About fifty years ago, the education system did not use technology, believed highly in memorisation, grades, IQ, and school used to be a long lecture with no other skills to be learnt. But in the past few decades, technology has advanced incredibly quickly, leaving not much time for the world to adapt to it. Almost every career today needs some form of technology to function. Delivery services need their own apps to even be in business, salespeople need technology to impress their clients with presentations, AI has been developed to take over jobs that don’t require humans’ creativity, and map reading is no longer a skill, but rather an app. Our education system has needed to evolve as well, in order to prepare us students for our careers in the future. This new education system is called Learning 4.0.
Learning 4.0 focuses on taking advantage of how technology is easily available, therefore providing opportunities for new learning techniques in this education system. Learning 4.0 allows students to be more personalised with their learning, uses the concept of flipped classrooms and believes in equipping teachers with new skills and grading systems.
Today’s schools now usually use computers or tablets for homework assignments, taking notes during class or sitting an exam or test. This makes communicating with teachers easier, saves paper, increases organisation and has helped significantly in home-based learning during this pandemic. It has also caused memorisation to become less of a skill and has prompted projects to be research based, with skills lying in techniques of structure, research and sentence forming. This also creates less weight on students’ shoulders as all their textbooks, notes and worksheets are on one device. However, while technology can be a powerful tool, students may abuse it by getting distracted or cheating more easily. Schools also need to work on developing a balance between screen time and offline time.
Learning 4.0 allows students to learn in a more efficient and fulfilling way with personalised learning. Schools are becoming more open to their students choosing their subject choices and the difficulty level that they want to be in. The subject choices that we are offered in early high school (art, drama, enterprise, history, photography, design and technology etc) used to only be given to students in college. Having control over such choices not only instills responsibility and prompts the process of adulting early on, but also gives students the opportunity to set more realistic goals, learn with peers at the same level that they are and excel in what they want to do.
The next concept is a flipped classroom. The idea of a flipped classroom differs from the education system of the past, which is to learn at school, memorise and review as homework and then have a test on it. A flipped classroom asks students to study the new unit as homework, justify and discuss those concepts in school, and have projects that research it further, instead of tests. A flipped classroom therefore covers important skills like research, social and debating skills all at once, positively impacting the students. It also contributes to students’ grades being well rounded instead of coming from a single test.
All these concepts require a lot of dedication and interest from teachers, students and parents which might take a long time to develop. But we need everyone to believe that although there might be some cons, Learning 4.0 is the way to go. The concepts in this type of education are more flexible for different students, which is not entirely supported by many because they believe that flexibility proves inferiority as a school. Oxford Professor of Higher Education, Simon Marginson, believes that, “as long as they retain fixed curricula, flexibility makes other institutions look of lower quality.”
While our education system is changing slowly to adapt to the fast paced technology industry, at least our education system is changing to suit the world.
Comments