Investing More in Virtual Learning

Some years before the pandemic it was forecasted that learning with the traditional teaching methodology through joining prestigious schools, colleges and universities is going to be obsoleted and irrelevant. For the rise of internet platforms, enriched by 5G technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning, leaving the century-old education system is inevitable.

This one example could be enough to convince you that, once we were forced at the school to memorize books of geography, as I can remember I spent a whole evening for memorizing the size of countries, their number of populations, climates, languages, ethnicities, etc. Now one click on your mobile phone is enough to find the data with more alive images and videos. Memorizing information, even understanding the maneuvering of data through textbooks is already outdated when books are replaced by software and apps.

5G Conspiracy Theorists, who are campaigning against 5G technologies, couldn't stop the spread of 5G adoption, and failed to come with convincing facts and figures that 5G is causing cancer and autism, destroying flora, fauna and birds; furthermore, their invalid assumption it’s using for controlling people’s mind, spying, and spreading diseases went vain. Therefore, still many are far from the imagination of what would be 5G-based teachings and contents; soon virtual teachers like Albert Einstein would come to you to teach you through interactions, you would feel his vivid physical presence in front of you. This isn’t just science fiction with telling a story through pseudoscience.

Now some of the corporate houses don’t ask for educational qualifications at the interview for hiring staff, like asking where are you from and which was your school, in the info-tech era these are irrelevant questions, rather they give interviewees some problems to solve, best solution makers get the job. When I was in Europe, I saw employers, who are outsourcing remote-jobs, only check candidates' present skills in solving problems; their continuation of the job depends on how successfully they are dealing with the assignment. Even they don’t invite them to be at the office to talk and submit credentials.

Still we are focusing on traditional academic skills and learning, and neglecting creative efficiency in critical thinking, and adaptability; the generation with the absence of these mentioned faculties have no future; even supplying manpower like garment workers will no longer exist because the robots are showing tremendous performances and going to take all kind of human jobs.

Always challenge for Bangladesh in digital learning is content, Bangla contents available online are poorly prepared and digital formatted books aren’t enough, virtual texts are rawly written and not digitalized standardly, and old books are still as textbooks; how the books would be relevant to the digital generation is questionable.

Teaching or learning software making could be easy for us, we have a pool of software designers and in the international market, this software isn’t expensive. But for building content we need creative minds, to some extent, content writers should be more brilliant than programmers.

Uninterrupted internet is a prerequisite for online learning and teaching. Our internet bandwidth price even higher than in East Europe. A broadband connection is often interrupted and the mobile phone operators charging much higher with traping the customers in the offered packages. Recently BTRC fixed one rate everywhere in the country. However, even the new pricing is much for those students whose parents don’t belong to the upper-middle-class society of the country.

One of the loopholes in online education is students fall into a feeling of isolation. They distract their eyes from the screen and become tired of paying attention to the online lecture. Nowadays a lot of students are glued to online games; it’s alarming and a severe headache for the parents. In playing the game they aren’t tired and their minds don’t get distracted. So minimizing the sense of isolation and distraction of the mind is possible through introducing gaming-like educational tools.

In the nearest future, for the dominance of robotic gadgets and 5G technology, instead of asking the names of your school and university your employers might check which platform you used to learn and who were your digital mentors.

Teachers would be important than universities because some of the teachers like Salman Khan, a Bangladeshi origin American educationist, as an individual would take a larger space in the cyberspace to teach students digitally.

Establishing and maintaining educational institutes is costly, you need buildings and hostels with a big campus, including modern labs. Virtual education evangelists forecasted one decade ago that we don’t need such costly ventures when we have online educational tools and content. Many teachers from the old school doubted the possibility of perfectly teaching students online; they think there is no alternative than students and teachers’ interactions in the reality.

However, whether you like virtual education or not isn’t a question anymore. It became a necessity and inevitable in the time of Covid-19, which, unfortunately, would be one of the reasons for disappearing some of the well-known educational institutes and traditional pedagogies.

Therefore, instead of investing in the traditional education system, we should invest in online learning, spend more brain in creating teaching platforms, applications, and building digital content suitable for the students at this digital era.

The Writer is a Journalist; he works as a Science and IT editor. He can be reached at: sshuvra@gmail.com