By ASSIST Education Posted August 6, 2019 In Blog Posts 0 0
This article was first published by Education Technology Insights in August 2019.
With the advent of innovative technologies, the education sector is swiftly transforming to deliver enhanced digital learning experiences marked by connectivity and collaboration. Augmented and virtual and reality (AR/VR), artificial Internet (AI), machine learning, IoT, and cloud have brought new possibilities in connected learning in the K-12 space. For instance, teachers can now share the students’ test results with other teachers, the management team, as well as parents in real-time. With rich insights, stakeholders can collaborate remotely and take effective measures to drive the learning process. They can also track the behavior and performance of the students in the classroom and in other activities. The understanding of the behavioral trends at the individual student level enables them to make informed decisions and guide the students’ journey toward success.
The K-12 institutions will continue their involvement with robots this year. They are exploring several ways to integrate robotics in education today. Although robots can serve specific motives, the in-depth learning experience can be certainly be improved by employing them.
Considering children’s fascination with games, many K-12 institutions are planning to introduce game-based learning. This form of learning brings computational thinking concepts to k-12 students. Most children and young adults think more analytically while clearing the various stages in a game. This attribute, with some effort, can be extended to learning lessons in a classroom. Using memorable experiences, students can break away from the age-old monotonous way of learning and adapt to the new age of education.
Augmented and virtual reality technologies (AR/VR) play a major role in creating new opportunities for the education sector. The emergence of affordable technologies will enable educators and teachers to provide an immersive experience. Students will be able to travel across the world without even leaving their classroom. Along with AR/VR, assistive technologies like Google Home, Siri, and Alexa will be more relevant in classrooms in 2019. Internet of Things (IoT) will enable teachers to monitor students’ progress swiftly and with ease. The integrated form of learning is another great development. Several schools have already adopted integrated learning solutions that can combine print materials and textbooks with digital aids.
The year 2019 will witness massive adoption of AI and big data. These technologies will offer huge opportunities to education to shift from the standardized testing data into less structured data that will help educators to comprehend the students better. Although the standardized testing is unavoidable educators involvement of AI and big data will enable educators to extract much more benefits than they ever could with state testing.
To help CIOs navigate through the list K-12 solution providers, our distinguished selection panel, comprising CEOs, CIOs and VCs, industry analysts and the editorial board of Education Technology Insights narrowed the 10 hottest k-12 solution providers that exhibit competence in offering innovative K-12 solutions.
We present to you Education Technology Insights’s “10 Hottest K-12 Solution Providers- 2019”
ASSIST EDUCATION, LLC: USHERING A NEW ERA OF ONLINE SCHOOLING
Is it possible for the post-millennials to imagine a world without the internet? For a generation that thrives on social media, the answer is probably “no.” The surging use of digital media is changing the way people live their everyday life and this inspired a team of dedicated teachers to build a digital-only school, Advantages School International (ASI). Today, everybody wants tailor-made products, and thus ASI believes that education also needs to go beyond a “one-size-fits-all” approach to make it suitable for the fast-paced globalized world. This ideology brought ASI to life, a fully-accredited online K-12 education institution that offers flexibility to students with varying learning pace and lifestyles.
However, building an online school from the ground up without a financial investor is not a cakewalk, but the team remained undeterred. They did not want to navigate between multiple, (and costly) management solutions like student information system (SIS), learning management system (LMS), and content management system (CMS); so they built a single comprehensive management system in-house. In due course of time, the tools created for ASI’s operation were put together to form an integrated education management platform called ASSIST. Today, ASSIST has not only redefined digital curriculum management for ASI but has become a go-to solution provider for other schools and educational institutions, supporting online learning, globally. Here is how.
The ASSIST platform, as a turnkey solution, helps schools establish a digital presence with a versatile and diverse range of academic materials. The platform being content-agnostic, takes help from a panel of external content experts to add courses that meet industry standards. These study materials are made available to schools and students based on their academic goals and needs. “If you can offer study materials and courses in a way that students want, they will embrace it willingly and become empowered to drive their own learning,” states Michael Spencer, CEO of ASSIST Education.
Alongside, the platform’s online catalog and comprises a wide gamut of courses, students are preparing for their shift from school to college, and later, to a digitally sophisticated workplace.
For schools that are just starting to create an online presence, they often work with different ed-tech platforms, which can be cumbersome and expensive. In such cases, ASSIST proves to be a one-stop shop for requirements on two levels—managing administrative tasks and assessing student performance. That said, ASSIST also ensures that the addition of new features to its robust platform is easy and less time-consuming.
Today, ASSIST has helped numerous educational institutions turn their game around. A case in point is a Mexican academy. The client was using several disparate systems to manage grades, curriculum, and student and teacher information, among others. As a result, organizing data for daily operations became time-consuming and for the workforce to navigate the separate systems across departments proved expensive. To alleviate these inefficiencies, the client implemented the ASSIST platform to integrate all administrative and curricular processes in a single system while allowing relevant data to be viewed by appropriate people.
At present, ASSIST boasts its presence throughout in East Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America and Africa, with a wide catalog of courses from these regions. Moving ahead, the technology team at ASSIST education is on a constant mission to add schools in those regions and stay digitally relevant. Together with that, the team is closer than ever to launching a master scheduler that assigns courses to students based on their performance data, and also digitalizing student and teacher document authentication on the ASSIST platform. In the near future, ASI aspires to implement a virtual whiteboard facility to facilitate seamless one-on-one online teaching.
