ICT and online technologies have great potential
to support your lifelong learning plans.
As of 2018,
almost all urban areas of Asia-Pacific have access to the internet.
There are as many mobile connections as people in the region,
and we use our devices almost everywhere, for everything
Did you know that — in the Philippines and Thailand
an average user spends more than 9 hours a day on devices
and nearly 5 hours of that on their phone.
How about you?
What do you think the potential could be for us
to use technology to support people with learning?
In this unit, we’ll look at:
What opportunities does ICT offer us as a tool to support learning?
and how can the government make use of it to support learning for everyone
along the way we’ll also look at some examples of
how some providers are already using it to support learning and wider community
There are many innovations in ICT for learning.
We can see 3 key trends for the last 10 years.
Online learning, for people to learn whatever, whenever and wherever they want
Connecting people across places in collaboration and to people with shared interests
and personalizing content to enhance the usefulness and appropriateness of material
The first is online learning
When Massive Online Open Courses first began,
they were designed to open up a select number of higher education courses to the public
Today you can almost learn anything online
and more than one hundred millions of people around the world
are already learning at global and local online platforms
Some platforms are supported by the government
such as K-MOOC, J-MOOC and Thai MOOC
Some platforms like Udemy allow anyone to create and post online courses
MOOC has been evolved for the last 5 years.
In the past, the completion rate has been low.
Now the contents became shorter, more skill based, entertaining and are gamified to motivate
learners to complete the courses.
Online contents are more blended into the normal classes.
Social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook also allow anyone to create and post their
learning contents.
Everyone can be a teacher!
Secondly, technology offers us the unique possibility to connect with people across
space in ways we never imagined.
connecting people online with similar interests and passion.
They can learn or start new projects together.
Today online learning environments are evolving to be more collaborative.
We would like to introduce 4 types of learning through connecting with people or collaboration.
We can get connected at the specific online platforms such as music or hobby groups to
share knowledge, contents or ask questions.
Data tells that – 42% of Asia-Pacific are active social media users.
Through social media, we can create networks on any topics and explore new opportunities
to learn.
We can easily find information from crowd knowledge through hashtags provided by internet
users.
Online social gathering allows people with similar interests and passion to connect online
and be able to meet in persons.
For example, Meetup is a digital platform to organize online groups with
something in common.
They can meet, discuss and start projects together in real life.
With big data and artificial intelligence, learning can be personalized or customized
easily.
In school education, adaptive learning has been popular.
It allows learners to study based on their capacity and progresses.
The system can personalize the contents, learning pace and levels in order to leverage their
strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
Adaptive learning has been used by Khan Academy and Lexia.
Apart from school education, Google, Amazon, YouTube and Facebook also personalize the
contents for you.
They recommend website, books and video contents based on your digital history and trends.
Another example is Lynda.com.
It offers courses that are related with your LinkedIn data to give you personalized learning.
You might also receive notifications from MOOC platforms that suggest the contents based
on your past learning.
There are also other innovations that could support learning.
We live in a world where conversational bots can be trained by users with little to no
coding knowledge, responding to learners’ questions in real-time.
They can work as AI Tutors.
For example, A world where VR/AR enables learners to learn in simulated environments such as
medical operation, disaster preparedness, driving lessons or visit special places and
learn about history.