Education Technology (EdTech) has made unprecedented progress over the past two years. These days, most learning institutions know how essential it is to have an online learning platform where learners and trainees can easily access materials and set their own pace.
Unfortunately, now that online distance learning has become so ubiquitous, the gravity of its positive and negative impact on all higher educational institutions and learners is becoming more apparent. So, how exactly does digital higher education affect lifelong learners? Is it more of a divider or a bridge-builder for learners and trainees alike?
Digital Higher Education of Today
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitalization of traditional learning. The rapid transition of all modes of teaching and learning to various online learning platforms has shown EdTech’s untapped potential in the future. Before the pandemic, you would rarely come across institutions that had their own fully digitized teaching programs with completely embedded EdTech across their curricula. The majority of these were open universities with established digital models for teaching and learning.
However, that is no longer the case. With digital higher education becoming more of a norm, you can now access an unlimited amount of curated course materials across various learning platforms. As a lifelong learner, this means you’ll be able to set your learning at your own pace. With online learning, you now have the option to upskill, reskill, and even change your career without the hassles and worries of conventional education.
Learning and Collaboration of Tomorrow
When it comes to collaboration, EdTech, when properly integrated into an institution’s curricula and training modules, will enhance the learning experiences of its learners within and outside of the conventional classes and give way to authentic virtual collaboration. Collaborative learning platforms can provide you with access to courses for intercultural awareness, improve your language proficiency in the comfort of your home, and set virtual learning experiences at your pace.
With digital learning, you can easily combine collaborative experiences with local learning. Collaboration within and between HEIs is now even more manageable, with higher potential for achieving authentic lifelong learning outside the traditional classrooms.
Closing Digital Divides and Building Pathways Forward
Online distance learning has shown us that education doesn’t have to be limited to the conventional norms and systems of teaching and learning. If you’re someone who has troubles with conforming to course modules set for a group, you now have the option to look for courses that are tailored for your individual needs. You can now explore different programs from different countries without the need to spend thousands of dollars on traveling to a foreign country’s university.
Institutions can offer various types of learning models for their learners. Even training and development institutions can create training materials and choose whether to provide their training virtually or face-to-face.
Now that policies and programs are becoming tailored towards digital learning, the limitations of traditional classrooms are becoming a thing of the past. You no longer have to bother about individual and cultural differences, geographical distance, and system and structure limitations. Higher education leaders now have the opportunity to spearhead collaborative learning experiences that can build bridges across various divides of inequalities previously encountered in conventional learning models.
Building Pathways Towards Lifelong Learning
EdTech has opened countless doors for training and development — doors that were previously closed when traditional learning platforms were the common medium. Digital learning may not be perfect, having its own sets of pros and cons. But the more we implement it and integrate it into our educational systems, the more solutions we can find for problems that could never be solved before. With digital higher education, we are progressively building bridges that can help us achieve sustainable learning outcomes while continuously improving and developing the way we learn.
Every time universities and training institutions choose to collaborate and share their resources through various online learning platforms, we are going above and beyond the limitations of learning while building bridges that could pave the way for lifelong learning.
