The Rise of Distance and Remote Learning: What does it mean for Philippine education?

Rex Wallen Tan, Chief Technology Officer, Southville International School and Colleges

As we are now entering the post-pandemic education world, modes of learning such as hybrid classes, online classes, and self-paced work are part of our day-to-day vocabulary. How should education evolve when being connected to the Internet is part of our everyday routine?

In the world of technology, we have come to rely on just a few technologies to make the entire world wide web work. There is only one language namely Hypertext Markup language (HTML), the code that describes how a website looks like. There are only two popular Mobile operating systems namely iOS and Android which power nearly all our devices. In the world of the internet, we tend to use fewer options (e.g. Mobile operating systems, Browsers) but with a much wider level of adoption and maturity.

In my view, adopting more mature international standards that are more widely used should happen in Philippine education. If our grade level curriculum standards were similar to say the United States, then teachers could more easily find standards-based content on popular websites such as KhanAcademy which is supported by Bank of America, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Tata Trusts, and more.

As the world increasingly moves online, global frameworks will start to emerge and there will likely be more adoption of global learning standards rather than self-developed local ones. One large example of this movement is in the language-learning space. In the language learning space, one global framework dominates namely the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), it is used to describe learning ability and is adopted by the entire European Union. In the past few decades, nearly all countries in South America and many countries in Asia have adopted the CEFR. In the past few years, there have been many initiatives in ASEAN adopting the CEFR such as the Malaysian National English Roadmap in 2015 and the Vietnam National Foreign Languages Project 2020.

"As the world increasingly moves online, global frameworks will start to emerge and there will likely be more adoption of global learning standards rather than self-developed local ones"

In recent years, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) through the leadership of Chairman Popoy de Vera and Atty. Lily Freida Milla has been at the forefront of advancing the global competitiveness of the Philippine language learning sector by adopting the CEFR as well and creating a Technical Working Group called the National Roadmap for Global Competitiveness in Communication Skills (NRGCCS). I am personally grateful for their leadership and to be part of the NRGCCS Technical Working Group.

Global frameworks and the increasing use of connectivity will change education as credentials become more mobile, and there will be more learning resources and options available for learners. There is no better example of innovation in education than Duolingo, the world’s most popular language-learning company.

Duolingo is the world’s most popular language learning application with over 500 million learners from around the world. Duolingo offers all of its courses for free, and it is funded mostly by a small subset of learners (less than 5%) who pay for the premium version called Duolingo plus. In addition, Duolingo courses are CEFR aligned which provides an additional incentive for Philippine institutions to adopt international standards (to have access to good free things!!). I personally volunteered to be part of the Duolingo team and did the curriculum work on most of the skills for their course tailored to Filipino/Tagalog speakers which are called “English for Tagalog Speakers”. We were able to launch the course based on CEFR standards last year and to date 385,000 Tagalog speakers are learning English for FREE. While 385,00 is an impressive number, there are over 10 million users of Duolingo in Vietnam (~10% of their population).

How global frameworks really transform the education landscape is by decreasing the costs of education and making credentials more mobile. There are multiple affordable credentials to prove competence against the CEFR language framework such as TOEIC (English), TOEFL (English), IELTS (English), DELE (Spanish), and more. I am personally using Duolingo to study Spanish and prepare for a DELE exam. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for language classes and enrolling in a language institution, I can access free resources and pay a reasonable exam fee to prove my competence. In the Philippines, the most popular CEFR-based assessment is the TOEIC test because of its affordability. Many popular Universities such as the Mapua Institute of Technology, Lyceum of the Philippines University, the University of Santo Tomas, and Southville International School and Colleges use the TOEIC tests to provide global credentials for their students.

As schools, classrooms and learners become increasingly connected to the Internet, at our institution we are moving towards two things: (1) Improved connectivity to the Internet (Wifi, VOIP, Cloud) and (2) Global standards, resources, and learning materials. In this article, I did not touch much on improved internet and cloud access (as there are enough articles that talk about this), although I personally got certified in two global credentials during the pandemic (Cisco and AWS). I do feel very strongly that in the next coming decade as we become more and more connected, there will be fewer localized standards and more adoption of global frameworks, credentials, and resources as it is more cost-efficient and it improves credential mobility.

In summary, I believe that distance learning and remote learning will increasingly use global frameworks and resources which will make learning cheaper (e.g. OER and Freemium models), provide more options (e.g. Duolingo) and increase credential mobility (e.g. CEFR). Countries that take advantage of the shift towards internationalizing standards in education will be at an advantage in a post-pandemic world given the increasing popularity of both remote and distance education.

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