Educators, parents and students have to find a way to use this outbreak to reimagine education, including what and how our kids learn, says ...
Right now, 90 per cent of the world’s learners – more than 1.5 billion students - have been affected by school closures, according to OECD estimates.In China, some 120 million Chinese students have been sitting in front of their televisions, learning through national broadcasts. Hong Kong students have been learning on digital apps since February.
While there has a lot of focus on going digital this home-based learning season, the bigger issue is that education needs to modernise and become more relevant. Digitalisation is both the solution and the challenge.In this, there are two main issues to reimagining education - how to teach, and what to teach.Starting with the “how”, many academic institutions are unprepared for this sudden transition to digital platforms and have scrambled to offer move their lectures online.
“They say if you finish early, you can go and read a book. I don’t really feel motivated with all this free time. And also there is no flexibility to change the teaching because the timetable is set in the morning so everyone just has to stick with it,” the 11-year-old said.My 13-year old grumbled: “The problem is that they aren’t very clear about their instructions, and they just say things once and then leave us alone to figure it out.
Our education systems have done a good job making the jump onto digital platforms and must now focus on how to make digital learning count. So how about changing up teaching to nurture thinking rather than to dish out instructions?I had an opportunity to witness a lesson in progress at Minerva Project, a futuristic university headquartered in San Francisco regarded as a pioneer in the world of higher education recently.
It was a refreshing and thoroughly modern experience. It succeeded also because investments were made in having faculty undergo months of training in the principles of learning science and online facilitation.
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