With novel technology, formalised homeschooling is worth pursuing
Vivian Oyugi writes on a whiteboard in her house in Kisumu in August last year. With schools closed, the primary school teacher resorted to homeschooling using digital platforms.
What you need to know:
- Educationists and parents are now thinking of solutions to education inequities, insecurities and ballooning costs.
- How to adjust the posture of education has become a sharp matter of countenance in formal education.
Of late, formal education has, by necessity, been forced to transform its canvas at a rapid rate that some have described as “building the aeroplane while flying it”.
Many students did not report back to school after last year’s lengthy Covid-19-induced break. Juvenile delinquency in Kenyan brick-and-mortar schools, and the pandemic, raise an interest in different teaching approaches.
Educationists and parents are now thinking of solutions to education inequities, insecurities and ballooning costs after the pandemic destabilised family economics.
Schools are responding to their local and national contexts while joining the global discourse about how best to address students’ changing educational and pastoral needs. How to adjust the posture of education has become a sharp matter of countenance in formal education. Perspectives into content, innovativeness and technology are closing in.
From Grade One to university, students sit in a classroom and are lectured to. The static and repetitive nature of our curricula permits it to be mathematically expressed and analysed by an AI system. This would then allow homogenous, consistent digital learning.
E-learning was in many elite and higher education institutions way before Covid-19 with some universities setting up divisions that offer distance learning and virtual learning courses. What is different is that, now, real-time interactions are critically demanded.
Technology provides the solution. By upscaling technological support via formal arrangements with software providers, anybody can broadcast and examine students online in a credible and uninterrupted manner. The system locks out other browsers during an exam. It ensures accuracy, credibility and confidence in online exams set up remotely. It’s in place in some universities.
Creativity and innovation
By leveraging on such fostered environmental architecture, learning centres can realise a level of social interaction that is greatly minimised by digital learning while increasing enrollment and reducing the cost of learning.
Indeed, the main challenge of digital learning is that social interactions are minimised, which is horrid for proper human growth. Group work via chat room breakaways is way too minimal to offer the real holistic effect of human presence. More than just online pep talk sessions will have to be done.
Much of what we teach and test has also become easy to digitise and automate. The future is about pairing the artificial intelligence (AI) of computers with the cognitive, social and emotional skills and values of humans. It will be our imagination, awareness and sense of responsibility that will help us to harness technology to improve the world.
Success in education is about identity, associative agency and purpose. It is about building curiosity — opening minds, building compassion and opening hearts. It is also about engraving courage, mobilising our cognitive, affective and psychomotor resources to take action that changes the world for the good. These are our best weapons against the biggest threats of our times: Pandemic diseases, the closed mind, hate of the closed heart and fear of the unknown agency.
The digital learning ‘reggae’ will usher in homeschooling as a practice worth pursuing. It will enhance organisational flexibility in responding to threats of space. It will build flexibility to education models and improve creativity and innovation. It will reduce friction costs and mitigate overhead costs for all.
Through well-designed, well-executed effective digital learning strategies, centres will boost revenue and streamline production of competence and excellence to move national populations via a laptop, electricity and reliable internet. That can cascade an unimaginable scale of growth of competent graduates and increase the potential for the youth bulge to a demographic dividend.
But to benefit wholesomely from these levers of power, the youth must enhance their self-discipline, order and infrastructural support to optimise the digital interventions and opportunities cast upon our times by the silver lining of this pandemic.
Mr Kitheka, a public communications consultant and educator, is the founder of GoldfishPR and is former HOD Geography at Strathmore School. [email protected].
