Transcriber: Pamela Castañarez Reviewer: David DeRuwe
If I was to ask you to think about your education
until the start of the COVID pandemic and then give it a shape,
what would you say?
A circle, trianglish, elliptical?
I’m sure most of you would answer squarish or box-like.
For many of us, our education is a series of boxes
or compartments that we move through until we graduate.
Our schools are square.
Our classrooms are square. Our desks are squarish.
The information that we learn is predecided chunks of information
packaged into modules or blocks
and handed down to us on someone else’s timetable.
At least that’s how it was until now.
What if I asked you to think about your educational experience
since the start of the COVID pandemic?
What would you say? Crazy, hectic, confusing.
One minute we’re in our traditional classrooms,
the next we’re operating online out of our house.
Other days, some people are back in the classroom, others still at home.
The class contents are roughly the same, but how we’re learning them is different.
We have to do more on our own,
and technology is playing an ever-increasing role.
There’s a movement away from traditional memorization
towards more group and task-based work.
Everything is a lot less rigid these days. Everything is changing fast.
Actually, these changes in the way that we’ve been learning
have been coming for a while.
Even before the COVID pandemic, the world and education
was becoming a lot more flexible, fluid, less rigid, less fixed-place.
Lifespans are getting longer.
People are working longer and changing jobs more often during their career.
In between, they’re popping in and out of education to brush up their skill sets.
These changes in our lifestyle and the way we work -
we’re already putting changes on educational institutions to change.
Many schools throughout the world were already offering
on-demand, online graduate and postgraduate courses.
I myself did one from the comfort of my living room in Tokyo.
The lectures were online, the group assignments were online,
projects were personalized.
Our fellow students were tuning in
from China, Japan, Korea, different states in Australia, the UK.
It was extremely useful, extremely convenient, fluid and pre-pandemic.
And then along came COVID 19.
Within weeks, changes that were mainly being made at university level
were being rushed into education at every level down to primary school.
Schools were scrambling to adapt as they tried to get the kids online,
and if they couldn’t, they were scrambling
to produce some kind of curriculum that the kids could do at home.
Suddenly, everyone was out of their traditional classroom;
everyone was being forced to adapt.
The situation was and is changing week by week, day by day.
Everyone is being forced to be more flexible. Everything is much more fluid.
Change that was originally coming in 10 to 15 years is happening now.
As unwanted as it is, COVID 19 has proven two things:
that the traditional educational model is not sustainable
in this fluid, interconnected, disrupted modern world,
and that educational institutions can change rapidly when they have to.
What the COVID pandemic has merely emphasized is that ...
schools really need to develop alternate, more adaptable learning systems.
OK you say, that’s very obvious.
In a world where most people have at least some access to an iPhone
and the internet, of course changes are inevitable.
You're right, it is obvious.
But as an educator, what I propose to you
is that the coming change is much more profound than most people think.
Let’s change the subject a little bit, and let me ask you a question:
What is the purpose of education?
I’ve asked this question to literally thousands of my students
over the past 10 to 15 years,
and the answers are mostly the same:
“It helps us to learn the basics, it helps us to get a job.”
OK.
These are logical, largely predictable answers
that mirror my students’ experiences.
They view education
as a largely logical process that leads to logical outcomes.
They have a few choices along the way, but in general,
they follow predecided paths, learn predecided information,
and move towards logical goals.
Another question I ask my students year after year is:
“How was it, your educational experience so far?”
“Yeah,” they say, “I was OK, Jason, you know,
I got to hang out with my friends.”
One or two of them say:
“One or two teachers are really good, and I enjoyed their lessons.”
What they didn't say was that they enjoyed the process of learning
or that they enjoyed where it was taking them.
As a teacher, that’s heartbreaking.
For me, on a global level, the purpose of education
is to create better human beings to maximize global social development.
On an individual level,
the purpose of education is to maximize the learner’s potential,
to help them acquire and learn the skills and motivation
that they need to live their lives in more productive, meaningful ways.
To do this, education needs to empower them by giving them choices
and to engage them by making what they learn or what they do
connect with their lives.
You may be thinking, “That’s great, Jason. Very idealistic, but it’s not realistic.”
Well, my proposal to you is that it soon will be.
As I already said, education was already moving
in a more flexible, individualized direction before November 2019.
The pandemic has merely accelerated the pace.
What we’re looking at now is the beginning of an era of educational fluidity.
Autonomous learners will make choices about their own learning,
customizing it to their needs throughout their lifespan.
This means that the focus of each learner
will move away from merely memorizing predefined knowledge
and moving toward and flowing toward knowledge they wish to acquire.
Our concept of what we understand
as learning will move beyond simply localized formal events
to include unscripted, spontaneous learning opportunities.
Learners will move fluidly from source to source
as they attempt to identify and fill gaps in their existing knowledge.
Globalization and technology have changed the landscape of learning
from a series of boxes we move through from kindergarten to graduation
to a lifelong of learning that begins when we are born
and flows until the day we die.
Naturally, these movements towards education fluidity
are a natural reaction to a world that’s just seen a sudden, massive change
in the way education is delivered and learner-teacher roles.
So ...
what is this new educational future?
Well first and foremost,
there’s this progressive movement toward autonomous learning.
Learners will have more control over their learning than ever before,
and they'll be able to structure their own learning
and make decisions about where to learn, what to learn, and who with.
Of course, students will still have to attend formal compulsory education,
but there will be more emphasis on the IT and autonomous learning skills
necessary to make them fluid learners in the future.
I envisage that armed with these new IT skills and technology,
learners will not have to turn automatically to formal education
to get structured learning.
Instead, they’ll move towards open learning networks and sources
and make their own choices about where to learn, what to learn, and who with.
Not only that, but as we’re already seeing,
learners are moving away
from being the consumers of others’ predefined knowledge
to being the creators and co-creators of their own.
We are already seeing people making their own content
from blogs, websites, social media.
You only have to search the internet for a little bit to see,
to your surprise, that the person next door has their own YouTube channel.
This phenomenon will only continue to grow and expand
and will contain knowledge at all kinds of different levels.
As a result, educational institutions
will be forced to rethink their business and educational models.
Transnational hybrid education will be the norm in many tertiary institutions,
and hybrid curriculums in primary and secondary schools will necessitate
a shift towards autonomous learning and group-based models.
Initially, I guess there's going to be a period of confusion and disruption
as people who are more used to or who prefer traditional learning systems adapt.
For people like me, the IT factor will always generate stress,
but I guess this is just a test of my ability to grow and flow with change.
For example, two years ago, before the pandemic,
my daughter’s school was experimenting with hybrid learning;
all of the kids had iPads, and homework was issued and submitted online.
The kids picked up their homework at 8:30 in the morning, submitted it at 4:00.
Initially, parents were against this idea.
They didn’t like the fact that the kids could be surfing the net
and fooling around when they should be doing their homework.
And then along came the COVID-19 state of emergency.
The kids simply went home and continued on as normal.
The school scrambled to put in an online conferencing system. Classes continued.
Suddenly, the parents could see the value in this new system,
where other schools across the country were scrambling to adapt.
Now, the government has been trying to implement a new system,
whereby all kids have iPads
and at least some access to educational technology.
For me,
this is a clear example of what’s coming in the educationally fluid future -
technology that will ensure that all learners
have the ability to learn what they want, when they want, from wherever they want,
and this new emphasis on autonomous learning skills
will ensure that even if this technology is no longer available,
learners will be able to identify their needs
and structure their learning accordingly.
This isn’t something to be feared.
I’m sure a lot of people will naturally resist this new decentralization
of power and roles between teachers and learners and institutions.
But this is mainly out of fear of being superseded by technology,
you know, and I think we know this isn’t really going to happen.
How to learn is becoming much more important than what to learn,
and the roles of teachers, learners, and institutions
will change from being the keepers of and dispensers of knowledge
to being the gatekeepers of the pathways to it.
For me, this is a great thing.
Educators will be freed up to better focus
on their learners’ emotional and cognitive processes,
and institutions will have
a much more symbiotic relationship with their learner students.
This should, in theory, lead to much better educational services and products.
Of course, there will be problems like any major social transformation,
but for me, these are far outweighed
by the benefits of an individualized, globalized, universally accessible
and personally meaningful educational system.
Personally, I’m really looking forward to our fluid future.
Thank you.