Necessity is the mother of invention
MANY innovations and inventions have come about at times of crisis, summed up by the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention”.
As a computer scientist, I often draw on the development of computers in the 1940s to provide examples of changes as a result of a crisis. One of these is the code-breaking efforts of those at Bletchley Park, which enabled the secret messages coded by the German Enigma machine to be read. If it were not for the world war, computers would not have developed as quickly as they did in those early years.
As we (hopefully) emerge from Covid-19 and enter a new normal, will the higher education sector be able to point at innovations and inventions that resulted from this crisis?
We can wax lyrical about how we quickly moved to online delivery, we can provide case studies where we worked from home and we can demonstrate that we made changes to our working environment in order to cope with physical distancing, taking temperatures and wearing masks. But are any of these changes worthy of the tag of “innovation” or “invention”, and what would be a lasting legacy for higher educationinmalaysia,thatwelookbackon with pride in a few years’ time?
There have been discussions about the differences between face-to-face teaching and online delivery. What if we could make those two experiences identical? Augmented reality could be one way of achieving this, enabling those sitting at home to feel as if they are in the lecture hall, sitting amongst those that are physically present. Every student could interact with the lecturer in the same way. Indeed, any student should be able to interact with any other student, as if they were all in the same physical space.
Augmented reality is still a long way from being able to provide this experience in a way that students would feel that not being physically present is in any way a barrier. The technologies largely exist, but it requires significant innovation to provide a seamless environment between the physical and the digital world in higher education.
Augmented reality provides the ability for students, wherever physically located, to have the same experience – but why worry about physical location at all? Indeed, why worry about structured learning in the form of lectures, seminars and tutorials?
The aim of taking a course is to impart knowledge in such a way that some form of assessment at the end of the course measures whether the learning outcomes have been achieved. Do we really need the “sage on the stage” 50-minute lectures? Why not let students learn at their own pace and in a way that they are most comfortable with, whether that is face-toface, using their phone/tablet or through some other medium such as a 3D avatar delivering lectures.
If these types of innovations can be combined with adaptive learning, where every student has a unique learning experience, adapting to their continual assessment and providing support in areas where there is evidence that they are not meeting the learning outcomes, this will enable every student to reach their full potential, rather than being left behind as each lecture becomes ever more challenging.
Due to Covid-19, the Malaysian higher education sector has had to adapt very quickly. The challenge now is ensuring that we do not simply revert to the old normal, but innovate so that when we reflect on this crisis in a few years’ time we are able to see that there was a necessity for change, and that that change can be witnessed through the innovations that are now in place.
The challenge now is ensuring that we do not simply revert to the old normal, but innovate so that when we reflect on this crisis in a few years’ time we are able to see that there was a necessity for change, and that that change can be witnessed through the innovations that are now in place.