For Education to be More Effective and Lifelong, They Need to Become More Interactive and Digitized

Jobs tend to be very hands-on. Employees are required to actively work on various projects, and the success of the projects is based on the output that is delivered to the clients. Creating the output requires employees to get their hands dirty, chipping away at a list of tasks for completing the project, and communicating with team members to coordinate the splitting up of tasks. No one gets to simply sit around and read without producing anything. Passiveness at work is, to put simply, not a job description of any productive employee.

In contrast, learning often has a passive component building, relating to reading textbooks and listening to lectures. Sure, students are expected to comprehend what they listened to and read, but the need to check for comprehension may be much later than when the knowledge was acquired, in the form of big exams or essays. And not all knowledge needs to be regurgitated anyways, as the exams and essays are never meant to check every single concept that is disclosed in the books and lectures. The result is that while academic learning is dominated by passiveness, the same would never fly in the workplace.

The resulting gap between learning and working needs to be addressed for workers who newly departed the world of academia to realize their fullest productivity in the corporate world. In particular, learning needs to become more active in its overall process, even if knowledge continues to come from books and lectures. For this change to be active, learning modules need to be made more kinetic, allowing a far more interactive experience than the types of materials that students are given. Rather than looking at texts, watching videos, and hearing lectures, they need to move their hands while they learn.

Quiz- and exercise-based learning methods can be a good start. Rather than giving students visual or audio materials first and having them take tests later, it might be better to have them do tests first without any necessary knowledge and provide question-by-question feedback. Perhaps some questions are so self-intuitive that students can get their answers correctly without even learning anything. Skipping over those while getting students to focus on explanations of questions they get wrong saves time and keeps students engaged.

Having this sort of questions-first learning method will require a greater shift from classroom-based, in-person learning to a more online-centered environment. After all, there will never be enough teachers in place to handle a customized learning process in which every student moves at his or her own pace, and stops after every wrong question to learn about the underlying knowledge to answer it correctly. Online curriculums, based on automated processes of displaying the relevant knowledge for each wrong answer, would be needed to ensure the customization is implemented without any glitches.

Schools today are hardly ready for this sort of digitized learning process. Teachers, many middle-aged and trained decades ago, have a hard enough time keeping up with all the new content and changes in curriculums without having to also deal with changes in how they must teach their students. With teachers' salaries remaining low and many overworked amidst the disruptions of COVID-19, many are contemplating leaving the education sector altogether rather than thinking about how to revolutionize it for the benefit of their students.

Only educational service providers must fill in the gap in this digital shortfall. While regular schools can provide students with the fundamental schooling process as per usual, online education should be there to supplement the classroom experience. Supplementary education is particularly necessary for adults who have been employed and thus out of the classroom for many years. Graduation from degree programs, after all, does not spell the end of education. Professional certification and retraining to enter new industries should be a regular part of every worker's professional career.

The question remains how online education can be customized and provided to millions upon millions of people without developing the process becoming prohibitively expensive. For-profit education, however innovative, is useless for those seeking to change their lives due to their current financial predicaments. Affordability and accessibility to all should trump the perfection of whatever learning process and software requirements that come with it. The cost issue, then, is something that government authorities in charge of education and education technology firms must stand together to address.