K-12 education: Challenges, approaches, and the way forward

Digital transformation has left no industry untouched. The big education world is also no different. In our ever-evolving education system, digitization has given birth to new modes of delivering content. With the learning requirements going through a transformation, the education sector is amongst one of the fastest-growing segments in today's technological landscape. Blended learning has become the way forward, especially post the pandemic.

With rapid digitization, there are expected disruptions in the K-12 education market as well. The K-12 education market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 31.6% during the forecast period 2021-2026. The market is driven by schools switching from the traditional blackboard approach to smart technology, integrating them into learning environments.

With this context, let’s take a 360-degree view of K-12 education and how we can enhance the teaching/learning experience.

The K-12 education system

In a K-12 educational model, the letter K stands for Kindergarten, and 12 stands for 12th grade Therefore, the K-12 model includes kindergarten, primary, secondary, high-school, and pre-university education with a focus on the involvement of teacher-student communications.

This surging concept of K-12 education has transformed the conventional way of educating students and ensured basic elementary education for children from kindergarten to 12th grade.

The concept of K-12 education is quite popular worldwide, especially in countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. India is also making significant progress with its 1.5 million schools, 8.5 million teachers, and 250 million students taking part in the modern K-12 education concept. The school education sector is one of the underlying factors towards the growth and development of the youngest population in the world, greatly amplified by a gross enrolment ratio of 69.25% and the tally of students receiving school education in India.

Current challenges in the K-12 education system

Despite the increasingly widespread adoption of technologies in almost every sector, significant challenges are preventing effective implementation in educational institutions. Given the diverse demographics and vast school landscape, administrative issues with teachers, students, and school leaders are stifling the current system. To add to this, there is a lack of personalization for the varied learners in the classroom coupled with less involvement of parents.

Challenge 1: Professional Development for Teachers

The core challenge is the lack of adequate, ongoing professional development for teachers. Teachers are being asked to integrate new technologies into their classrooms. However, they are not provided proper training beforehand, due to which they are unable to understand new technologies. This leads to underutilization of all investments. Also, the new processes (techniques) simply mimic the older ones rather than exploring and innovating new processes more aligned with the learner’s engagement.

Challenge 2: Acceptance of Technology by Teachers

It’s human nature to resist change. We are overly comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves. Teachers and school leaders are no different. They are resistant to technology, and it’s difficult to push teachers and school leaders outside their comfort zones. They still feel that technological experimentation is outside the scope of their job descriptions.

Challenge 3: Lack of tools for personalized training

Technology is essential to go beyond the human-only teaching/learning methods and level the playing field on educational opportunities. Despite all challenges, school authorities are trying to provide personalized learning. Unfortunately, teachers aren’t getting equipped with the right tools they need to accomplish engagement, or adequate tools simply don't exist.

Existing set of technology for the K-12 education market

Beginning with the Indian Market, some of the leading vendors providing School Management/School ERP software are Entab, Edunext, and MySchool One. These software are widely used; however, these systems do not cover the solution needs comprehensively, offering very low coverage of academic modules (learning, curriculum development, reporting, and academic analysis). They primarily serve the purpose of report generation only.

Exploring the Indian International Bureaucratic (IB) schools IT application landscape, we find that one of the preferred school management systems for IB schools is Managebac. Managebac is the leading curriculum-first learning platform serving over 3000 IB World Schools. Managebac supports IB well for academic purposes, curriculum development, learning, academic communication with parents, report card, and academic analytics.

Now moving beyond the Indian market, we find that most of the schools internationally use the best-of-the-breed systems that integrate packages of software and custom components from various vendors. The objective is to develop enterprise systems that are more closely aligned and loosely coupled with the requirements of an organization. Which, in this context, means a solution that could meet the needs of an entire enterprise, from admissions to Student Management Systems to Learning Management Systems and Curriculum Management Systems. However, best-of-the-breed (BoB) systems aren’t fully integrated right now within the school systems. Also, specialized skills training is needed to handle BoB.

How can education technology address the K-12 challenges?

There are issues on all fronts, and resolving them requires the concerted effort of all the stakeholders, starting from those who are actively engaged within the education system to others who are providing their support, such as critics, arbiters, parents, etc. To be able to adjust to these changes and come up with the appropriate response to these challenges, it is necessary that school administrators, teachers, and students make proactive and tailored approaches or interventions that fit their own school setting. By doing so, bottlenecks can be gradually addressed and overcome, which could lead to better chances of attaining the One Vision and Mission.

On the technology front, the current challenges can easily be solved by ed tech providers. With customized and immersive learning, new dimensions across the education realm of K-12 can be created thereby, helping schools globally provide students with personalized learning experiences.
Post-pandemic, the learning requirements have gone through a massive transformation for good. As the world moves online, organizations and institutes get access to students globally.

Towards the future with ed tech

New technology implementation has a lot of potential for reshaping the educational sector through innovation, especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a sudden shift to online education and educational software were leveraged.

Edtech is attracting more and more investment and is now the most desirable place for start-ups. A Market Research Future report predicts that the online education market size will expand to USD 197.64 Billion with a 22.7% CAGR by the year 2030.

We can clearly see that the possibilities are endless and yet only beginning to take shape. The future of the education sector beholds reforms that could come from:

• The consolidation with big players buying niche players
• Standalone software opening APIs to integrate
• Upcoming marketplaces coming for paid integrations
• Continued investments in AI to make learning more engaging for students

With so much happening in the educational sector, there surely is going to be a visible shift in the Indian education industry.

What Nagarro brings to the table?

With proven expertise across the field of technology tailored for the education sector, Nagarro offers consulting services to help identify suitable LMS for schools, universities, and corporations. We can help you identify and successfully implement long-term LMS solutions that innovatively look at solving these problems in a structured and seamless manner and are best suited to individual, organizational requirements.

Our extensive experience in the education sector can help you build long-term technology blueprints, best practices, and customized solutions. We enable you to identify the right technology partners to implement ERP, SIS, CRM, and other essential systems.

Get in touch with our experts for more.