Learning Made Possible Anywhere, Anytime

Tim Lovatt, Head of Digital Learning, UWC South East Asia

I was leading a professional learning workshop on blended learning on 3rd April 2020. Participants were in the process of giving presentations on their innovative unit plans they had been working on and how they took the best bits of digital and face-to-face learning to create an enhanced learning experience. One group was presenting a particularly interesting Biology example when an SMS notification popped up at the top of the screen. COVID lockdown is coming, you have four days to prepare (or words to that effect). There followed some frantic shifting of pedagogy, echoed worldwide, by teachers determined to do right by their students in an unprecedented world of remote learning.

You know all of this. You saw it in the news. You’ve lived it. You’ve got your own stories about it which convey your personal hardships, life-shifts, flexibility, and resilience. But ‘normality’ has returned somewhat and, for some, perhaps with it a sense of “well, that’s over and done with then.”

But this is not the end of the story for distance and remote learning. In fact, it’s not even the beginning of the story. Way before COVID, Sal Khan was amassing millions of followers for his entirely remote, asynchronous lessons on Khan Academy; Coursera was founded in 2012, making a wide range of learning opportunities available remotely; Ted talks publicizing ‘ideas worth spreading’ have been online for almost 20 years. The list goes on.

So what about the future? What role does remote learning play in the future of education, and how can we leverage its best parts? Here is a window into how we are embracing this future at UWCSEA.

Where is remote learning taking us?

1. Broadening the scope of education. Education is no longer confined to the classroom. Learning can happen anywhere, anytime, and this should be celebrated. Every member of our community is an expert in something different, and this presents amazing opportunities for students (and adults) to learn from a hugely diverse range of people. Here at UWCSEA, we have developed an interactive network of Alumni and students to nurture these learning relationships and engage our alumni in our student’s learning journey using online and remote learning frameworks. We have students participating in global educational initiatives like the Imperfect Art of Living, connecting and collaborating remotely with peers worldwide to find ways to live meaningful lives. The global community is our new textbook.

"Education is no longer confined to the classroom. Learning can happen anywhere, anytime, and this should be celebrated. Every member of our community is an expert in something different, and this presents amazing opportunities for students (and adults) to learn from a hugely diverse range of people"

2. Enabling student-driven learning. The time of lectures and rote learning has passed. The age of personalized learning and “learning in the flow of work” has already begun. Students do not need to be told exactly what to write and when, because this isn’t what work is like anymore. Remote, asynchronous learning allows students to follow passions, work on different projects, link their work to real contexts which are personally relevant to them, and develop skills and knowledge when it fits with their learning journey. At UWCSEA, we are developing and refining a whole suite of brand-new courses and curricula which nurture this creativity and support students in finding and exploring their passions through deep enquiry and conceptual transfer. In support of this, we have continued to embed our learning platforms, our fundamental digital and remote learning tools, and our PL around blended and student-led learning. We plan to augment this further over the coming years with mini-courses designed for student self-enrollment and remote self-study, commissioned and curated by experts worldwide. It is an exciting time to be a student!

3. Supercharging inclusion. Everyone is different. It sounds obvious, but applying that to an educational context equates to ‘everyone learns differently.’ A slightly more complex, but no less true, idea. The logical question that follows is, ‘how can you teach everyone differently, with one teacher per class?’. Take a hypothetical class of 20 students. Maybe there are some with diagnosed neurodiversity. Perhaps some are shortsighted to varying degrees. For several, the language the lesson is being taught in is not their home language. Some prefer to take in information visually, some by reading, and some by listening. One or two were up late the night before and are having trouble concentrating. This is just a glimpse into the potential variability in one single class. The technologies and processes used during remote learning have made it possible to cater to a huge number of diverse learning needs all at once. By using digital learning platforms, remote learning tools, and a blended classroom model, we can give students a choice over how they learn whilst retaining the same overall learning goal for all students. This model of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a strategic focus for us here at UWCSEA, empowering our students to get to know their own learning styles and become expert learners. This is perhaps the greatest gift that remote learning technologies have to offer society as a whole—success for every child.

Softly Softly

This is not a revolution. We should not throw the baby out with the bath water. In-person classes and schools still have a firm place in the future of education. We must be mindful that we do not dissolve into mini-siloes of individuals working alone at a screen for days at a time. The benefits outlined above are fabulous, but they must be paired with authentic interactions, socialization, and empathetic contextualization, or they will be meaningless.

At UWCSEA, we believe that education is a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. We must take our understandings, broadened and deepened by the opportunities of remote learning, and come together. Schools must be a melting pot of different cultures, perspectives, and ideas, which can be applied in service to our planet and all of its people. Remote learning and the technology that comes with it augment the learning experience, but physical school is where we will always find meaning with our fellow humans