Educational technology is coming of age during the pandemic

EDTECH HAS never quite fulfilled its promise to galvanise poorly performing school systems. Past investments in educational technology often failed because of badly specified hardware and clunky software, which put off potential users. But as with much else, the closures forced on the world by the covid-19 pandemic has put pressure on schools, parents and pupils to embrace innovation. Has its moment arrived?

The picture is inevitably mixed. The covid-19 crisis has exacerbated the digital divide. The poorest students living in places with the creakiest digital infrastructure have been least able to take advantage of virtual schooling. But what has been achieved in many places has nonetheless been remarkable. Nowhere more so than in India, where more than 4,000 edtech start-ups, attracting over $2bn of venture-capital funding, have emerged in the past five years. “Necessity is the mother of all invention,” says a teacher at a school in Chandigarh in Punjab that has embraced edtech. “It came as a blessing in a bleak situation and made a world of difference.”