Today’s rapid shift in the traditional patterns of social lifestyle caused by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has resulted in the necessity to define possible approaches to living a full-scale life while respecting the need for social distancing. Thus, one of the major challenges in the context was to define the patterns of work and education process during the global lockdown. When it comes to the notion of education, the process of online learning has become a salvation to the problem of education access and efficiency. The definition of online learning stands for an umbrella term that encompasses a series of machine-learning techniques that allow learners to acquire relevant knowledge with the help of technology in a certain sequence [1]. Although the process of online learning has become widely popular due to an ongoing emergency, the term genesis can be traced back to decades prior to COVID-19, as machine learning is also regarded as a scientific outbreak besides being an urgent problem solution [2]. Thus, once the necessity of technological intervention in education became an absolute necessity, there had already been a variety of devices and software applications to implement.
Over the times of the pandemic, the concept of educational technology (EdTech) has become widely popular with software developers and investors. In fact, EdTech, despite a relatively long existence in the market, has now introduced a variety of software applications like Classplus and Edmingle that would facilitate the process of education in both developing and developed countries [3]. Moreover, the already existing educational sources powered by Microsoft and Google are also of great efficiency for today’s learners, as their plain yet efficient design helps students accommodate quickly to the process. Hence, taking everything into consideration, it might be concluded that the process for online education that was rapidly facilitated by a pandemic outbreak is likely to develop greatly over the next few years, creating a full-scale competition for conventional patterns of learning.
References
S. C. H. Hoi, D. Sahoo, J. Lu, and P. Zhao. “Online learning: A comprehensive survey,” SMU Technical Report, vol. 1, pp. 1-100, 2018.
A. Muhammad, and K. Anwar. “Online learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic: Students’ perspectives.” Online Submission, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 45-51, 2020.
D. Shivangi. “Online learning: A panacea in the time of COVID-19 crisis.” Journal of Educational Technology Systems, vol. 49, no.1, pp. 5-22, 2020.