The Educator Magazine U.K. Jan-April 2023. - Magazine - Page 6
What it meant for students:
What it meant for students:
• Students had to learn and even re-learn
the appropriate usage of technology.
• Students could benefit from increased
accessibility and a more authentic
learning experience, due to the
integration of student portals and
commonly used platforms with
the larger educational ecosystem.
• Students had to adjust to a hybrid
model of remote and in-person
education.
What it meant for educators:
• Teacher training emerged pivotal for
performance delivery and curriculum
creation.
• The ability to use emerging teaching
technologies to their best effect
became increasingly important.
• There has been a rise of remote
professional development
opportunities.
• There has been an acceptance that an
innovative teaching mindset is key,
along with equipping oneself with skills
to gauge students’ digital signals, such
as type amount of content they
consume and drop off rates from
sessions, to better plan for and create
curricula.
Tech-Powered Ecosystems
In the past few years, there has been a
tremendous increase in the reliance on
digital services, and education has been
no exception. This shift also served to
highlight the age-old issues that many
organizations face due to the lack of
synchronization
between various technologies used to
support learning, teaching and logistics.
Institutions that operated with a more
harmonious approach dealt with the
challenges of the pandemic better than
those that leveraged tech in silos.
What it meant for educational
institutions:
• Institutions were able to identify the
gaps and can now concentrate efforts
to design and nurture collaborative
spaces, leveraging the best of
contemporary and traditional
practices.
• There has been an acceptance of the
importance of finding a cost-utility
balance between the existing
ecosystem and new technologies
going forward.
• Institutions could plan for increased
investment in relevant technology, on a
need basis.
Grading Up: The Way Forward
While many institutions may have
returned to in-person education, there
have been pivotal lessons learned
during the pandemic that have helped
set the foundation for digitally native
generations to thrive. Findings suggest
that a digital-driven mindset is the way
of the future, backed by fundamental
changes at an institutional level and a
fine balance between technology and
the human touch.
Key measures for the future of
successful digitally-powered
education include:
• Moving all curricula to digital
platforms.
• Leveraging the right platforms to
create better symbiosis between
students and teachers, for the greater
good.
• Leveraging and investing in virtual
support platforms and services, to scale
up efforts to deal with mental health
challenges.
• Creating and adapting curricula to
better suit new consumption habits.
• Investing in creating and managing a
pedagogical framework that supports
new social and educational norms.
• Identifying key areas of growth and
expansion for institutions to transcend
geographical limitations and improve
learning modalities.
The pandemic has taught us all that
being prepared for change is being
well prepared. Transformation in
educational systems from a
technological and accessibility
standpoint is no longer optional, but
a necessity to foster efficient learning
environments and economic salience.
While the COVID-19 pandemic brought
innumerable issues to the forefront,
it also shed light on opportunities for
institutions to better fill those gaps
going forward. A focus on using digital
models for equitable and sustainable
learning will prove beneficial for better
educational practices in the future.
Read the Lesson in Education
report for a wealth of
actionable insights and
detailed case studies.
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