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Personalising the future of online education with the abilities presented by technology.
It’s just a fact that today’s children, teenagers, and young adults are digitally savvier and more connected than their parents. So why should they learn in the same way their parents did when they were at school?
“We grew up with screens,” says Tyla, an International GCSE student at Valenture Institute, who lives in Cape Town. She joined this global online high school because she has aspirations to be a professional golfer. The flexibility of the online classes makes it possible for her to go to high school and to travel to tournaments around the country.
The young people of today value their autonomy. This is something that traditional schools cannot offer right now. Online schools provide safety to students in terms of continuity of their education during lockdowns while maintaining a connection to their classmates.
“A school like Valenture speaks directly to how young people today live lives that are integrated with technology rather than relying on methods that may no longer be relevant to a hyper-connected generation,” says Ian Louwrens, a Physics Learning Designer at Valenture.
Education is evolving so fast, and not just because of Covid. Updating what learners learn, and how they learn it has to be top of mind for all educational institutions when developing methods relevant for this generation of learners.
Designing a new way to learn, for a new generation of learners
Visual Capitalist notes that a survey of 1 400 educators done in 2019 found that the majority believed that classrooms of the future will be centred around self-paced and personalised learning.
Let learners choose their own pace and let the process be guided by learning tech like artificial intelligence and blended learning approaches like the flipped classroom.
Online environments are incredible in terms of how they can allow for personalised learning through the abilities of tech. These virtual learning environments are able to capture data in real-time and employ this in the course content development and presentation far faster and more efficiently than traditional schools ever could.
For example, Learning Designer, Ian, uses machine learning in his Physics course development to automate the template completion process and to generate quiz questions. “This alone saves me up to six hours per module. Since the template completion is automated, there is no human error involved. These hours I can then dedicate to developing better quality content for students.”
Valenture’s technology also gives them incredible visibility of every individual student’s progress at every step of their academic journey. “We can see exactly what kinds of outcomes students are struggling with, where we need to target our interventions to help them do the best that they can and we can very quickly see where we need to help learners,” says Lizzy Steenkamp, Head of Learning Technology at Valenture Institute.
Hear more from Head of Technology at Valenture Institute, Kim Westcott on this topic:
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