Future Opportunities for Personalized Online Global Learning

Introduction

There has been a sudden and swift paradigm shift post pandemic education all across the globe and the use of Information Technology and Communication technology became a part of the “NEW Normal”. Even after the introduction of vaccines of various types and the vaccination jab is ongoing, the impact is so unsure that the larger population is yet to accept to make communities cent percent jabbed to have herd immunity. Till then, the Covid-19 protocol is required to be in place in every country, especially in their student communities. This also means that ICT usage will be widely adopted globally and Global Online Learning is here to stay and will make forays into the future. This development has to be viewed in the context of what has happened in the past. High growth and adoption in educational technology is not just a phenomenon of the emergence of the pandemic. In 2019 itself, the educational technology investments reached a whopping 18.66 billion US dollars and were predicted to reach 350 billion US dollars by 2025 in its normal course as existed then. The language apps, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools or online learning software, there has been a cloud burst in the field. With the pandemic in place, the phenomenon has taken more and newer dimensions. Currently, there are more than 1.2 billion children in 186 countries affected by the school closures due to the pandemic. In Europe, in Denmark and Sweden children up to the age of 11 are returning to nurseries and school after the initial closure of the schools. In Asia, in India and other neighbouring countries and South Korea, students are responding to roll calls from their teachers online. These old classrooms of brick and mortar are giving way to mouse and click and touch and navigate to machine man conversation. With this shift away from classrooms in many parts of the world, it is only natural for everyone to surmise the adoption of online learning and its continuance for the future and the resultant impact on the traditional market for educational activities. It is in this context that the current emergence of new platforms for online learning has emerged. A humble upstart like Byju Chandrasekhar developed into a globally most highly valued educational technology platform styled as BYJU’S got established in Bangalore in 2011. It is now offering online tutoring and ventured into the space in a big way. Their product Think and Learn App has seen 200 percent increase in the number of new students using its product. After the Chinese Government officially instructed 250 million students to continue their studies through online platforms, an “online movement” resulted in the history of education. Nearly 730,000 or 81 percent of K-12 students started attending the Tencent K-12 Online School in Wuhan. Another Singapore based collaboration named as LARK, which was originally developed by Byte Dance started offering students and teachers unlimited video conferencing time, auto-translation capabilities, real time co-editing of project work, smart calendar scheduling etc as the new features of the system developed and required by the educational system. It was a swift act to address the concern of the crisis situation and the Global Server Infrastructure and Engineering capabilities were ramped up to make sure that there is no disruption to connectivity. It is a record of rapid capacity expansion when Alibaba’s Ding Talk deployed 100,000 new cloud servers in just two hours to enable distance learning solutions. There are other initiatives of partnerships between The Los Angeles Unified School District and PBS SoCal/KCET to provide local educational broadcasts with digital options and BBC promoting Virtual Learning.

The platforms are now designed in a way that the students are able to study in an individualised and customised learning environment. Such learning is referred to as Personalised Learning (PL). The approach to personalized learning emanated from Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. The variables of personalised learning include the interests of the particular learner, the needs, abilities and the identification of the best learning style of each individual learner. Such learning enables the learner to be good at on-the-job and is consistent with the constructivist learning. This emphasizes that learning is active and knowledge is built on top of own experiences. “ It is, therefore, important that each learner realizes their individual characteristics and needs such as different prior knowledge, cognitive abilities and learning styles.(D. H. Jonassen and B. L. Grabowski, 2012) . These individual differences affect the learning processes and are the reason why some learners find it easy to learn in a particular subject of study, whereas others find the same subject difficult”