How digitalization should change the way we see classroom education

“However, digitalization guided by didactic considerations offers an opportunity to bring about a paradigmatic shift that will also bear on the way education sees its own role: Children will be given more opportunity to learn at their own pace. Teachers, in turn, can be relieved of routine tasks in order to engage more with students. This will support teachers rather than replace them. Digitalization, individualization and inclusion are in a way best friends,” Böttger recently said in a hearing at the education committee of the Bavarian Parliament on perspectives in education for the year 2030.

For Böttger, routine tasks are the pure teaching of content, such as the vocabulary of a language or the systematics of fractions, which both might easily be taught digitally. Here, the use of AI already offers new perspectives for individualization, for example when the system analyzes a student’s spelling while they are typing a text. This could serve to assess students’ levels of knowledge that teachers can then use as a baseline. “This would leave teachers with more time to do what they do best - help build skills. This is contradictory to current classroom standards with all the students simultaneously working on the same task,” says Böttger.