How Has COVID-19 Stimulated Online Learning

By A. Abeku Haywood-Dadzie.

It was William Faulkner who said, "You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore." Unfortunately, status quo bias denies us the opportunity to discover new horizons most of the time. Our refusal to swim for a new horizon is what has turned the graveyard into the richest place on earth. According to Les Brown, it’s "there that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream."

Change in any form is very difficult. What makes it difficult and the reason most change programmes don't produce the desired outcome is the human factor. According to Chris Pennington "We are hardwired to resist change. Part of the brain—the amygdala—interprets change as a threat and releases the hormones for fear, fight, or flight." He emphasised that our biological system protects us from change. Change is not natural, so we naturally repel it.

Again, we do not resist change, we resist being changed, and the motivation for this resistance is natural and simple. Though we accept the fact that change is the only constant in life, we often don’t voluntarily embrace change. This is because change comes with sacrifice, and this sacrifice is about giving up something old for something new; something we have become accustomed to for something we are unfamiliar with. It demands we throw away the familiar and jump headlong into the unfamiliar.

Ironically, our worldview is anchored on what is familiar—the basis of our basic assumptions and the bedrock of our culture. -"The way we do things around here" We therefore naturally cling to what we are familiar with and cleave to the unfamiliar. It is therefore not surprising that culture can devour massive amounts of well-intended process change. In the words of the venerable Peter Drucker, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Until the early part of 2020, the world was steeped in culture and tradition when it came to education and anything related to learning and development. Humanity was fixated on "face-to-face in-class sessions."Culture consequently consumed all innovations within the learning and development [education] ecosystem until the outbreak of the coronavirus. COVID-19 resulted in schools being closed all across the world. It was estimated that globally, over 1.2 billion children were out of the classroom during that period. UNESCO, reported that as of April 10, 2020, more than 188 countries had implemented nationwide school and university closures, impacting over 91% of the world’s student population. -UNESCO n.d.

During these school closures, all face-to-face lessons were canceled. For countries like Ghana, which operates on a 6-3-4-4-all "face-to-face in-class session" educational trajectory; Primary School – 6 years, Junior Secondary/High School – 3 years, Senior Secondary School – 4 University The Bachelor's [first] degree challenge was awesome. The question for most was how to adapt and transition from the conventional flipped classes into the new "normal" of online flipped classes using Bybee et al.'s 5E framework: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate in unpredictable times.

The COVID-19 outbreak compelled us to do away with tradition and immediately switch to an innovative way of learning and development. It therefore, led the digital transformation across the world of education, it became a catalyst that revolutionized, renovated, reinvented, and accelerated the digital transformation agenda in the corridors of learning and development. As a result, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken online and on digital platforms. Ironically, what was enacted during this revolution was not novel; what was novel was the speed with which it was implemented.All we did was to do away with the familiar and to take the opportunity provided by the COVID-19 platform to make things better than they were.

According to an essay written by Cathy Li and Farah Lalani for the World Economic Forum, "The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed education forever." While some believe that the unplanned and rapid move to online learning – with no training, insufficient bandwidth, and little preparation – will result in a poor user experience that is unconducive to sustained growth, others believe that a new hybrid model of education will emerge, with significant benefits. "I believe that the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and that online education will eventually become an integral component of school education," says Wang Tao, Vice President at Tencent.

Maria Barron et al. suggest that two crucial factors have shifted due to the pandemic. First, pedagogical adaptations have proven to be pivotal as the traditional lecturing in-person models do not translate to a remote learning environment. No matter the type of channel used (radio, TV, mobile, online platforms, etc.), teachers need to adapt their practises and be creative to keep students engaged as every household has become a classroom-more often than not-without an environment that supports learning. Second, the pandemic has recalibrated how teachers divide their time between teaching, engaging with students, and administrative tasks.?The pandemic has highlighted the need for flexibility and more time for student-teacher interactions.

In the global effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus and minimise its death toll, most governments introduced radical social distancing measures that partly or completely reduced physical presence. " Even though the shock of the COVID-19 on education has been unprecedented, the players in this community have been resilient.?Today, it is critical to note that, despite the overwhelming challenges of the pandemic over the next fifteen months. I have been able to perform my work in the learning and development space with ease and some advantages that did not exist prior to COVID-19. although there was not much training, little preparation, and bandwidth challenges, humankind had forged ahead and was making the best of the challenges posed by the pandemic.

The question is, how will learning change after COVID_19?