The Positive Impact of Collaborative Technology on Education And Career Programming

Education is at a crossroads of academic pursuits and technical innovation. Collaborative technology is bridging these two elements together and moulding the industry in a completely unique way.

A successful project management is achieved only via collaborative efforts where people, harbouring diverse expertise come together to pitch in a joint effort and complete the appointed task.

What is Collaborative Technology?

Collaborative technology is a software or group of software developed to bring people under the common venture where they can share collaterals and work together for successful task completion.

The Education Agenda

So how does it affect education?

CT is making education accessible and interactive. Via its 3D visualizations and wireless attributes, the contemporary education industry is breaking the conventional notion of face-to-face interaction and taking remote teaching to a completely different level.

Though many still believe in the familiarity of the teaching methodology so far, they cannot avoid the proactiveness offered by this technology that helps build up a student’s approach to academics and learning. It also opens the door for virtual learning where students can experience education rather than just reading or listening to it.

This is where technology proves Confucius right. “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand”. CT directs educational programs towards practical learning and unlocks the lessons’ potential to be student-driven rather than be ruled by a curriculum. It enables personalized & tailor-made learning and of course increases a student engagement & teacher-student interaction.

How Has Education And Career Choices Changed Over The Years?

Rewind a decade back and students with heavy backpacks and sweltering over books was a common scenario. Being was in fact, applauded because it fetched marks, what all was needed beyond that after all?

Today, education has undergone a paradigm shift. There is liberty to learn and experiment with the ideas. Today, thankfully, failure is (though not everywhere) considered a stepping stone towards success. Yes, ambitions today are sky high, but that is a story for another time.

Similarly, career choices have always been the basic options of engineering, medicine, law, or finance. Though these pursuits are as noble as ever, they are not every student’s first choice.

While children in earlier times would accept the stream as per the marks scored, today’s generation is challenging the status quo. They are venturing into fields with the desire to do something different. Thanks to the recognition of the education industry, new paths are being paved and novel opportunities are knocking at the students’ doors.

How It Affects School Children: The K-12 Impact

Improves Engagement Collaboration Technology expands the concept of education, especially for school children who, with their malleable minds have immense flexibility to stretch their learning horizon.

In fact, it builds their cognitive abilities to understand the concepts and challenges them to envision it in real time. As per a study conducted, 69 per cent of children believes that technology is functionally independent and can be used for diverse subjects.

Enhances Knowledge Retention: If the student’s mind is engaged, it will be easier to grasp knowledge and retain it as a concept that is understood and not merely learnt to be forgotten later. Technology helps to improve this retention and makes education a multi-verse phenomenon for the child.

Encourages Self Learning: Technology creates a mind map where knowledge is imprinted upon and offers the child with a path to explore new ideas, a sequenced activity to know ‘what’s next’. This leads to the coveted section of self-learning.

Helps School Teachers: A school comprises of students and teachers and to say that the latter remains unaffected by technology is nothing short of ignorant. CT majorly helps teachers' creative interactive learning curriculums and save time in clearing concepts with the help of the audio-visual mediums. This not only helps improves the students’ academic orientation but also enhances collaboration and knowledge sharing between teachers.

How It Affects Career Choices of a Student?

Humans and machines are today working together and if we talk about the preferences of the younger generation, they are comfortable with the inclusion of technology in daily work lives. Careers that have a major imprint of technology attracts a major chunk of students, at the cusp of their professional lives.

CT can help bring together different professionals from different walks of lives and fuse their talent together to create a new workplace. Moreover, with the diminishing era of the hierarchical structure of an organization, collaboration is dominating the contemporary office space which by default, mandates the need for collaborative technology.

It is proven to:

• Increase clarity among students looking for career options.
• It helps them take research backed decisions which are customized to their preference.
• Improve work productivity amongst existing professionals.

Collaborative Tools

Some of the most common tools users can deploy for a collaborative educational approach are:

• Edmodo (edmodo.com): A holistic and common platform for sharing lessons. It has tools and features that can help multiple stakeholders share content and involve students, teachers as well as parents in collaboration enabling functions.
• Vyew (vyew.com): It is a collaborative whiteboard that can share the lessons remotely and also provides the space to upload images or other ad/vid collaterals for interactive learning.
• Cacoo (cacoo.com): If flowcharts are your domain, you should use Cacoo. It spreads across a variety of academic discipline and is easily integrated with the existing academic content.
• Haiku Learning (www.haikulearning.com): It is a cloud-based software that can streamline the curriculum content for teachers and provide an intuitive learning experience.

Future Prospects

Collaborative Technology has opened the doors for a new wave of teaching and learning methodology. Learning will now take the form of a social experience, enabling educational institutions to turn into think tanks.

Technology will lead to diversity in education and there will cease to exist one common notion of imparting knowledge- it is going to be customized as never before. The virtual learning has the capability to change the socio-economic situation of lack of schools and the dearth of education.

Technology when blended with education, will change the dynamics of the industry forever. 

Kartik Bajoria

Guest Author Kartik Bajoria is a writer, educator and moderator. He holds workshops on creative writing and personality development at various schools.