Educator and tech entrepreneur shares object lessons on managing transitions

‘In the face of crisis, we have the inherent capacity to innovate,' says Prof Ernesto C Boydon

For the past 35 years, Prof Ernesto C. Boydon has been working concurrently across education and information technology, each sphere complementing the other.

When Boydon (‘Boogie’ to friends and colleagues) turned 60 last May, he retired from teaching to focus on his ICT company.

“This is actually not a total life pivot for me,” explains Boydon, founder and CEO of Cyber Optimus, and an active blogger. “I have always been an entrepreneur and educator at the same time.”

“What’s different now is that I get to engage in a tech business that focuses on something that I love which is teaching and thus, it becomes a continuation of my passion for education even if I have already retired from a regular teaching load.”

In June this year, a month after retiring, his company launched YES! Ynnov Education Suite, with a city university and a private college among the first users.

Boydon says his more than three decades of teaching helped him create the platform. The pandemic helped him refine it further.

As he points out, COVID-19 brought three Ds to education: disruption, disconnection and discontinuation. 

He stresses, however, that there are ways the sector can tackle these challenges.

“In the face of crisis we have the inherent capacity to innovate, to be creative,” says Boydon. "We can turn around situations, what seems to be a difficulty, to actually become an opportunity.”

Applying this to education, he states: “The role of educators in the new normal is to be effective and efficient curators of knowledge, able to craft a learning plan by clearly defining the learning outcomes, crafting lessons and activities that will optimally result in those desired outcomes, and expertly putting together a variety of learning resources curated from varied sources from all over the internet.”

“When the pandemic started, I saw the difficulty that a lot of schools were facing with the transition to a more technology-based education,” he says. “I started giving a free webinar entitled 'The Digital Transformation of Education'.

“This is how I got to understand the problems of schools, administrators, and educators more. These insights help me formalise and concretise the design and philosophy that went into creating YES!.”

He says schools had three main pain points – management, digital learning and student engagement. Those three had to be served in a seamlessly integrated platform.

He observes: “Some schools only had a school management system (some call it SIS or Student Information System) while others only had a learning management system or LMS. Or if they had both, it was not integrated so that data had to be entered again into the LMS even if it is already available in the SMS or SIS. And because of the need for synchronous and asynchronous learning sessions for students because of the pandemic, the need for a virtual classroom that is integrated with the LMS also became apparent.”

His team used these insights to create YES! The result, he says, is “a robust, pedagogically sound learning management system for teachers to create their learning plans, define desired outcomes, identify competencies to be achieved, manage grades and rubrics for grading. 

“At the same time, they get a social learning platform that looks and feels very much like Facebook and thus create a level of engagement with students – and teachers alike – that is both fun, captivating, and gives an effective and rewarding learning experience.”

“We took that further by expanding our platform to be a comprehensive educational suite that seamlessly integrates our learning management system with a school management system and a virtual classroom.”

The making of a tech entrepreneur

“I was actually already an entrepreneur in 1983 when I first got into teaching,” says Boydon. He taught part-time in computer schools with short-term courses. At the same time, he was building a business, assembling IBM-PC compatible computers and supplying these to school laboratories.

“It was while I was delivering a set of computers for a laboratory at Trinity College of Quezon City that I got invited to teach in the college,” he cites. “The experience reinforced my passion for teaching and I have been a teacher since then until I retired this year. All that time I would still be running a business.”

“At one point I was even joking that the reason I was running a business is so that I can finance my teaching because being a teacher doesn’t really pay well enough to raise a family of four children,” says Boydon, who is national president of the Philippine Society of Information Technology Educators (PSITE) and director for graduate programs in IT Education – Asia Pacific College (APC).

“I have been into e-learning for the longest time,” he adds. “When I first came to learn about the internet in 1994, I was immediately fascinated with it.”

His early experiences online were cumbersome as it was still all text at that time. When he went to Japan for a project in July 1995, he appreciated the power of email to save on communication costs with his wife Queenie. 

“But it was still inconvenient because I had to connect to our Ateneo [University] server first using Telnet then go to the email client to write an email. The whole idea of HTML and the browser was already fascinating but it was still crude at the time.”

Boydon was still in Japan when Windows 95 came out. “This was when the full impact of a graphical user interface hit me,” he says. “I related it to the attraction of the website and by 1998 I started experimenting on how I can put my courses online for my students.”

Over the years, he has seen different types of learning management systems and taken note of their strengths and weaknesses.

One open source system that got his attention was Moodle. “Even at that time, it was already quite powerful and attractive to educators wanting to put their courses in an online form.”

When he joined the Asia Pacific College in 2011, he got to learn Moodle more because it was the system they were introduced to. “I was using it for my students but I realised that even if it was something that educators like me loved so much, it was not creating as much engagement in the students. Students found it boring and you had to force them to go to their online subjects,” he recalls.

“By that time, I was also into Joomla, a powerful content management system that I got to learn right from its creation in 2005. It helped me in my business at the time which was website development and hosting.

“An idea came to me of combining Joomla and Moodle and that’s when I discovered that there was such a component that did just that. I could create a more engaging interface for my students using Joomla but I was still creating my subjects and the lessons in Moodle.”

“It proved successful that in 2013, I even won an award for it, the Esther Vibal Award for Education Technology Innovation,” says Boydon. He says the award was the first-ever of its kind given by the Philippine Association for the Advancement of Science (PhilAAS). 

He continued experimenting with the system and came up with the idea of putting in a social network interface using another Joomla component called Jomsocial. This created a Facebook-like environment within Joomla.

Taking on the principles of ‘globality learning’ 

“The philosophy behind the design of our platform is anchored on my definition of what the new learning paradigm looks like. I call it ‘Globality Learning’”, says Boydon.

He says the word ‘globality’ was coined by Daniel Yergin in his 1998 book The Commanding Heights, to describe what was then known as the Information Age or The Age of the Internet. 

“The key is to take these globality characteristics and repurpose them for the positive objective of a learning environment,” says Boydon. 

Globality learning or learning in our internet age has the following characteristics, he states.

• It’s social and interactive where learning happens in social platforms where collaboration, communication, and cooperation abounds.
• Learning is delivered in micro and bite-sized portions – small, easy-to-digest nuggets of knowledge and where the understanding and retention is immediately assessed at the point-of-learning.
• Learning happens in a continuum. It doesn’t stop and is encountered by the learner in an ubiquitous and pervasive manner.

“As educators, we need not worry where we are going to get the resources to sustain that ubiquitous and pervasive nature of globality learning,” says Boydon.

“The knowledge is already all out there on the internet,” he states. “A lot of the big schools like MIT, Harvard and Stanford have put a lot of their learning resources available for everyone and for free. There are also massive open education resources from various other sources.”

Boydon says the goal is to not just equip schools with the technology to conduct digital learning. “It is about empowering them not just to survive but to thrive by teaching them revolutionary steps to make them the school of choice in the new normal.” 

The steps include ensuring schools are agile, adroit and adaptable, he states. “These are three key characteristics necessary for any business to succeed in the digital economy.”

#education #continuouslearning #innovation #university #leadership #career #digitaltransformation #elearning #agile #digitaleconoomy

 The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap