Reading through the fourth unit of the SBOSE module, Imagining the new and emerging technologies that are expected to be available for education in the next ten years and providing use cases and pedagogical approaches to be utilised in hybrid, blended or online learning models.
After the unintended transformation of how education is imparted across the globe, education needs to equip today’s young people with the skills to thrive in tomorrow’s world even if we do not have a clear vision of what it looks like yet.
How can we teach our students when they can just google it?
In the UAE (where I teach), 21st-century skills become a high priority and recommended by the country rulers. In a world of readily searchable knowledge at our fingertips, memorising facts lost its importance. Many traditional skills that were used to be learned at school might start to feel pointless in the digital age: handwriting, the rules of spelling and grammar, foreign languages …
Due to the pandemic, educational technology – as an industry – is booming nowadays, starting from enhancing the traditional whiteboards to enhancing the content or the role of the educators. Which in fact is luring investors and technology firms to invest fiercely into this field.
Back in the early nineties, many manufacturers were competing for the mobile phones industry. However, after 2 decades, a couple of industry giants have full dominance over this field and acquired a major market share.
Same as the dawn of computers operating systems, educational technology companies and manufacturers are competing nowadays to offer the easiest user interface and the richest content and platforms, trying to acquire portions of the market share.
Like all other technologies, by the time, the ferocity of the competition will start to calm down, and a couple of companies and manufacturers will obtain the market, although there might be some changes in the order of the top manufacturers.
Not only educational technology manufacturers, but also educational institutions are competing now to offer online (distance learning) modules, and many have set up international branches, often part-funded by governments to build their “soft power” abroad.
Unlike traditional learning, which only required concrete buildings and teachers with “folk pedagogies”, modern education requires reliable infrastructures, educational aids, and well technology-trained staff, which will indeed act as an obstacle in front of many developing countries.
Institutions now can easily have their global presence simply by putting their courses online. And students started to appeal to the idea of studying at a globally renowned institution or university without leaving their countries.
Today, institutions from 33 countries have branch campuses in 76 host countries. The top source countries are the US, UK and Australia, and their hosts are in the middle east and, Asia.
In the UAE, many institutions, schools and universities from the US, UK and Australia have their branches opened and offering many under-graduate, graduate, and post-graduate modules.
Local institutions can compete online learning by focusing on the experience of going to university. State-of-the-art learning spaces, inspiring architecture, affordable but high-quality accommodation, a good atmosphere on campus, a strong sense of community, cafes and bars, sports, leisure and retail, and of course great teaching too.
References:
Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2020). What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944
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