IoT in Education: A Future of Sustainable Learning

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) is considered to be the most trending topic in the world of Information Technology. Since its inception, Internet of Things has been an area of interest for people in various fields being it developers and innovators in the IT world or academicians and researchers and still its full potential has not yet been realized. IoT brought a complete change in the usual accepted ways of connecting devices through the internet. It has touched every area for development- being it is medical, horticulture, biotechnology, science and education. The basic framework of IoT technology is that almost everything around us can be connected anytime to the internet using easily available sensors which can be embedded into any object through which there can be communication between the things and the environment in an intelligent manner. This ability of connecting things to things and to other devices and finally connecting things to humans has revolutionized the way wired or wireless communication can be set up among various non-living and living systems in a much more affordable and effective way.

IoT finds its applications in various sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare and military and can help in developing smart buildings, smart agriculture and smart environment etc. A smart home is the place where one can access and control over all devices even from his office or may be from other city. It makes life easier and also provides better security.

Developing smart cities require smart planning taking into consideration different aspects such as infrastructure, manufacturing, transportation, health of the citizens with smart education being one of the most important concerns. IoT technologies consist of people, sensor and networking device to make connection. These technologies are different from other previous technologies as these technologies follow ubiquitous computing and provide more intelligent and autonomous solutions. It has developed the ability to impose or embed sensors into any object and use machine to machine communications to develop connection among billion of people and devices using internet as infrastructure. According to Cisco (2016) IoT technologies are used to make a network around the world by making connectivity of different objects for anything and for anyone, and any where using any network services. It fulfills the goal of tracking, identifying intelligent and managing the things. The communication between human to things and things to things has been expanded to a large extend. There are huge developments in the areas where a communication between human and machine is required. Like in Agriculture, farmers can put sensors in their fields that may help them in determining the temperature and humidity condition of soil. It may help them to decide the water requirement of their field. The sensors can also be put to determine the requirement of specific fertilizers for the crop in field. Moreover, it is not just knowing about the requirement, IoT technology may also remind farmers about each and every requirement by sending an alert on their mobile phones using connecting devices. Similarly, in medical, information about patient, maintaining and sharing the history of cure of patient with his family’s member has become easy.

Many research organizations described the future of IoT and its impact on the development of communication and connection among various devices. The devices are trillion in numbers that may have digital sensors and may be connected by leveraging any network. According to a research conducted by Juniper in 2015,the number of connected devices is 13.4 billion which can be raised to triple i.e. 38.5 billion by 2020.