Aristotle said, “man is by nature a political animal” — central to that idea was mankind’s innate desire to interact with one another, learn with one another, and socialize with one another. Some people argue that the age of social media has made this possible, but on thorough inspection has it? Many proposed models of learning require students to spend massive amounts of time in front of their computer screens, which can cause physical and psychological damage.

Though technology can aid a teacher to personalize a student’s learning path and content, guide a teacher to provide help at the right time, or help increase student engagement, it cannot and will not replace educators because they don’t simply teach concepts and skills, they inspire young students to be inquisitive throughout their lives and start a cultural revolution, one which sparks curiosity, which enables these students to have independent thought processes and equips them with the power of knowledge. Moreover, this stirs their enthusiasm and passion for learning.

Thomas Edison predicted that by the year 1922, motion pictures would revolutionize the face of education and would have changed the way of learning in a classroom. Blackboards would have been replaced with graphics and illustrations and live lectures would have been replaced by movies and recorded lectures through online classes.

As appealing as this sounds, in reality, it was not before the 1930s that even the radio transmission of information to classrooms was a reality. Moving forward, in the 1980’s video discs (giant CDs) were supposed to revolutionize education but that did not happen. We see that it was in the 1990s that education got a new makeover with the power of the internet.

The Internet has revamped education without a doubt. But does this mean that the role of educators has been reduced or minimized? That would be a hard no.

By now, we all have come across the headlines which rubric that technology will be taking over the world including the field of education. MOOCs (Massive online open courses) will make it possible to learn anything from home. Well, that just isn’t going to happen, and here is why!

Teachers go to all kinds of extremes to include all their students and make the classroom an inviting and invigorating place. They engage and energize students and know how to handle intrinsic motivation. A teacher’s use of questioning to spawn critical thinking and initiate deeper learning is something students can’t miss out on.

No doubt technology could now conduct tests based on cognitive capacities and tell us which careers would be perfect for us or it can help personalize education, but can it push you like a real-life teacher or mentor to achieve those goals and dreams and materialize them? Again, a hard no.

Questions like how is a motion graphics lesson better than a static version has dominated educational research. There’s no denying that animation is a powerful educational tool. What is surprising, though, is that animation is often less effective than a static graphic. Now, why do you believe this occurs?

This occurs because animations and motion graphics sleet and the learner may miss important facts during the animation. A static graphic, on the other hand, is not changing or transitory, making it easy to understand. As a result, it may be deduced that the most important part of education has less to do with what happens in the learner’s environment and more to do with how the student learns.

As Dan Donahoo explains in his article titled, Curating Games-Based Learning, “Students don’t often learn directly from a game, they learn from an experience that involves a game, some activity around that, some critical thinking and engagement or questioning from a teacher. Just as students don’t learn directly from a textbook — the textbook is a tool that supports a teacher to facilitate learning.”

No teacher can be replaced by technology and that is a fact we must accept. The responsibility of a teacher is not only the delivery of knowledge but guiding the process of education. The roles that a teacher must play should be that of a leader, motivator, and mentor providing adequate one on one mentorship and career guidance.

Indeed, the initial purpose is the transference of knowledge, but a teacher cannot be limited to a singular dimension. The priority task for any teacher is to make the child feel that they are appreciated, and they have their unique talents and capabilities.

Why am I persistent on the proposition that educators and tech-based learning innovations are not rivals but allies because they cannot work without supporting each other like a marriage. The technology builds the atmosphere and provides the tools to make a marriage work and teachers come up with the “how-to’’ part of the same. These teachers are the people deciding what, when, where, and how to teach the young impressionable minds to get the highest possible results ever.

Technology can help a person compartmentalize the tasks they have in a day, but they cannot offer the support and motivation to complete the same. It is equipped with the power of a massive database that has terabytes of information, an amount of data that cannot be registered with the human brain, but tech cannot offer the mentorship that a person might need for the practical application of the same information.

If I were to talk about the accomplishments of artificial intelligence, it is indeed one of the strongest achievements of mankind. However, it produces files and results based on previous patterns which may have been exhibited by a small sample size of the population. Hence, it can be concluded that AI is not prepared to effectively manage the challenges of a growing student with continuously evolving demands and problems. Having a synchronized relationship between educators and technological tools is where we are lacking in our education system at present.

Teachers do more than just the one-way task of instructing a student. They identify social cues that would be impossible for a machine to parse, especially non-verbal or invisible interactions, that affect the learning experience. They help identify roadblocks for students that might be more personal or emotional, that a machine cannot pick up on. They help to contextualize lessons in real-time, which might not be possible for a piece of technology to do.

Think back to your favorite teacher — did you enjoy their teaching because of their infallible library of knowledge or because of how they made the subject they taught come alive for you? The human connection is necessary for something as key as the act of learning.

The pandemic has made us change in a lot of ways. One such dimension that has faced a drastic change is education. The classroom has moved online and is reduced to a mere feeling. This has also led to the extinction of a personalized career guidance system. Many university and college-going students have reported the lack of a research-based curriculum, more so since the onset of the pandemic. This leads to a reduction in the academic quality of students and their potentials are not truly discovered. We are witnessing a time when the students are yearning for more social settings in learning.

The school administrations provide platforms that open different channels of communication for teachers with students and their parents. With this software, teachers can stay better organized and on top of their game with reduced time and effort. Education-based technologies help enhance the teaching-learning methods rather than changing them. They help in the curation of dynamic and interactive learning aid which was previously out of the reach of teachers due to monetary and technological constraints. Tech should empower and enable the educators, rather than replace them.

In the forthcoming decade, education is set to face a revolution. People are becoming proactive about what education stands for. The fantasy that many innovators nurtured in the past that new learning tech would emerge out of massive data and predesigned algorithms are the past decade. People are trying to build classrooms that are personalized in which the educators are still in charge but are well equipped with technological advancements.

The future holds a system of learning wherein teachers will be able to give their students an experience of shared adventures and personalized support and feedback. This may happen with the help of an algorithm in some scenarios, while in others, it’s just an outcome of brilliant design.

According to Jessie Woolley Wilson, even the best instructor cannot give personalized content to 30 kids in a classroom without the use of technology. However, it has been discovered that personalized learning technology that dynamically adapts to students’ needs while providing real-time insight into their progress enhances a student’s accomplishment tremendously. Personalized learning technology provides extra support for teachers, allowing them to spend less time researching for specific lessons and more time on the art of teaching.

Blended learning (a marriage between technology-based innovations and educators), focusing on one-to-one mentorship and building a community to be able to present a state of the art system-based educational changes which profit all educators and students is the only way forward into the future.

Blended learning implies the building and setting up of tech labs integrated with the latest innovations in technology with the help of the massive amounts of data that is available on the open sources and the data libraries on the internet and capable and enthusiastic educators willing to help these children’s lives by being the mentors and guidance figures they need. It is through this teamwork and harmony that education for the next-gen can be made fun and possible.