Talking about educational software, most people might say that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are the first major breakthrough in educational software. They changed the way that people learn new skills at school and college level, but they weren’t the first educational software. Before MOOCs, there were specialized, niche types of educational software like flight simulators. There were also plenty of desktop programs (who remembers installing programs from CDs?) that were very simple, but still revolutionary for their time.
‍
As the web kept growing in power, online courses have dominated the digital education market. Platforms like EDx or Coursera aren’t very complex technologically speaking, but their selling point is bringing the highest quality of education to people around the world that wouldn’t be able to learn from MIT or Stanford any other way.

So, this shows us that there are two broad types of educational software:
‍
• For anyone who wants to learn something new,
• For experts who need specialized education.
‍
Next, most types of software might come in handy for education in different ways, including:

• AR / VR,
• Web platforms,
• Mobile applications,
• Desktop programs,
• Embedded software.
‍
Sometimes you don’t need a full system for teaching, just a little supporting program that will help students move along the material. So, educational software can also be:

• Encompassing the whole educational experience,
• Covering specific parts (references, knowledge base, gamification) of the experience to help students progress.
‍
Finally, there are different types of educational software depending on the use case:

• Simulations,  
• Educational games,  
• Virtual practice,  
• Digital tutors,  
• Remote collaboration.

Thanks to software, teachers and trainers can get very creative with the way they teach. Whiteboards, printouts and heavy textbooks are a thing of the past. Educational content and software can take on many forms, and help our brains learn by engaging multiple senses at once.
‍
It’s not a novelty, it’s becoming a necessity. We’re all inundated with extremely engaging content all the time, especially young people. Lessons can’t compete with TikTok… or can they? Education could be as engaging as TikTok if we put enough work into it. The problem is that the standards of education are badly outdated. Test-taking, exams, and general knowledge learned in school don’t contribute much to the development of young minds. Likewise for working people, boring training materials at work will actually make it harder for employees to learn what they need to know in order to do their job.
‍
We need new educational standards, and software will be the medium for implementing them. As the world gets consumed by increasingly advanced technology, people need new ways of learning in order to keep up with the pace of progress. Software is flexible. You can build anything you want, and when it comes to education, this is the time to try out even the wildest ideas.