Mobile immersive learning: a dominating trend in the education app industry

The technology is changing the education landscape where the mobile apps for education industry will replace the traditional teaching methods. The current global education market size is of around $5 billion and is expected to grow by 35% by the end of 2020.

As per The Mobile Landscape Education Report 2015, more than 5.5% of educational revenues of U.S is now invested in EduTech ecosystem.

The education market in the US was estimated to be about $1.3 trillion in 2015 and was mainly branched into 4 major sectors:

• Early childhood education: $ 70 billion
• K-12: ~ $60 BILLION
• HIGHER education: ~$475 billion
• Adult learning: ~ $ 55 billion

Almost 9% of US GDP is spent on education and is the second largest market after health care, in the United States.

Mobile immersive learning is brewing technology trend in education that provides engaging experiences to students. Memory training apps, education game apps, language learning apps and device embedded learning products are few examples that deliver mobile immersive learning experiences to app subscribers which are primarily students.

Moreover, to successfully integrate the digital approach into the learning ecosystem, the education institutes and universities have to work on a bigger scale, making kids, pre-schoolers, college students, parents, teachers, academic administration their stakeholders and users. Then only the technology driven education system can grow many fold; technologies like Internet Immersive Environment (ILEs), Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs), gamified learning and much more.

Educational institutes are leveraging these technologies to deliver education in visual and interactive form to students. But which are the top 5 technology trends that will rule 2017 in education landscape? Let’s explore,

Augmented reality

Augmented reality will transform the text based classroom teaching into visual, interactive and engaging content in the form of videos and animated content that are augmented on the static content. Augmented Reality based mobile apps infuse more engagement in learning exercise and students tend to grasp the complex concepts quickly with interactive content.

M-learning

The rapid growth of technology and access to the internet are critical factors of m-learning. Mobile learning provides real time access of knowledge and learning on the go. The technology-rich activities enable high level peer collaboration compared to traditional teaching methods. There are few dominating apps already used by students to grasp complex concept in an interactive way namely Quizlet, iCell teaching.....

.....What can be some awesome benefits of leveraging these technologies via mobile applications?

Mobile educational apps for schools are delivering prospectus-style content in an innovative way to the universities and schools. Mobile app developers are working towards integrating all the major features and social media platform in one app to give the user a commendable experience. Few of the feature driven benefits to include:

• GPS-enabled mobile application to enhance the navigation experience via interactive campus maps.

• Robust CMS and real-time chat features can help faculties store and share information about curriculum, events, exams, lectures etc. and communicate with students in real time.

• Social media integration helps in connecting with the alumni and students to boost awareness and engagement of events and campaigns.

• Custom mobile apps can also be beneficial in spreading the news and announcements in real time with specific communities within the institute.

But for the successful implementation of the mobile app having such features, the institutes should plan to tackle certain challenges. The biggest challenges are faced during the development and implementation of interactive features.

As there can be multiple users like students, parents, faculties, the primary focus should be on building interactive yet user-friendly apps for education Other challenges include keeping the data secure, right marketing, maintaining comprehensive ERPs, linking the data from various sections of the system and much more.....