Nepal’s Educational Future: Bridging the Digital Divide with Adaptive Learning

16th December 2025, Kathmandu

As the world is rapidly moving towards digital transformation, the education sector is no behind in embracing it. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions around the world have been forced to rethink and redesign the teaching-learning process, teaching content creation, student engagement, and the role of the teacher.

Nepal’s Educational Future Bridging

The COVID-19 pandemic forced an alternative teaching model to be included in practice. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet helped in bringing education from physical classrooms to virtual classrooms, which in turn established the concepts of virtual classrooms and online learning as a necessity.

In Nepal, during the pandemic, most of the teachers and students were forced to use the digital medium, which made our education system deeply familiar with two important concepts – “Digitization” and “Digitalization” (transformation of teaching-learning through digital technology).

However, the disparity of internet access, weakness of technological infrastructures, and the lack of digital proficiency of teachers created a challenge and chaos in the early stage.

Even before COVID-19, there were some research on digital education, online instructional design, and e-learning. Digital Learning Research Lab (https://dlrlab.ku.edu.np) of Kathmandu University has been actively doing research in these areas.

The pandemic, however, allowed testing such efforts in practice and showed that the education system has to address some important questions, such as: what kind of teaching style will be effective in the future? What type of digital training is required? How to keep students engaged in online learning? Which material distribution method is the most suitable?

Based on these questions, many educational institutions started adopting a new instructional design model, among which blended learning became popular, which also includes physical interactions. The combination of both seems to make learning more effective and flexible than only online or offline.

Research conducted by the Digital Learning Research Lab suggested that the Personalized and Adaptive Learning Systems have been making a significant contribution to the education system and overall to the digital transformation of higher education.

When working with students with diverse backgrounds, interests, and learning styles, the same type of content may not be effective for everyone. Some prefer to learn from video, some read text content, some listen to audio, and some might feel comfortable on print notes.

Understanding this diversity, the Adaptive Learning System developed by our research lab provided adaptive content to the students based on their behavior and learning style.

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The availability of different types of materials (contents) according to the different needs of the students sitting in the same class can become the main attraction of digital transformation in the future. Another example of research conducted in our research lab is gamification.

Features such as the collection of marks, awards, and progress bar seem to work to keep the student engaged in learning. The competitive and entertaining environment has shown results in increasing both student participation and motivation, especially “intrinsic”.

Context in Nepal

Due to Nepal’s complex geography and socio-economic disparities, the digital divide remains a serious challenge. Lack of equitable access to technology in education, lack of internet and devices in rural areas, inadequate digital proficiency of teachers, and the unique development situation of each region make it impossible to implement a similar teaching learning strategy in all seven provinces.

This has provided a challenge to develop state-specific strategies for the expansion of internet infrastructure, asynchronous content development, content recording, offline learning access, and digital literacy training. To achieve a better output from digital transformation, there must be cooperation between the government, the private sector, educational institutions, stakeholders, and local communities.

The foundation for modern education is not gettable without long-term investments in digital infrastructure development, quality content creation, secure data management, and behavioral policymaking.

In a nutshell, adaptive and personalized learning systems are becoming the essential foundation of modern education. The pandemic has taught the key lesson that “education cannot be sustainable without digital readiness”.

With the right integration of technology into teaching materials, learning models, and assessment processes, Nepal can also move rapidly towards quality, equitable, and accessible education.

The education of the future must be student-centric, technology-friendly, and accessible.

The author is Dr. Sushil Shrestha, Associate Professor and Lead of Digital Learning Research Lab at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Kathmandu University, Nepal.

For  more: Nepal’s Educational Future Bridging