The Great Audition
If your factory burns down but you have loyal customers, you’ll be fine. On the other hand, if you lose your customers, even your factory isn’t going to help you.
Seth Godin. The Icarus Deception.
A few days ago, I read an interview with Nobel prize Finn Kydland in La Vanguardia, where he explains how we can get over the pandemic. According to him, the key is keeping the human capital, because they hold the know-how, the skills, and the relationships that will allow businesses to recover once social distancing is over. Today I started reading The Icarus Deception and got into the paragraph that opens these lines. Startled by how each of them tackle two sides of the present situation, I decided to try to put in order some ideas about what’s happening with teaching right now.
With schools going into Emergency Remote Teaching mode, there are some considerations to be stated on how they treat their students, teachers, and, let’s not forget about them, staff. There is a lot at stake. For years there has been both an open debate on the capacity of the educational system to back up the learning needs of modern society and a public war among traditional and alternative models trying to take the lead, with the alt-online sector showing strength in offer, students and profit. I think this situation may work as an audition for the whole education sector. Traditional contenders have trouble adapting to change, and although they have already moved into online education, the rush could expose their weaknesses and make them easy prey. Residential learning has an opportunity to become a premium product, but to get there, providers must survive and keep their reputation.
We are all living very differently, trying new things, and changing our habits. An experience of this intensity and length has tremendous power of transforming society and, in consequence, the way we live in the world. This factor adds up to all the other change acceleration elements that got activated with the pandemic. We seem to be facing a planetary shift in behavior.
A lot of people are still reluctant about online learning. Some perceive it as a cheap version of the real thing, and traditional institutions as the perfect framework to start building a professional network and get access to libraries, working spaces, and equipment they cannot afford. All of a sudden, most of it is shut down, and students are forced to attend online classes they enrolled to do in person.
Imagine you are a person studying abroad. The excitement of living in a foreign city is severely handicapped when you can’t get out of your small apartment. You may be alone, away from family and friends, who could get sick or worse, and the interaction with your classmates, once a daily thing that was a space for building friendships, is limited to the few minutes at the beginning or end of an online lesson. You are living like an astronaut, but you didn’t get the expensive training. Your emotional balance is at serious risk.
This is just an extreme example, but these students’ motivational and emotional status must be cared for. In the real classroom, it was easy to do, but in a virtual space, it isn’t. Online, canned-course providers don’t need to worry about it, because that’s not what they are selling, but face to face schools must provide a safe learning environment because that’s in the core of their value.
There is an enormous amount of free online courses available, and plenty of low-cost ones given away for free temporarily. Chances are a lot of people will be making good use of the time they are spending at home, and try one. Inexpensive online course providers are taking advantage of the opportunity and giving away goods because they know they can win a decisive battle. Many students will be comparing the value of both products, and differences will be easy to find. Brick and mortar schools should better do an outstanding job of virtualizing their product.
Providing the largest part of your activity remotely can reduce the perceived quality of the service. A fun and brilliant teacher may have trouble adapting lessons to the online world. A four-hour lecture that works wonders in the classroom can feel like a walk through the desert when given online, where sound and is glitchy, video is terrible, interaction is discontinuous, and non-verbal cues are lost. Just as anything remote has its tools and techniques, so does learning. Bringing on the experts and preparing teachers for the task is a must, unless you want to leave the core value of your business in the hands of improvisation, tech illiterates, and faulty internet connections.
The transfiguration of the schools’ ecosystems into remote mode may also leave behind the support that is granted in the residential model: a series of departments where we can ask for help if something goes wrong. Setting up virtual departments with real people that can be easily reached to the teachers and students can alleviate the situation and help keep a seamless learning experience.
Just as we should double the attention we put on the condition of our students, so should we with our teachers and school staff. In the current situation, most people have either health, money, family, work, or stress concerns. Those who have not lost our jobs, are severely overworked, working with the kids at home, confined in small apartments, worried… Overall, the emotional conditions can be far from ideal to provide the quality of attention that a good learning experience requires.
A stressed, emotionally distressed, and overwhelmed team is going to have trouble not only providing the support the conditions require, but also discerning right from wrong and making the right decisions.
In summary, I think schools specialized in residential learning must be careful about what they are leaving behind when going online. From my point of view, these are the key aspects to pay attention to:
- Apply their vision into visible actions that will help them differentiate from the competition.
2. Set up a supportive learning environment.
3. Take care of the wellness of the staff, students, and teachers.
Otherwise, they risk offering the worst quality for money, suffering significant losses in the battle, and compromising their chances of keeping the main role.
