Itâs May 2020 and Nuno Fernandesâs six-year-old son â like most children around the world â is doing school online. As the CEO and President of Ilumno, a tech platform created to open up access to higher education in South America, his father has a special interest in how his teachers are managing the crossover from classroom to webcam. âSchools are doing the best they can for their students right now,â says Fernandez. âBut most of them arenât ready to provide online education. The modality of online education was started in the 90s, so itâs 30 years old. Modern online education is totally different. And COVID-19 has just put the evolution of online learning on steroids!â
âCOVID has put the evolution of online learning on steroids!â
He prefers not to use the term âonline educationâ when he talks about learning from home in its most modern and dynamic form: the way that top online educational institutions are doing it today. It harks back to a time when filming a lecture and sending the footage to your students was seen as brave innovation. Online learning is so much more than simple remote education, he says.
In Latin America, in 2002, 20 percent of people who were eligible to go to university actually went. Last year it was 50 percent. âOnline education has expanded access to higher education, transforming societies and giving families a better quality of life,â Fernandes says. Even in the US, 80 percent of people eligible to attend university are now doing so, while back in 2002, only 60 percent of people who could have pursued a higher education went down that path. According to Fernandes, the current global crisis is just accelerating a process that has been quietly growing behind the scenes for decades.
Olin Oedekoven is CEO of Peregrine, a global accreditation organization. For him, the COVID-19 crisis has brought both the potential and the pitfalls of online learning into sharp focus. âWhen people switch to online learning, they often try to replicate the process of classroom learning. Now theyâre realizing it doesnât work. The traditional model of getting something out of the teacherâs head into the studentsâ heads is not effective.â
âTrue online learning is about a collective learning experience,â he says. âLearners take ownership of their own learning process, share it with others, and collaborate. We canât just lecture at students for an hour to teach concepts.â Oedekoven calls true online learning âdiscovery learningâ, and through his wealth of experience with both campus-based and online universities, heâs seen what works, both for learners and the organizations that employ them after they graduate.
Itâs an undeniable fact that online learning fits the needs of a growing global workforce that must respond to constant change, says Lyndsey Craft-Goins, Director of the US Education Ecosystem at Microsoft. âThe Institute for the Future says that 85 percent of the jobs available in 2030 do not yet exist.â
âChange is always going to be a constant, so adaptability is key.â
According to Craft-Goins, in 10 yearsâ time, artificial intelligence (AI) could hold the key to giving learners the skills they need to succeed in the workplace of the future, delivering truly personalized education that speaks to different learning styles. In one recent study at the Georgia Institute of Technology, students didnât realize that a teaching assistant communicating with them online was actually a bot. In future years, AI looks set to do more than emulate a human teacher: it could outperform them. The highly personalized learning that a machine can give, as it âlearnsâ how a student learns then adapts its teaching content accordingly, could allow each learner their own path to graduation, agrees Fernandes.
Peregrine has data that compares the performance of graduates from online and offline universities. Since its inception, the company has administered 1.5 million exams to graduates worldwide. âThe punchline is that the online students outperformed campus-based students in all 17 subjects we tested at Masterâs level. The Bachelors was a bit tighter: in 15 subjects the online students outperformed their counterparts. My conclusion is that online is just as good, if not better, than a traditional university.â
Fernandes, too, sees online students perform better on exit exams. He cites a study where 61 percent of HR directors preferred to recruit online students because they have competencies they see as valuable: traits that are harder to find in graduates from campus-based universities. âThe only difference between online and offline is the modality of delivery,â he says. âA quality institution will deliver quality learning, whether thatâs online or offline.â
Oedekoven was already seeing more universities evolve from the traditional lecture and take notes model before the COVID-19 crisis. âNow theyâre realizing more than ever that the old model wasnât effective,â he says. âWhen they return, theyâre going to foster a learning process that gets students engaged. This could be a good thing for purely online universities because traditional universities might produce great content that they share. Theyâve seen now that thereâs a better way to learn than talking at people: whether thatâs in a lecture theatre, or through Zoom, thereâs no going back.
âWhen I hire people to work at Peregrine, I look at the skills that they have and the traits theyâll bring to the workplace. And I see those skills and traits in people whoâve got their qualifications online just as much as I see them in people whoâve done it the traditional way.â