Gitex 2021- EdTech companies need to push the envelope

Jumana Salem, EdTech vice-president of Injazat — the home-grown national technology champion for Digital Transformation, Cloud, and Security Solutions based in Abu Dhabi, said: “Education technology companies should move beyond their comfort zone and build products and release features to make it a transformative tool for teaching”

She said the technology available for the education sector today only addresses and alleviates the administrative challenges of teachers, but a lot more can, and should, be done.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) for education sector continues to serve the lowest common denominator of pain points, the lowest hanging fruit, basically the problems that are easiest to fix and in fact have been addressed by several platforms, and this needs to change.”

“For AI to have the right impact we (the EdTech industry) need to take on the following challenge: imagine the best teacher you ever had, and build your next feature, your product, your roadmap to serve that teacher. It is easy to build time-saving tools, auto-grading tools for multiple choice-type questions and to generate classroom reports,” Salem said.

“But we don’t need more of that, what we need is for AI to be as transformative for the teaching profession as it has been for many other sectors."

Salem made the comments during a discussion at the Gitex Global panel on AI, XR and Emerging tech that revolutionises end-to-end education.