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POLICY & REFORM
The concept is, let’ s support students inside and outside the classroom. This type of approach will vary by the type of institution.
TAFE schools [ what we call community colleges in the US ], are going to be interested in providing more options to reach the students when they have time to study. So this is great for ongoing education for a busy student and they’ re going to invest in different ways to either stream this content online or do what is being called asynchronous education, where they’ re recording the content and make it available to consume when the students need it.
The four-year schools [ both colleges and universities ] are still putting a lot of emphasis on place-based education. They see a lot of the value in engaging the students in person; however, they’ re still embracing flexibility to allow the students to consume the content whenever they need to.
That being said, a lot of their business schools are experimenting with flexibility for ongoing education, where they’ re reaching more of the professional students, who may already have a job. They are working to accommodate those busy schedules by leveraging the hybrid classroom as a way to stream content to those students or make it available on their own schedule.
Ultimately, this is making it easy to [ provide content in modules ] so the university can curate it and make it available for specific subjects.
[ This also makes it easier ] to bring in specialists. For example, there’ s a big movement [ towards adjunct professors ], which is a professor who’ s not necessarily a fulltime employee of the university who comes in often to speak on a specific subject or teach a specific class. With this kind of modular content, it’ s much easier for universities to bring in these specialists as needed.
This makes it much easier for universities to partner with peer-based institutions to leverage skills that the peer-based institution may offer as well, because with the virtual classroom it’ s easy to beam in the content when and where you need it.
That’ s technology more from the university perspective. Even look at the students themselves. If you walk into a classroom today, they’ re all engaging with a screen of some sort. They either have a laptop in front of them or a phone.
Really, what the students want is the ability to be more socially engaged with that classroom the universities – and the instructors themselves – are starting to invest in apps, tools, polls, different types of ways to engage the students on those screens, so the classroom itself becomes much less about a static lecture and much more about the dynamic engagement of content and exchanging of ideas.
How would virtual classrooms facilitate face-to-face interactions then? The goal of the virtual classroom is to make the interaction between the students and the teachers much more engaging. That could mean a scenario where you’ re using the virtual classroom to reach somebody who’ s not even on the campus today, and that’ s going to be more of a niche case to start. It could also be used to complement that face-to-face interaction and that’ s going to be more the [ norm ], at least initially.
In either case, it’ s about adapting content to be personalised to engage the students.
Something we’ re seeing today is the flipped classroom. Its goal is to make better use of time with the students. In a flipped classroom, the professor will record the content in advance and then make it available to students to download and view.
That’ s perfect if the student has a busy schedule and needs to adapt life around being able to view that content. It also allows instructors to make much better use of time when the students are in front of them, either in person or virtually. Then that time can be used for discussion.
In a face-to-face interaction, the discussion can happen in person, but in a virtual interaction that discussion can happen [ via ] a lot of the tools available to students today. Things like Chat, content sharing, screen sharing and virtual desktops, all allow a mechanism for that student to engage with content without having to be in the room. It becomes quite easy to engage with students who are in the classroom and those who aren’ t at the same time, so it gives the university flexibility to stream a lot of that content and make use of [ teacher’ s aides’] time and professors’ time in a virtual world.
What influence will virtual reality and gaming technologies have on learning? I think [ that technology is ] going to enhance the social sharing aspect of the virtual classroom. You’ re going to take lessons learned about how gaming has evolved into a social platform for sharing experiences across geography.
Gaming has evolved from being individually based to [ more social approaches ]. It’ s now common for gaming to happen in social environments. That ties in to how students prefer engaging with each other during class.
You take a look at that social sharing aspect and throw in things like virtual reality, which has the potential to push technical training into the home or lab. It’ s easy to think of virtual reality in the classroom benefiting someone like a medical doctor, where they have the ability to learn advanced techniques remotely. I’ ve seen examples of that in some of the schools we’ ve talked to where a lot of the training for doctors [ involves them viewing ] pre-existing cases happening virtually. The student can be anywhere; they have the ability to interact with virtual tools that allow them to practice their skills without having to be in a classroom.
Often that’ s the more common example you think of but there are even more relevant examples for a lot of the trades out there. One of the community colleges I talked to, or one of the two-year schools, had its welding students participate using virtual reality tools. They weren’ t touching a real welder until they took the final certification. They were doing everything virtually. What that does is open up the potential for a lot of this ongoing training to happen either in the home or in nonspecialised environments. You don’ t have to have everybody in a specific lab until the last minute. Allows a lot more flexibility in how you engage those students.
I will add that one of the things we are looking into is how the internet of things can apply to the classroom. One of the challenges we didn’ t discuss is making the virtual classroom a reality. It requires a lot of technology in the back end but you don’ t want the technology to be a barrier to the instructor. The instructor already has enough things in hand to prepare content and make it available to the students, so what do you do to make it easier for them?
One of the things we’ re exploring is whether you can automate the starting of all these different aspects and tools in the classroom so all the instructor has to do is to hit a button and start the class. We think if we get there, it will lower the barrier to entry for making those virtual classes a reality at a lot of these different colleges and universities. ■
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