1st EdTechs Occitania meeting on education technologies

The DAS e-Education of IRIT co-organise with the association La Mêlée the first EdTechs Occitanie meeting on June 16th at 6pm in person at La Cantine du Quai. This event aims to bring together the various actors of the EdTech in Occitania which are companies, research laboratories and the DRANE (Direction de Région Académique du Numérique pour l’Education). This event aims to question the disruption driven by the world of innovation and startups, which is now attacking education. This dynamic is called EdTech for Educational Technology. Indeed, can knowledge still be transmitted only through physical interactions in a society governed by digital technology?

1st EdTechs meeting

 The event will include presentations on current projects and on existing collaboration opportunities. In particular, there will be a focus on the activity of the strategic application domain which currently gathers about 40 IRIT researchers, in 11 teams and 6 departments. These researchers are working on digital technology for teaching and human learning. The support that Toulouse Tech Transfer can provide will be the subject of a presentation of Polymny, which emerged from research work at IRIT. This first meeting in Occitania aims to raise awareness of the booming e-Education sector, through testimonials from local and national players. 

The challenges of e-Education

With major investments from major cities like New York, Beijing, London, San Francisco and Paris, we can see that e-Education is a buoyant market, as evidenced by platforms like SchoolMouv, Open Class Room and Klaxoon, among others. The development of digital technology for education has been a real craze over the last decade, especially since the containment of the covid-19 pandemic. E-education is now adopted in almost all training institutions to accompany and reinforce traditional teaching and learning methods. It also allows to propose new innovative practices that would be impossible to implement without the digital tool. e-Education brings solutions to the current problems that the educational world has to face: the implementation of large-scale training, access to knowledge for all, individualization of training, and lifelong learning.

Educational research is multidisciplinary. It calls for the collaboration of researchers from various fields such as educational sciences, psychology, didactics, ergonomics or cognitive sciences. As for e-Education, it naturally requires new skills capable of articulating the human sciences with digital technology. Thus, Computer Science naturally finds its place in teaching and learning, whether it takes place in the presence of learners, at a distance or in hybrid training modes.