Higher education institutions have been adopting digitally driven learning environments for quite some time. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic shaking education foundations to their core, the sophistication of interactivity, adaptivity, and assessments needs to improve.
Colleges need to embrace evolving and interactive digital tools along with sciences research to lead the way into meet the needs of their students. This convergence creates new possibilities but demands new approaches to the design of the learning experience.
We are developing a new model of digital learning design that will call “education through exploration” (ETX) that aims to inspire curiosity and to promote higher order thinking skills, in addition to content mastery. Students solve problems and actively discover relationships, supported by an intelligent tutoring system which provides immediate feedback and scaffolds scientific thinking and methods.
Leveraging Digital Technology
”Many of the goals that we have in education that we struggle with in in-person learning and the thesis of our Center is that with the right technologies and the right learning design approaches, we can actually leverage digital technology to teach better, not simply to cope with the challenges of COVID-19,” said Ariel Anbar, head of Arizona State University’s (ASU) Center for Education Through Exploration (ETX), during REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit. ETX is reinventing digital learning around curiosity, exploration, and discovery and in 2017 Anbar was named one of 10 “teaching innovators” by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The future of society and the world as a whole, comes down to education. As the earth and societies have developed, the behavior of humans is fundamentally driven by education. Therefore, higher learning institutions, which have adopted some interactive learning tools and techniques in the past, need to accelerate their efforts during in the new world order of COVID-19 and online learning.
“As I started thinking more and more about the future of this world and started thinking more and more about education systems, what I came to pretty quickly, and this is not a unique or novel observation to me is that we need a planet of problem solvers,” Anbar said. “We are rapidly facing a set of problems and challenges of the sort that humans have never encountered before. We need to nurture a planet of people who are prepared to confront and deal with those sorts of challenges,” he said.
Currently most of the higher education system is focused on conveying knowledge. While that is certainly important, it is not enough. With today’s digital devices, access to knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips. Knowledge alone is no longer a sign of intelligence but what is done with that information through analysis and action is what is critical.
More Than Knowledge
“Knowledge is not enough. When we start to think about the careers of the future, what are we training our students for? What kind of world are we preparing them for? And increasingly the jobs that just rely on mastery of lots of knowledge and even simple understanding, simple patterns and relationships among different types of knowledge are increasingly the jobs that are being automated away,” Anbar said. “And so, when we think the future of work. When we think about the kind of careers that our kids are going to have. We need to be thinking more and more about educating them to be sophisticated users of knowledge and creators of knowledge, not simply masters and regurgitators of it,” he said.
And because knowledge is just not enough, ASU has “rallied” around this notion of “exploration” as the focal point to master digital learning, according to Anbar.
“Exploration is the use of knowledge. To navigate the unknown. So, it's not simply about knowing stuff, it's about how you use it in order to achieve certain goals,” Anbar said. “Exploration is about problem solving. It is about innovation. It is about persistence. It is not just about vocabulary, equations and rules. It is not just about what you know. It is about how you use what you know, and how you discover new things. That's what exploration is all about,” he said.
So how can instructors instill the values of exploration and the skills and attributes in higher education? Especially in this new realm of online teaching and learning, 15 sessions of simply instructors lecturing is no going to work. Instead, instructors must turn to active learning tools and technologies, especially in the sciences, according to Anbar, adding it has to also be scalable.
ASU’s ETX works with Smart Sparrow to create personalized, active and adaptive learning experiences for their students. There are different types of tutoring:
-No Tutor
-Answer Based Digital Tutor
-Step Based Digital Tutor
-Human Tutor
While there is nearly no replacement for actual human tutoring shows the most progress, step-based digital tutoring is very close and extremely effective, Anbar said. “Step-based digital tutoring can rival human tutoring,” he said, adding the simulation environment provides fine grain feedback, beyond just animation. The system knows what a student has done, and so can tutor the students to success.