The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the nature of education in ways that few other events could. Adopting technology to work, live and learn from home while staying distant from others has affected millions. A recent instalment of the Asia Thinker Series (After the Pandemic) moderated by Associate Professor Suzaina Kadir, Vice Dean of Academic Affairs at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, discussed what is in store for education in the post-COVID-19 era. After the session, Global-is-Asian caught up with Associate Professor Suzaina Kadir as well as Associate Professor in Practice Francesco Mancini, Associate Dean of Executive Education programmes at the school.
David Austin: The first question is kind of targeted towards Francesco and the question is, how will COVID-19 change adult education and what specific skills should professionals in both educator and learning management tracks take up to adjust to this change?
Francesco Mancini: I guess COVID-19 had a big disruptive effect on adult education, and to me, there are at least two components of it. One is what to teach and the second one is how you teach. So, let's here focus on how you teach, which is, you know, what we want professionals in both education and learning management tracks [to] adapt to.
And, to me, because most of the disruption come through the online means, it requires a complete revision of pedagogy. And it's not just about adding a couple of apps or doing what you are doing, a classroom online. But it's really rethinking how people learn through the means of a screen, of a digital device.
And specifically means one, that the way you deliver knowledge has to be much more segmented and contained. What used to be that, say 45-minute lecture has now to become segments of 10 minutes, things that people can absorb in stages. The second is that you need people to engage in multiple activities.
You can't just focus on listening, but you also have to engage visually. And then also in terms of the activities that you make them do, things that they can do offline and then come back. And finally, I think that is the big challenge of how you share network knowledge to participants, which online requires a little more creativity on how to make that happen.
And so, all the kind of interaction that generally happens in a classroom can become a bit tedious online, but that's where the "live" online part comes in. And so, the "live" online should not be about lecture, it should be about transmitting knowledge, it should be more about engaging the participant and let them kind of grow.
Suzaina Kadir: I just wanted to jump on a term that Francesco used, which is "networked knowledge". I think what we are seeing, in the education space now, is a fundamental recognition that there is no single source of knowledge and that knowledge is spread out. And the role of the instructor or the teacher typically, which was always about conveying knowledge, actually increasingly is almost like a curator.
And what that instructor or teacher does is to connect these different streams of knowledge. And the learner, is now, really front and centre in connecting now all these different, sort of sources of knowledge and they sort of flow out, right? So there's a connection that flows out from the centre.
So it's actually, to me, fundamentally, a very, very different approach to how we learn.
David Austin: Okay. And, before we move on, that question was specifically about adult education, but it seems like it would apply to all education these days. Is that correct?
Suzaina Kadir: My own sense is that actually that differentiation between, what is core education versus what one gets exposed to in adult education is increasingly blurred. And so this idea of network learning or network knowledge applies in both sets, right? But within a sort of elementary, primary level, I think the struggles that schools encounter is how do we provide that base learning. How do you move in the direction of that networking when those skill sets may not necessarily have been there from the start?
David Austin: The next question was about tech companies and how tech companies are coming out with their own educational content. You know, companies like Google and LinkedIn, et cetera, available for professionals. And some educational institutions lament that the traditional academic cycle is too long and not adaptable to the fast changing labour market.
How do executive education courses offered by universities compete in this future learning climate and, Francesco, you want to start on that?
Francesco Mancini: Yeah. This is not [a] very new trend, companies as always try to supplement education that comes out of academia with content and skills that are more kind of fitting of their own cultural company culture.
But obviously there is an acceleration today, right. And the issue of, you know, how fast things changes and how fast you need to adapt your content to new realities, which makes, you know, companies much more flexible. And then, you know, they can react to that. That said, it really depends what content are we talking about. So if we're talking about data analytics, I have no doubt that some of these companies can produce, you know, content a more effective way.
But there are also a lot of set of soft skills, that require more of a cutting across different fields and different areas of knowledge. And for that, I think that academia is still well-positioned because they have faculty that come from different walks of life and different competencies and are able to train people in a more comprehensive way.
So professional education, and executive education, we don't really see tech companies as competitors, but actually as partners. Where we can actually work together to do precisely that - they bring in the technical competencies and we bring in the more kind of broader picture, or more kind of, behavioural kind of skills, that are then required to thrive in a working environment.
Suzaina Kadir: I completely agree with Francesco. I think that the opportunity is for this collaboration between executive education with the tech companies in actually producing a way of learning or an exposure to knowledge that's quite up to date and quite novel.
The challenge which the tech companies bring, really to traditional sort of approaches to education, the traditional institutions, where the approach to learning is always based on building blocks. And a certain sort of a disciplinary funnel, right?
Taking over a very clearly demarcated timeframe over several months and so on, the challenge that comes from the tech companies is essentially to upend that. But executive education actually is much more similar in the way that the tech companies approach learning, they've always been responsive to what's out there in the labour market.
And in fact, if they can move forward in collaborating with the tech companies, they actually are in this opportune space to come up with quite a superior product, quite different from how traditional academic institutions approach learning.
David Austin: Well, that's a good segue to the next question, which is what can institutions and educators like the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy do to embrace this shift toward creating multiple pathways for students to pursue education?
Suzaina Kadir: So at the LKYSPP where we're basically, a graduate programme and for some time we've been focused on a typical, graduate programme in public policy, for example, right. It's quite the clearly demarcated, it goes through very clear pathways, in the students' sort of learning the skill sets required. So that by the time we reach the end of the two years, they would graduate, say, with a Master's in Public Policy.
But I think over the last five years, we've thought through what creating multiple pathways might look like, right. And this is again in alignment with the larger approach that the National University of Singapore has taken, which is to bring in front and centre the idea of what's known as lifelong education, right.
Which is that education doesn't really stop. It doesn't move necessarily from what is tertiary education. And then it gets sort of "demarcated" from what would be adult education that we will come back to, say 10 or 20 years down the line.
Actually the programme that we are envisioning now is one in which we are approaching education as something that is continuous. So one doesn't leave learning at all and it simply proceeds, right?
So concretely, some of the multiple sort of pathways we envision would be, having a mixture within a single class, those who are on the full time programmes that have dedicated two years of their life to completing this programme and graduating with a degree, as well as those who are learning in modular sort of bits and chunks, and opening up the classroom, such that we've got students that would mix, within a single classroom. We're beginning to introduce even to our full time programmes, this bite-size approach to learning.
So things are not, you know, dragged out over 13 weeks, but we've got courses, very much in place now where you can complete the course over a span of one to two weeks. And, and in taking that course, you actually see a mixture of the different groups representing this different. You know, sort of multiple pathways to learning.
So it is actually trying to bring into a front and centre into the life of the school and executive education type approaches. And allowing that to coexist and a run alongside full time programmes, which follow a traditional approach.
David Austin: Along those same lines, as the situation changes and there's more e-learning how does the pedagogical supervision and monitoring have to change? You know, how can educators handle the grading and assessment beyond exams for online learning and making sure that it's equitable for the students and that they can include things like soft skills and class participation?
Suzaina Kadir: This is where I think the collaboration with, some of the advancements that are, that have come forward, through the tech companies have been really valuable. We are at a stage where, doing assessments, doing exams, can actually happen online. It is possible to submit assignments, entirely online.
You can even have exams with e-proctoring that's done but if we are talking about the interaction element, I think these are things that we'll have to build into the course design. And again, there are already apps out there which allow for us to include certain soft skills like presentations.
We can look at monitoring class participation within a lesson that's conducted via Zoom, for example. they are in fact quite a number of apps out there enable you to upload presentations and allow the instructor to grade those presentations. So we are, in fact seeing, you know, some sort of grade developments, in terms of apps and software, which allow us to actually already begin to build this into that e-learning space and create a robust, sort of learning environment nor are less robust than what you would have in a typical classroom in a typical traditional classroom.
David Austin: During this shift, how do you include the voice of the student and their perspective, as it affects their educational journey, how is the student incorporated?
Suzaina Kadir: In a typically well designed, e-learning module or online module, one of the key things we have to bear in mind is, the needed space that must be built into a typical online module where we are actually aligning expectations about how that module is going to evolve.
And during this space is when the views of the students, how they understand what the module objectives are, how they are actually going to learn in this module. Online learning allows us to create the space so that both the instructor, as well as the students actually come together to learn in that same space.
And this is where the voices of students become quite important. So it can actually be built in very nicely into a typical module. The first few weeks of classes often incorporate, students, as well as the instructor learning to realign their expectations of that same module.
So that. Ultimately, we get to the end goal of learning at the end, together. Right? So those everybody's voices get properly heard and accommodated for. And my own experience has been in online learning. That [it's] become a lot more possible now, the apps that we are using, which capture this, are so much more advanced than what I would have encountered, you know, sort of five years ago.
So it's actually a fundamental journey that both the students and the instructor go on together.
David Austin: That also brings us to the next set of questions, which are directed to both Francesco and Suzaina. The first one, you've talked about a bit, but the question specifically about the role employers have in reimagining education and how they can be brought into the conversation with what educational institutions are doing in terms of curriculum review, rethinking pedagogy, and learning design.
Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit more?
Francesco Mancini: The reality is that I think we're going to a direction, a more customised, learning experience, where you have these interactions between educational institutions and professional institutions, that are designing content based on the needs - this is, by the way, already happening.
In executive education, most of the programmes are actually customised, there are the more successful ones where clients come to us and say, "I have these particular needs, I don't know what I need to get to that goal. But you as an academic institution have a sense, and so you develop the content based on my educational goals."
And that's the kind of conversation that I think will happen more and more precisely because those educational goals might continue to evolve. And so the demand is in a constant evolution and we'll have a need from the supply side for the academia to kind of interact very closely with the world of employers.
Suzaina Kadir: So one of the things, when we talk about education in the future or when we reimagine what education will look like - I think I'll harp back on this fundamental point about our traditional approach to education as being fairly top down, defined by a group of experts, and only the experts know the content and know what students need to learn.
I think that approach to education has been completely disrupted, right? What we are looking at for the future is one in which the different actors or stakeholders are fundamentally part of that picture. So knowledge itself is dissipated, it's network knowledge, as I mentioned earlier, it's found in different places.
And the role of the instructor often is to bring that together. It's almost like a curator. A key part of this picture is actually what the market is looking for, what the employers need, and they need to be brought into letting the student and the instructor know what's out there in terms of the demand, right?
Francesco Mancini: Yeah, that's actually a very dramatic shift on the way I think academia is to think about education, moving from sort of gatekeepers of knowledge, to more highways in which they, you know, they kind of prepare the journey, right. On the highways there are different vehicles going on and that kind of really comfortable shift, I think, has to happen.
David Austin: The analogy of the highway is a good one. This next question again, it's a bit redundant on, we've talked about it a bit, but the question is how are assessments whether for academic studies or executive education courses, going to differ with an increased use of technology and the decrease of physical interaction, do you want to touch on that and elaborate a bit more?
Francesco Mancini: We are a little less concerned about assessment and more about impact. And what I mean by that is we're not necessarily testing if the person remembers the three steps to something. More in terms of, "Can you implement what you just said learned, and if that's so can it actually help you through it, that process?"
And what I mean by that is the assessment might be more diluted over time. And so, you might take your course, you learn something, and then you go back to your working environment and you might continue to stay anchored to the academia. Maybe with a sort of coaching kind of environment in which you are supported to actually implement a particular project or actually do certain things.
And so these interaction between creators, instructors and coaching, it's where I see the evolution of assessment, where again, we're primarily focusing on how you utilise the knowledge that you learned rather than just checking.
And this is obviously, particularly for adult education. I mean, that's sort of a different conversation when it comes to primary or tertiary education, but in adult education, we are already not necessarily assessing, but we're primarily helping people to transform what they learn into things that are useful for their own professional life.
David Austin: The last question here, I think is a good one and asks both of you to kind of look to the future and how you would reimagine the purpose of education and skills learning. They say 20 years down the line, if AI and robots replace the human workforce. How do you think education will be different?
Francesco Mancini: So, obviously it's very hard to look at technology and think 20 years, right? Because you know, even three years ago, we didn't know what it was going to happen today. But looking at this issue, now, my sense is to stop this idea that, you know, human workforce need to compete with machines, because there are certain functions that a machine will always do better than me.
And I hope that one day we will have a machine, for example, that is able to grade papers better than me. It's a painful experience to go through 55 papers, right? And you want to have artificial intelligence that is able to do that, where I think we need to focus, is making those machines more human.
And what I mean by that is to valorise: What is the human value added? And the human value added in education, to me, it's what machine cannot replicate, which is serendipity, which is that human instinct of picking up the right question from a student that can trigger thought. That goes into a direction of talking about something in a classroom that will trigger another question, and so on.
And a lot of the conversation that happens in a classroom are not planned really. There might be within a certain framework that an instructor needs to set up and that's the skill, but it's about creating that environment, in which students are interacting, and you are the conductor of that interaction. That, I can't see sitting right now here in 2020, be done by [a] machine.
And I think that's where humans have a value added. And at the end of the day, I imagine a school which paradoxically, will look more like those painting in the Renaissance, where you see Plato walking around with a lot of people. You don't see anybody sitting on a desk.
That's the original kind of sense of education because it's an interaction.
And I think that would be very hard to be replicated by a machine. And that's where I think we all as humans need to get better because that is our, competitive advantage over AI.
Suzaina Kadir: You know, I agree with everything that Francesco has said, you know. On this question of robots and AI, right, it's not even a question of if, but really a question of when, and the technology is moving so fast that we are playing catch up in many ways.
As we move along on sort of the learning timeline - if you can you can envision a single person - would be, we begin with the general, the basics, and then we begin to expand our knowledge and then it starts to funnel into very specialised areas, right? So we gain a specialty, we gain a strength in a particular discipline, which enables us then to have the kind of knowledge plus skillsets, very specific to do that discipline, before we go on, out into the workforce to occupy that space. So we all come out in many ways, as that specialist, right?
The development of robots and AI has upended that, the idea of developing certain skill sets within a particular disciplinary track, emerging as specialists in that particular area is no longer relevant because in fact, there's AI and robots that can essentially do the job, right?
What I think is important is actually to recreate or reimagine education in which these humanistic aspects are actually what's at the front and centre. So in many ways we've gone back to what it was years and years ago, it is about reasoning, critical thinking, critical analysis, things which cannot get replicated, by those robots, and by those drastic developments in AI.
David Austin: Okay, very good. I think that's a good place to end it actually. That's kind of a nice summation.
(Photo credit: August de Richelieu)