Education and educational processes will always be critical to analyze and study. They are the base for social and economic changes in all human history. In these times, education faces several challenges to continue to offer its services and then produce the needed evolution and changes for our societies. For this purpose, educational active methodologies were conceived and proposed, developed to address new roles for teachers, managers, and students. As a powerful association, these propositions found, in the market, a relationship with emerging technologies, which reached the common user in some routine presentations, such as digital marketing and e-commerce. This chapter presents a study regarding the application of modern tech resources for active methodologies, promoting a sense of this new paradigm. This perspective can result, for this chapter, as being one productive contribution for additional studies and planning abilities, as this association of engaging methodologies and emerging technologies is still on its way and can produce more positive results.
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From an external point of view, Education is a formal sector, with planned responsibilities, structures, and processes, aiming socio-political challenges to guide students to a previewed formation, with a recognized delegation. This extremely naive consideration is still present in some educational programs and propositions, leading to a comprehensive limited response to social answers, regarding the demands of a turbulent reality, in a fast-changing world.
Fundamental concepts, such as the traditional classroom, teacher’s role on unidirectionally providing knowledge and orientation, strict communication methodologies, along with bureaucracy, slow reaction to external reality and huge regulatory barriers are among the challenges which are determining some difficulties for Education in modern times (Lacerda and Jamil, 2020).
Other source of pressures arises from the changes of behavior, in a cultural revolution: as the society embraces social media and other approximation technologies, such as instant messaging platforms and virtual spaces, like the recently proposed Metaverse, classical explanatory and analytical methods are no longer attractive, demanding composition of new educational paradigms (McAfee and Brynjolfsson, 2012; Peng, Luo and Liu, 2022).
This scenario produces an interesting opportune to apply technologies in classrooms, educational organizations planning and for teachers, instructors, mentors and other agents involved in educational efforts, ranging from the point where social demands and market opportunities are researched and comprehended, programs and plans are designed to promote courses and training programs, its execution, concluding with the overall analysis as to identify if these works reached the expected level, can correct or adapt its previous offer or, eventually, evolve for new directions.
As it can be seen from OECD (2021):
At the same time, the world has seen a growing disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of our planet; between the financial economy and the real economy; between the wealthy and the poor; between the concept of our gross domestic product and the well-being of people; between technology and social needs; and between governance and the perceived voicelessness of people. No one should hold education responsible for all this but neither should one underestimate the role that the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values of people play in social and economic development, and in shaping cultural contexts. (OECD, 2021).
Educational methodologies must be reviewed, dynamically, to assure new levels of interaction, engagement by students, aiming to provide an intense, emotional, and attractive way of learning, which must continue after the class, or session, producing a permanent adhesion of students to central themes, allowing its expansion and adjustments to their different realities. A class must be something provocative, unfolding more in a structured motivation than a unilateral communication, revolutionizing a traditional way of thinking (Rebouças and Bezerra, 2022).
Notoriously, this captivating scenario occurs in the same period when emerging technologies, such as Big Data, Machine and Deep Learning (as specialties from Artificial intelligence), Augmented and virtual reality, 3-D printing, Blockchain and many others, reach a level of world-class affirmation, leading to an interesting scenario of organizational structures review and changes (Lacerda and Jamil, 2021; Jamil and Silva, 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic, which tragically impacted mankind starting from 2020, produced a subtle demand for new educational resources, implemented in a fast way as to answer planned schedules, programs and market requirements, sometimes not delivering the social educational objectives (Dedeilia et al., 2020).