Collaborative Learning Is The Future

A few ‘generations’ ago, teachers could sit back and relax thinking that what they taught would last for the life of their students. Unfortunately, for such teachers, the present is no longer the same. Today, teachers need to prepare their students for a more rapid social and economic change driven by the rapid advancements in information and communication technologies, and for jobs that don’t even exist yet, for technologies that haven’t been invented yet, and to solve (social) problems that we can’t even imagine yet. The future in the education is therefore about transformation.

Let me explain myself. The education in the past was divided. In the traditional educational setup, teachers and course content were divided by subjects. The courses were designed in a way to keep the students inside the schools and the real world outside of it. However, the future of education demands to be integrated. There needs to be a seamless integration of subjects, students as well as learning contexts, all of which needs to be hyper connected and permeable to the rich resources in the community. Instructions should be more project-based than subject based. The schools must do away with the hierarchical system wherein the students are passive receivers of knowledge and teachers are dominant resources. The future belongs to co-creation. Students are as important as teachers as resources of knowledge, for the design of learning and the long term success of the students.

The future, hence, needs to be collaborative. This means that the schools will need to change their existing working norms. Today’s proprietary knowledge essentially needs to become a commodity accessible to everyone tomorrow. Value in knowledge and education can no longer be created vertically, through control and commands. It needs to be transformed into horizontal connections and collaborations. Students and teachers alike should be encouraged to master the new forms of collaboration. Similarly, the diversity in student backgrounds (social and cognitive) should be embraced in the future education system with diversified pedagogical practices. Gone are the days of a curriculum-centered education approach. The future is all about learner-centered education approach. The focus should be on personalizing the education experience of each individual student. The instructions should be based on student passions and their capabilities and interests. This will excite them to contribute toward personalizing their learning and assessment in ways that foster engagement and nurture talents and skills. The future of education belongs to technologies that liberate learning from the conventional systems and connect students in newer and more powerful ways than ever before. Interactive is the past, participative is the future.

This is challenging, but it is definitely possible. I am very excited to learn newer ways of using Web 2.0 in order to make my courses as well as my students future-ready!