In today’s world, disruptive technologies have become essential for improving the performance of any organisation, particularly educational institutions that are big data producers. From the attraction of potential candidates through the analysis and academic management processes, educational institutions not only generate large amounts of data but also need to analyse, manage and store it, as well as extract relevant insights.

Technologies based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics allow education institutions to customise their offerings to achieve more proactive strategic planning, reduce analysis times, ensure the certification and quality of published data, automate processes, and free up resources for strategic and critical data analysis.

The application of innovative technologies in the management processes of organisations allows the improvement in process optimisation and, simultaneously, in decision-making.

Here is an excellent example of a higher education institution that needed to track and monitor the entire organisation’s performance. The institution intended to make management information available and control it in a transversal and democratic way.

Implementing a Data Analytics solution allows the centralisation of all information from internal and external sources, supports management in decision support and automates data extraction and collection processes.

The information thus became available faster and with better data quality, and the entire organisation gained more agility and efficiency with more strategic and precise analyses.

As far as teaching practice is concerned, the application of tools based on Artificial Intelligence also brings countless benefits to teachers who, through sophisticated systems equipped with AI, can optimise some of their tasks, such as test correction, lesson preparation based on feedback, lesson planning, or even identifying students’ most significant difficulties.

In this way, technology becomes a great ally for teachers who maintain their role of applying solutions that improve the learning capacity of students, especially digital natives who no longer respond to traditional teaching methods.

According to the Digital Transformation of Education study by UNESCO’s Institute for Information Technologies in Education, AI can accelerate personalised learning, provide students with continuous assessment and feedback, and apply analytics to differentiate the learning process to adapt it in real-time to individual students’ needs.

Driven by the pandemic context, distance learning or e-learning has also proved to be full of opportunities for educational institutions and students. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a complete change and replacement of what seemed irreplaceable: face-to-face teaching.

Although this new reality of rapid adoption has prevented many children from having access to education due to a lack of tools, technology has undoubtedly allowed students to remain active and take classes, were it not for the limitations at the level of society that were not yet prepared for such a rapid and imposed change.

Thus, the advantages of adopting distance learning in academia, including versatility and flexibility, were quickly understood. This is having considerable effects on the global e-learning market, which is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2028, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights Inc.

Technological advances allow, also in education to reduce physical and time barriers. Today, education must go beyond the traditional classroom, and there is no doubt that the educational institutions that invest in adopting disruptive technologies will be the most competitive and the ones that organisations will turn to in their search for professionals better prepared for the future.

Technological solutions promise reinventing teaching with more productive, effective, personalised models.