australia.

With the rise of AI, we may need to turn to sci-fi to predict the future state of our classrooms. Change is definitely on the horizon.