Adaptability to match personalized learning, the urgent need for upskilling and greater collaboration between traditional education providers and edtech players are among the 8 major thrust areas that emerged from the webinar held on Education in the Post COVID World by Simplilearn, a global provider of digital skills training and LEAD School, an academic excellence system.
Mr. Kashyap Dalal, Chief Business Officer and Co-founder, Simplilearn and Mr. Sumeet Mehta, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, LEAD School were the key speakers on the panel, moderated by Mr.Yogesh Bhat, Senior V.P & Co-founder, Masai School.
The 8 major shifts in education that were highlighted during the discussion are listed below:
- Adaptability
Education 4.0 has commenced with a need for schools and professional institutions to adapt to the needs of the learner. This is the era where everyone from curriculum developers, trainers, teachers, technology players will have to understand the best way to meet the learner’s requirements.
Adaptive learning, powered by Artificial Intelligence, which was not mainstream yet, has come to the fore to deliver personalized learning both at school and professional level. The ability to identify if all students in the same classroom are engaged at the same level will create room for trainers and curriculum developers to further fine tune or personalize content and teaching style.
Teachers will have to play a key role in enhancing their teaching styles and be comfortable with technology because adaptability and not experience on the subject will be the currency in the coming days. With vertical adoption of technology, the change in learning methodologies, which would have otherwise taken over a decade, has now happened within a fortnight and thus there is a need to learn new ways of teaching at a much faster scale.
- Support from Ecosystem
To deliver personalized learning, which is both accessible and affordable, all key stakeholders involved in education, including parents, teachers, trainers, schools, professional institutions and government will have to come together to help each other in creating an enabling environment for the learners. The earlier idea of technology being an add-on will now have to be replaced with the idea that technology is integral in the learning process. A support in this direction will be required at all levels in terms of adoption and scale.
- Enabling Technology Infrastructure
Data and Device today are the most important infrastructure support that people require to continue their lives even with the lockdown. Government schools especially will have to look at supporting their students who currently lack the technological support to continue with their education. A shift in thought – from food for the body to food for the mind needs to be undertaken to support students. In this regard, the government can consider channeling the allocation for mid-day meals which were earlier used as ‘food for body’ to providing data and device as ‘food for the mind’ and help students to continue with their education.
- Collaborative Partnerships
With schools and professional institutions still lacking the alacrity to provide personalized learning, a rapid growth in collaborative partnerships will be witnessed. Edtech players who have the technology to customize curriculum, improvise new learning techniques, engage learners among others will see a surge in demand from schools and professional institutions. There is already a steep rise in demand being witnessed by edtech players as more universities decide to overhaul the kind of courses they are offering to students pursuing different professions.
- Upskilling to Scale
With remote functioning becoming a new normal, more companies are investing in cloud services, cybersecurity and other areas and hence they will be on the lookout for more professionals who are in this space. The need for workforce to upskill itself will grow significantly with both professional institutions and businesses wanting to support their students to learn new skills. Traditional skills will fast be outdated and there will be a significant jump in skills for the future, most of which will be dominated by technology based skills. This will create the requirement for collaboration with edtech players who can co-develop curriculum around these new skills with a far greater speed.
- Affordability of Edtech
With the widespread proliferation of edtech, there will be an increase in its affordability. People will realise the value per dollar that online learning is providing and will be more willing to pay for it. However with technology having the ability to scale and achieve greater accessibility across the country, the cost will definitely come down.
- Personalised Learning
Curriculum developers and education providers will move away from one to many to one to one education. It is a widely known fact that not all learners are at the same level in a class, and hence may require more personal attention to bring them up to speed. However, technology will help learners, especially students who could earlier not repeat the same class, to go back and review what has been taught. This has especially been noticed by LEAD School@Home program, where pause and rewind buttons are now increasingly being used in video tutorials to indicate revision of the same session. Similarly, a learner’s interest level during the session will have to be gauged to ensure that he or she is learning even without a direct adult supervisor. Development of curriculum to meet these personalized needs will become even more important.
- Reorganisation of academic institutions and learning
There will be marked difference in the way the academic institutions will function upon the return of normalcy. For example at school level everything from transportation, school assembly, classroom seating arrangement, joint exercises, school uniforms will have to be relooked to factor in social distancing norms.
Secondly, how students are learning will have to shift with more adoption of technology in teaching techniques and collaboration between parents and teachers. There will be more collaborative assessment between teachers and parents since in the age of personalized learning the individual progress of the child will matter much more.
Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)
