How the United States Is Adapting to Online Education

COVID-19 has affected almost every primary sector of the American economy. The education sector is one of the worst-hit areas, with millions of pupils and students out of school for months. The conventional in-class schooling has proven to be vulnerable to these kinds of challenges, and the vital question is, what is the best solution?

The obvious answer is to go with online education, which can help us adapt to E-virtual classrooms with the potential to support remote teacher-student online collaborative learning.

Even before the outbreak of the Pandemic, education technology, also referred to as EdTech, has been growing in the US. Almost all US states have been conducting online learning that ranges from supplementing classroom instruction on an occasional basis to enrolling students in full-time programs. 

However, when COVID-19 broke out, many US schools showed more interest in adopting EdTech to support uninterrupted and continuous learning for their students by using innovative solutions. 

This zealous has greatly been complemented with robust video conferencing applications like Zoom and Microsoft teams. These applications provide a robust E-Virtual classroom environment between teachers and their students can successfully conduct learning remotely as if they were in a physical classroom environment. 

Although there have been significant concerns about Zoom’s security architecture, the application still remains to be one of the most dominant companies in promoting remote education technology in the United States.  

The Zoom video conferencing app has even introduced an education package, friendly to teachers and students. Zoom’s education subscription package allows teachers and students to use the platform beyond the 40-minute time limit, implemented on the free accounts. Primary and secondary schools’ pupils and students are eligible for this plan, which is quite useful. 

As if that is not enough, in the time when Zoom video conferencing application was under pressure for its laxity not to implement end-to-end encryption, other American companies like Microsoft have come out to introduce similar technology to help schools carry out remote learning for their pupils and students.

Microsoft’s Teams have come with full force, and many people seem to have embraced it. Of course, as a company, Microsoft has a reputable image in the world of tech, and its introduction could pose a success story for many users. 

Microsoft has even made the use of this application free for students and teachers to engage in a successful remote learning process. Large numbers of US teachers have spent enough time learning and mastering how to organize and teach using remote technology.

Undoubtedly, EdTech is a significant field of technology with enormous potential to transform the entire education sector. Some key companies are already making aggressive investment moves to bolster more disruptive innovation in this area. 

The outbreak of COVID-19 has only served as a significant catalyst in promoting education technology. In the first half of 2020, U.S. education technology companies raised more than $803 million in venture capital, according to an EdSurge database of publicly announced funding deals. Such an incredible investment represents and the willpower that already exists to transform the American education sector through technological innovation.