With distance learning, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the educational technology sector has boomed since 2020. In Italy, companies invest around 47% of their budget allocated to training in digital learning: in addition to the advantages deriving from the flexibility of use, critical issues still emerge with respect to the onerousness of the necessary investments. For 86% of schools, on the other hand, future investments in digital technologies constitute a strategic objective, a percentage that drops to 77% in Italian universities even if, in general, today they already invest around 5% of their total income in Educational Technology (EdTech) solutions.
These are some of the data presented byEdTech Observatory of the School of Management of the Milan Polytechnic, on the occasion of the conference "Training and innovation: ready, go Ed…Tech!", which aims to analyse, with the support of statistics, the scenario linked to Educational Technology in Italy, the set of solutions to support the educational, aimed at maximizing the quality of the learning experience and enabled by hardware to software technologies.
“Many of the barriers to change typical of the Italian institutional and economic fabric, such as the scarce diffusion of digital skills and the scarce coverage of technological infrastructures, have been eased through this "forced" push and it is, therefore, precisely the time to ride the 'wave to make technology truly an integral part of the education and training process,” he said Camillo Loro, director of the EdTech Observatory.
According to the Observatory, the total turnover of the companies surveyed is worth around 39 billion euros, of which half – around 19,5 billion – pertains to the world of Educational Technology.
Educational technology: what it is and how it works
There are two souls of EdTech providers: that of technology suppliers (both hardware and software) and that of content and service providers.
Most technology providers provides training platforms, mainly supplied to very specific types of customers: schools and universities, individuals, as regards lifelong learning, or companies, for corporate training. Often, in addition to the platform, the provider supplies hardware, thus reaching multiple customer targets at the same time.
Most of the fproviders of content and services specializes in providing training content on specific topics (from programming to technology issues, management, marketing, managerial skills, language courses, etc.) and in different ways (podcasts, video lessons, etc.). The main services provided, however, are divided into two categories: consultancy, for educators, and financing, for students and individuals.
