When Online Education Works
Tech can improve higher education, but it must prioritize the people
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As technology becomes more integrated with higher education, we will be able to do more with less. However, it will not come without its challenges.
Leaders in the space must have the ability to embrace and adopt tools that facilitate great online learning environments. Tools like Zoom, Circle, Slack, Substack, Notion, Twitter, Coursera, and YouTube can support powerful online learning environments. Additional platforms like Disco and Maven aim to give creators the ability to easily create community-based online learning environments.
Each of these tools are constantly changing, and I have no doubt some incredible technologies like virtual reality will be brought to market in the future to make the online experience more robust. As such, openness to change and iteration will be fundamental for leaders of the online education institutions of the future.
However, technology is just the beginning. To excel in the online learning environment, leaders must have the ability to bridge the gap between the technology and human components of learning.
When technology entered the education space with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), they did not live up to the expectation of disrupting education (less than 15% of people who start a MOOC finish the course). One of the fundamental reasons - MOOCs forgot about the people.
Learning alone is not easy and the self-paced model of a MOOC makes a transformative learning experience difficult. However, when you connect others to learn together, the experience completely changes.
As a result, leaders in the evolving online education space must be able to balance technology adoption and the human-centric community that makes learning possible. While the fundamentals of learning don't change when moving online, creating a human-centric online learning environment is a different challenge.
For instance, online schools will have to balance asynchronous learning on online community platforms with building deeper relationships on collaborative Zoom meetings. Engineering this human element is critical for an effective online learning environment.
Leaders of the online education movement will succeed by effectively integrating technological tools with the human components of online learning.