The global level of the EdTech market is growing significantly. More people are willing to use digital services for self-education: from online translators to online learning platforms. The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted this area. Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev), the founder of Adventures Lab, speaks about the promising EdTech areas worth contributing to in 2022.
EdTech involves users as well as appeals to investors. According to the Market Study Report, the global EdTech technology market will grow to $318.8 billion by 2027. And experts from HolonIQ have predicted that the total volume of the global education market will amount to $7.3 trillion in three years. In addition, Ruslan Tymofieiev exemplifies the statistics for IT investments in comparison. If in 2017 the total amount of investments in the digital educational segment was equal to $9.5 billion (it was a record at that time), then in 2020 it was already more than $16 billion: China more than 60%, USA 15%, India 14 %, Europe 5%. China seems to remain in a leading position.
Ruslan Tymofieiev believes that, when it comes to the forthcoming year, there are four promising areas in EdTech worth investing in.
Educational Gamification
Educational platforms developers know well that teenagers prefer the game rather than a school lesson. That is why it is essential to consider a game mode while learning. This tendency is not the new one but needs to be updated. Tymofieiev mentions a recently launched educational startup in Ukraine—GIOS. It includes an online math course to prepare for external independent evaluation reflected as a videogame. This startup was invested in by $400,000, and it attracted many users, which increased ten times during the quarantine.
Cybersecurity
This niche appeared to be vulnerable along with the growth of various IT products. According to Check Point Software Technologies, cyber fraudsters attacked educational services more than 1700 times per week during June 2021. Ruslan Tymofieiev emphasizes that online platforms in such countries as Turkey, Australia, Italy, India, and Israel were the most vulnerable to fraudsters. Similar cyber attacks were noticed in the USA a year ago. One Indian EdTech company suffered from severe hacking that triggered an information leak. Data of 75 million clients was on public access for two weeks.
Personalization of Education
The investor underlines that every person has their own abilities, talents, and a particular level of training. It leads to the necessity to customize the educational process. Tymofieiev mentioned a platform based on Artificial Intelligence and recently launched in Belgium. It is called Century Tech. This platform allows creating a personal, educational program according to the student`s goals. It is crucial to focus on the individual needs of students. Therefore, it will increase the effectiveness of the educational process.
Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev) concludes his speech with the concept of three L: Life-Long Learning. The tendency of permanent self-education is gaining popularity and switching old educational forms by modern and diversified learning modes. The latter will last forever. As the investor notices, it is related to human curiosity and eagerness to know more. For example, the person is studying programming today. In a few years, they will learn a foreign language, for instance, Spanish. After that, they can prefer to dive into directing films. In this case, EdTech technologies become a valuable solution for both users and investors. They provide flexible and multiple formats to gain knowledge and skills for any taste and need.