More than half a century ago, in 1967, Edmund Amidon defined teaching as 'An interactive process’. Today, when classrooms are virtual and interactivity is measured in clicks, human ingenuity has ‘unmask’ groundbreaking ways not just to survive but thrive through a pandemic.
The new normal has compelled us to conduct ourselves with a renewed commitment to innovation. Teaching, a traditional tri-polar process comprised of educational objectives, learning experiences, and behavioral changes, now yearns for re-engineered infrastructures and remodeled pedagogy. At the face value, we have seamlessly adopted Hybrid learning models combining online and onsite education, yet, the innovation journey is eons away from being over. I argue that the need for a cultural shift at the institutional level is more prevalent today than ever.
Since the turn of this decade, students have successfully navigated through distance learning and virtual classrooms. Subsequently, the Ed-Tech industry also improved its products and services to offer enhanced interactivity and state-of-the-art assessments options. While these extraordinary feats address the need of the time, they also beg a fundamental question; do we need to maintain the extravagant conventional campuses?
The industry’s stoics rule out the idea that campuses will become irrelevant in the future because of their significant social impact. I, however, argue that we are on the verge of a radical transformation of knowledge delivery, and we must re-engineer our campuses completely to keep them relevant. Now, more than ever, we need a vision for the ‘Campus of Tomorrow’ that is economically competitive, socially relevant, and pedagogically innovative.
Nearly all educational institutes offer “Hybrid Education” as a marriage of convenience between online and onsite learning, still, most do not address that we need significant infrastructural changes designed to outlast the ongoing disruption and be the next big idea. I want to invite the readers for a rather unusual comparison between Shopping malls and Universities. The colossal brick-and-mortar infrastructures of our educational institutes are no less magnificent than the extravagant malls of modern metropolitans. Let us also remember that ‘Malls’ are a concept that has developed over time, as Victor Gruen,
“father of shopping malls” wanted malls to be a place for recreation and social gathering. The economics soon took over and mall became a commercial entity, a complex of shops lined up next to each other with chains competing for footfall. Until recently, right before the pandemic came knocking, similar were the corridors of our educational institutes, a lineup of classrooms that offered mundane learning patterns starving of innovative rigor. With online shopping, the malls became social hubs, with online learning, it’s time for the campuses to step up and create innovative spaces and designs that enhance the social and entrepreneurial persona of the modern learner.
By definition, the Hyper-Hybrid campus is a 'Mall-like' campus that offers a unique learning experience befitting the aspirations of the hyper-connected youth; a campus that attracts Gen-Z through integrating Online with Onsite, Virtual with Experiential, and Social with Entertainment. For the digitally native who is gearing up for the Metaverse, the campuses must find ways to augment the new normal into the mix. Develop facilities that offer a futuristic learning environment ranging from on-campus Virtual Classrooms, Simulation Labs, and Augmented Meta-Spaces coupled with core social amenities like Social-hubs, Cinemas, Cafes & Restaurants, etc.
Much like Edmund’s prognosis of 1967, modern social life craves interactivity and experiences more than anything; the youth looks for them through touch screens and augmented interfaces. Reviving the culture of social interactivity and entertainment in higher education can become the driving force that attracts today’s youth to the “Hyper Hybrid” campus; think of this new campus as an integrated educational, applied, and recreational complex, in which students find what they want when they want, and how they want. Much like “The Mall,” Campuses must attract footfall by adding Fun to the Fundamentals of education. We must add exciting modern social hubs along with innovation labs, incubators, workshops, coding zones, to peak interests.
Statistically, due to COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment numbers for the 2020-21 academic year have remained substantially low. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that as of spring 2021, overall postsecondary enrollment went down by 4.2 percent from a year ago, which was much lower than the yesteryears. Education in the west is on a downward trend spiral and needs rekindling of the learners spirits. Another obligation that befalls educators today is to bring down education costs, especially in the post-pandemic era. I read a recent blog post highlighting the harsh but true reality of skyrocketing higher education costs. A disgruntled user left a comment about asynchronous online classes that struck a chord with me,
“I am not willing to have all this debt just to watch YouTube videos produced by Harvard,” he wrote with evident despair.
The educational institutes no longer have the liberty of charging premium prices for their degrees. With campus capacities no longer a concern due to online learning, institutes must consider the economies of scale and increase the student intake, subsequently reducing the costs of degrees. The institutes with localized ambitions can now attract outstanding global expertise to enhance their offerings. Restructuring the administrative jobs can allow employees to experience better work-life balance and improve productivity. There are significant ways to use technology to reduce higher education costs.
The Hyper-Hybrid model can only succeed when institutions commit to clear segregations of resources and learning techniques. On-Campus Education must strictly remain exclusive to applied studies, practical skills development, innovation, and entrepreneurship while Online Education should focus on cognitive development and theoretical pedagogy.The physical learning spaces need to be re-designed as environments conducive for post pandemic era students.
To restore excellence in higher education and avoid the campuses of today from becoming Museums of tomorrow. Institutes must acknowledge the need to adapt and recognize their students’ capabilities and personas; Generation Z and Alpha have grown up in the world on tutorials and how-to videos, it will take more than online classes to maintain the sanctity of higher education and rekindle the flame that could easily be lost in the blinding lights of Metaverse and Web3.0.
Dr. Abdullatif M. Al Shamsi is an Emirati academic and author focused on technology-oriented educational management. He is the President & CEO of UAE’s largest Higher Colleges of Technology. Prof. Al Shamsi has authored books and published more than 40 research papers in international journals. He regularly speaks at conferences on pedagogical approaches in education, mechanical engineering, change management during crises, and technology integration in educational practices. Alshamsi was named amongst the 100 most influential Arabs by Arabian Business and the Global CEO by CEO Today.