a real - I would not say yet marvellous - new world, which is having a decisive impact on humanity insofar as it changes all routines: social, professional, family and individual.
Education is one of these universes of profound change, with the vast majority of global players in this sector taking a deep dive into the online universe. The most enthusiastic and early adopters claim that these are changes that are here to stay, the most sceptical and conservative sigh for this wave to pass and the world to return to how they have always known it. In between, surely, will be virtue, which means a blended future is possibly opening up.
The much heralded next generation education enters its exponential curve, after many years of back and forth, with the LMS (Learning Management System) and the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) as its first protagonists. These first online courses, which were based on essentially asynchronous methodologies (where teaching and learning do not take place at the same time) with little involvement, were the poor relation of education, at a lower cost, sometimes even free, but with a much lower rate of return.
This new generation of education constitutes a second wave of online learning, which today benefits from significant technological advances, as has happened with all exponential curves that are accelerated by technology. Many startups emerge and try to make this idea real, until the best combination is hit and it becomes mainstream.
In this second wave of online learning, synchronous platforms (in real time) such as Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams, among others, are the big players of the moment. They are capable of recreating the environment of a now virtual classroom, where the main elements, knowledge, sharing and networking, the great assets of face-to-face teaching, are still present - as are the protagonists of this context, the teachers and the students or participants.
The transition is complex and requires a total reinvention of learning methodologies. Content is relevant, without a doubt, but alone it can no longer fulfil its mission of providing an enriching learning process.
In order to try to avoid new psychological illnesses, such as the announced Zoom Fadigue, Nova SBE's executive training has been dedicated to a rigorous research and experimentation work on new learning models. One of the most important premises is based on the idea that "less is more", that is, we privilege smaller sessions in micro or even nano knowledge capsules. The traditional eight-hour training day, in a vertical learning logic, is replaced by a horizontal logic, where the sessions are distributed over a period: one day can become a month. I challenge anyone to discover the webinars We all have a role to playwhere you can find multiple prototypes of this new way of learning.
In times of crisis, the mood is one of reaction and experimentation. The synchronous online that recreated the classroom was the new normal. But the future of education will certainly be different, no longer the pre-Covid-19 model, but certainly not the Covid-19 model either. We will see many innovations, some even more radical, that bring to the learning processes the best of the three models: face-to-face, asynchronous online and synchronous online. A seamless blended seamless, with more fluid boundaries between all the modalities presented.
Article originally published by PME Magazine
