The year 2020 was definitely one for the books. It gave us a slew of events that brought about changes in society and human behavior. There’s the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, protests against racial injustice, the riots that stemmed from them, company and school closures, and an election.
Predictably unpredictable. That’s how we would sum up 2020.
Given what we’re working with as 2021 started, we need to think of several ways to not just adapt but improve the way we do things. From starting a daycare franchise business to closing business transactions, things need to be contextualized with a pandemic-affected future in mind.
Post-Pandemic Education
COVID-19 has pushed us into uncharted territories. It pushed a lot of us beyond our comfort zones and tested our grit and tenacity. Before the pandemic spread, we were trying to adapt to the Exponential Age where the next generation of business leaders was being trained to navigate progressive changes brought about by technological advancements.
Now we’ve been thrust into a level beyond just the Exponential Age. On top of adjusting to the fast-paced technological developments we’re seeing, we also need to make the necessary changes and upgrades needed to survive in a post-pandemic world. This includes all areas of society, including education.
What it means…
If there’s anything that we have learned about our educational system this past year, it’s that it has a lot of gaps, holes, and disparities that needed to be remedied. The pandemic made us realize that we went about education the wrong way. Educators found out the hard way that they should have focused on knowing the students and staff more so that they could have come up with the right systems and put them in place beforehand.
Had we done things differently back then we would not be feeling the pain we’re feeling now.
For the global community
We all know that the internet made the world a lot smaller and closer. The ability to communicate with each other online has sped up the process of information sharing. The pandemic caused us to even make that circle more tight-knit as communities of educators all over the world banded together to share ideas and policies and find solutions against a common challenge.
For educators
By now, everyone has already been reminded of an educator’s intrinsic value to society. Teachers are irreplaceable, even with A.I. and robots around. Human connections and interactions remain to be the heart of education. Educational institutions and organizations will now find ways to invest in and support educators because of their role in nation-building.
For technology
Educators agree that technology should serve its purpose as an important tool for communication and education. However, it should not be the main consideration for reworking the system. Even if technology has become a major part of education, it should still be led by our values, purposes, and goals.
What will shape education in the near future?
Given all of the new learnings and revelations we gained, educators are hoping to come up with a system designed to the students’ identity and health. They hope to make a widespread push for it not just in K-12 but in higher education as well so that the inequities we have right now on all levels can be minimized, and if possible, eliminated.
Diversity in time and place of learning
We’re seeing it take place all over the world right now. Students now have greater flexibility in their schedule and place of learning. Learning remotely is now pretty commonplace and will continue to be the norm.
A more personalized learning experience
Schools will no longer be an assembly line of graduates. More customization and individualization will become keys in producing graduates that excel in their giftings. This means that academically-advanced students will be taught and evaluated using more advanced material. Students who struggle in certain areas will get a chance to work on it some more until they reach the required level.
Interpretation of data
We live in a world where computers rule so even if Mathematics is one of the three main literacies, it will become irrelevant in the near future. Computers will take over analyzing statistics and predicting trends. The human interpretation of all these data will become a crucial part of future curricula.
Moving forward, expect educational institutions to change radically in the next few years. While we all somehow had an idea that distance and online learning will be the next step in the evolution of education, we didn’t expect it to come this soon. We need to be on our toes and quickly adapt to a highly dynamic environment produced by the global health crisis.