Digital transformation seems to be the only positive thing that came to light during the Covid pandemic. When millions of students were forced to stay at home, the education sector had to come up with new ways for effective online learning. Many new educational technology (EdTech) startups have popped up to help the industry solve this challenge.
Today, the global education technology market continues to demonstrate no signs of cooling off. The EdTech venture capital has increased by 40 times during the last decade, reaching a whopping $20.8B in 2021.
An author of ‘‘The Innovator’s Mindset’’, George Couros, once said: ‘‘Technology will never replace great teachers, but technology in the hands of great teachers is transformational’’. We at JatApp have been in the EdTech business long enough to agree that teachers can use educational solutions to boost students’ cognitive abilities and reshape the entire educational experience.
That’s why we’ve prepared this article to help you better understand the global EdTech landscape and promising niches to fill in 2022. But before diving into the EdTech industry overview it’s important to understand what drives the growth of the contemporary market.
Key EdTech drivers in 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic has reimagined the education sector, giving rise to collaborative and personalized learning technologies. These two trends have a tremendous impact on the entire industry, regardless of the niche.
The increasing importance of collaborative technologies
As schools all around the world are disrupted by the global pandemic, the EdTech sector has become a lifeline connecting students with their teachers and assisting the latter in providing new knowledge and making assessments. In the reality of remote learning, collaborative technologies are becoming an increasingly common approach to engaging students who feel disconnected from their teachers and peers.
Collaborative EdTech range from online platforms that support remote presentations and group brainstorming to digital communication tools that enable synchronous and asynchronous cooperation via voice, text, and/or video. These tools allow students to remain active participants in the learning process while ensuring ‘‘teacher’s presence’’ in the remote settings. Below you can see the example of a collaborative slideshow tool with customized features named Buncee.
Buncee app functionality
The growing need for personalized education
Every student has their own pace of learning, preferences, interests, abilities, and skills. Given that the average classroom has 20-40 learners, it’s impossible for a single teacher to meet the needs of every student. Due to the lack of personalization many learners lag behind, even despite the teacher’s competence and expertise.
EdTech helps to address this problem, offering a student-centered approach based on how learners perceive the material, the level that they’re at, and how well they’re progressing. With artificial intelligence (AI), teachers can track learners’ performance and adjust lessons on the fly.
As an example of a good solution, StepWise is an AI-driven virtual tutor tool for STEM students. As learners are engaged with the instructions based on their abilities, they gain a deeper understanding of the material and better retain the information compared to a traditional classroom environment.
StepWise personalized tool for STEM students
Needless to say, personalized learning is driving the sector’s growth now. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan invested $45B to make this educational method boom today. Notably, the shift from a one-size-fits-all strategy to a more customized approach to education is particularly relevant in times of the pandemic. Many students are currently in need of personalized learning, as they either fail to quickly adapt to remote learning or fall behind due to the coronavirus disease.
Now that you’ve learned about key industry drivers, let’s talk about the most promising EdTech market segments.
Best EdTech niches crying to be tapped
Choosing the market segment for your EdTech solution is one of the primary steps you need to take in your product development journey. Naturally, you need to be aware of the current market trends to gain investors’ support and positive feedback from your audience. Let’s check out five most promising EdTech niches to enter this year.
Pre-kindergarten (Pre-K)
The technologies targeting this market segment are witnessing a surge in innovation. The recent research on children aged 0-6 years old about the so-called “learning trap” sparked the interest in this EdTech category. More specifically, the evidence suggests that children at this age are better able to explore more information than grown-ups.
The ‘‘learning trap’’ experiment has shown that when adults try something new, from a modern art museum to hummus, and dislike their experience, they typically won’t give it another shot. If adults leap to conclusions that all modern art exhibitions and hummus are terrible and avoid them ever after, they aren’t likely to taste a delicious homemade Lebanese breakfast and see an original Monet’s ‘‘Water Lilies’’. In contrast, children tend to be more curious about the world around them and are more likely to try once again after a failure.
Common learning traps
Given this children’s natural curiosity, more and more startups have started to design educational games and school apps for this age group. Studycat is one of the most popular language learning apps for Pre-K children. Since most children at this age have a short attention span, the application includes entertaining games, stories, and songs that help them to stay both focused and engaged.
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Studycat app functionality
The future of this education niche seems rather optimistic. The spending on child care is expected to increase by 4.1% each year until 2024. Since 2017 Pre-K EdTech startups have received $372M in funding, which is 5.7% of all sector’s venture capital raised during the last five years.
Bootcamps
Bootcamps refer to short programs that are approximately six months long and focus on preparing specialists for new professions. Many large companies collaborate with bootcamps for workforce upskilling and finding new talents. Bootcamps mainly aim to address the skill gap in the IT field.
As an example, Thinkful is a coding bootcamp that offers live mentorship from IT sector experts. One of the main advantages of this platform is that learners don’t pay for their education until they get hired in qualifying job positions. Besides, learners have an opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with the experienced professionals via video sessions.
Thinkful bootcamp functionality
Tech talents remain in high demand in the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that employment of software engineers and quality assurance specialists is expected to grow 22% from 2020 to 2030, which is almost three times faster than the average for all other professions. Bootcamps successfully help to address the IT skill shortage. The Switchup survey shows that 68% of bootcamp alumni find jobs in their field within six months after graduation.
Change in the employment by professions
Games and simulations
Game-based learning apps have long been a primary strategy for teaching Pre-K children. Gamification features also have been making their way into higher educational institutions and organizational training. It’s worth adding that mixed and virtual reality simulations are powerful educational tools. Engineering and medical students actively use simulations to develop practical skills and competences from experience in the virtual world as they would do in reality.
In traditional classroom settings, learners can always find ways not to participate, sitting silent at the back of class. By contrast, in Labster, a learning platform for virtual laboratories, nothing happens without students’ active engagement. The EdTech tool allows learners to apply their knowledge to address real-life problems with the help of 3D immersive simulations.
The education technology has gamification features that empower learners to explore science. The platform offers the context of a real story to engage students in a concrete mission. Learners play the role of hero and are capable of impacting the outcomes of the events.
Cardiovascular function exercise with Labster
Users can also have conversations with the game characters by choosing a response option and earn points for successfully completing the quizzes. Such a game-based feature as the ‘‘freedom to fail’’ allows students to get instant feedback and retake the quiz in case of giving an incorrect answer.
Many successful EdTech startups, like Cuemath, Matific, and Byju’s, believe that game-based learning is the future of education. The BlueWeave Consulting study supports this vision, claiming that the worldwide education gamification market has grown to $697.26M in 2020 and is projected to increase at a CAGR of 29% between 2021-2027.
Study notes and homework
Study and homework solutions help students to find, compare, and store the learning material, take notes, create bibliographies, get tutor’s help, and much more. Most platforms target specific age groups, while some larger EdTech companies provide assistance to users across the entire learning lifecycle, from primary to post-secondary education.
One of our recent clients reached out to us to build an online tutoring platform. JatApp helped them to develop a solution that connected learners with teachers for homework assistance.
Let’s see how it works. To get qualified help, a student posts instructions and sets a due date. Then, they can communicate with tutors via live chat to learn more about their teaching expertise. When a student confirms the completed order, a teacher gets paid. The notifications will immediately inform tutors when new assignments appear in the app.
Tutoring platform functionality
According to TechCrunch, major league EdTech venture capitalists have poured their money into homework assistance solutions during the last 4-5 years. Due to coronavirus-related school shutdowns, the demand for tutor’s help solutions will only grow, as, because of being away from the classroom, many students can’t keep up with the curriculum and need online help from competent tutors.
Test preparation
These days, the test preparation market provides students with a variety of personalized options. Many apps adapt the learning content to users’ abilities. For example, exam questions get more complicated as students make progress. Some platforms rely on AI technology to match students with those who perform well and offer immediate feedback on the exam results.
To help 6-7th-grade students to enter top UK schools, Brandon Learning Centre builded the test preparation platform called Pre-Quest. The organization turned for technical expertise to JatApp to create an easy-to-use product with the engaging UI/UX design.
The app lets users receive the immediate results on their test along with the explanations if there are any mistakes made. The questions in the quizz are generated based on the learners’ prior performance on the platform.
What’s more, the application has gamification elements that are appealing to 9-12-year-old children. Users can get trophies and badges for successfully completing the test, which motivates them to keep on working towards their goal. The platform also allows children to compete with each other by tracing the results of their peers. Meanwhile, parents can also monitor their children’s progress and time spent in this app.
Pre-Quest gamification features
Preparation for exams, like school admissions and language tests, remains a booming segment in the EdTech landscape. For instance, in India test preparation startups raised a quarter of all investments in the EdTech industry in 2019. In 2021, this niche along with the K-12 segment comprised 66% of the total EdTech market size.
Wrap up
In the last couple of years, EdTech has seen a surge in investments due to pandemic-related policies and restrictions. Such niches as Pre-K, bootcamps, games and simulations, study notes and homework, and test prep promise the greatest returns in 2022. These market segments are soaring right now, with more and more startups emerging to respond to the rising customer demand.
If you’re looking to build EdTech software like an Online Tutoring Marketplace or Pre-Quest, JatApp has all the necessary technical resources and vetted teams to assist you in turning your goals into reality. Our company develops education innovations that raise more than $500K in funding and attract over 70K users each month, growing by 20% annually. We provide support through all stages of software development and offer maintenance after the product has already been released.
Interested in cooperating with JatApp? Drop us a line and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.