By Sanjiv Goyal Featuring Umang Jain

In this article, you will learn about:

• Where education is headed in a post-pandemic world.
• The importance of experiential learning.
• How to keep growing and adapting in 2020.
• Why tech isn’t the answer to our problems.
• Why higher degrees may lose their weight.
• Why global issues aren’t stalled from a lack of resources.
• The secret to IIT Alumni success.

Reviewing Our Education System

“Some of the best years of my life were at IIT.” This is a sentiment I hear echoed by all of the graduates I have been interviewing for the IIT 2020 Impact Video Series. Our recent guest, Umang Jain, CTO of Zovio, was no exception.

With the advent of COVID 19, lockdowns and educational institutions are scrambling to adapt. How will education look in a post-pandemic world? The way we want it to look. This is a time for co-creation, reimagining familiar spaces, and adapting to curveballs.

Does Our Education System Need An Upgrade?

Education has followed a similar model for roughly the past 250 years. We pack students into schools and teach them all the same thing usually by rote. One teacher per class from morning till afternoon. This is the educational status quo. These are the foundations that are getting shaken by COVID.

Thanks to technological advances, much has changed in the past fifty years. Our focus has been on rapid, sprawling growth, but has anyone stopped to ask if our educational infrastructure is serving us in the Internet age? At a time when people are increasingly turning to Google and Youtube to learn, how effective is our current education system?

COVID Silver Linings: A Time To Reflect

There are many pandemic silver linings we can be grateful for. Perhaps the most important is being given the chance to question whether the way we are and have been living is actually working for us as individuals and as a society. We have been given the opportunity to take pause and to reflect, to step out of the rapacious activity of the machine, and observe it for a moment.

We are being forced to take inventory. We are under a systemic review. Time to release some old things to make room for progress. Is it serving us to jam twenty or fifty or a hundred people in a room and teach them all the same thing? Is that the best way to educate our youth?

The future promises personalization, customization, and bespoke experiences across industries. We have already seen how data collection has affected the private sector from the healthcare industry to Airbnb. But what about education?

Learning From Each Other

More important than knowing when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, is the information that people are sharing about their experiences. We are increasingly teaching each other how to replicate results through online platforms, like Youtube, mostly on a one on one basis.

We are past the point in our evolution where memorization of vast amounts of facts and figures is necessary for survival. The youth of today have grown up with a smartphone in hand since their hands could hold one. They have social media and a myriad of online course platforms to choose from.

We have to change the landscape of education to match the level of information and resources that are available to students. We have to meet people where they are. It’s time to rethink our education system.

Umang Jain is inspired by his children; anticipating their educational needs helps him to push the envelope at Zovio. The mission at Zovio may be slightly different from the mission of an elementary school, but the mechanism is the same: giving students a new level of understanding.

In order to get to that new level, Jain believes you have to understand where people are in their knowledge and their process. This requires observation and adaptation that doesn’t suit the cookie-cutter model most educational institutions are using today.

Implications of an Education System that Champions Critical Thinking

With the challenges facing our society today, developing critical thinking skills in our young minds is essential. Aside from pandemics and raging fires, we have basic human challenges that still aren’t resolved like world hunger and curing cancer.

It’s not a lack of resources that is preventing us from finding the solutions. The issue lies in our framing. How we interpret and think about these problems is preventing us from making the progress we desire.

Take world hunger for example. There isn’t a food shortage. Stores everywhere are stocked; agriculture is booming we have mastered farming techniques and created sophisticated equipment. There is a surplus, and yet people are starving.

What limits us is our thinking. How do we as a human society agree upon the basic standard of living and treating others and taking care of them? It’s our attachment to false beliefs about separation and differentiation that prevents us from uniting and working together toward humanitarian goals.

Thankfully we are being forced to think globally. In the face of tragedy and loss, we are confronted with our mortality and our dependence on those around us. This is another way that COVID is disillusioning us for the better. Death is the great equalizer.

COVID 19: A Call to Innovate

Necessity is the mother of invention. COVID is fast-tracking innovation. The brain thinks differently when exposed to new experiences. Thankfully for our cognitive function, our world has been turned upside down. Our intellects have been pressed to think in novel and challenging ways.

We shouldn’t wait for chaos to strike to push the envelope. In designing our future educational infrastructure, we should be asking how we can expose students to different experiences to start driving the innovation that will be needed to solve real-world problems. Making this is the new goal of education is paramount to the survival and success of humanity.

Predictions for The Future of Education

I asked Jain where he thinks the future of our education system is headed. Here are his predictions:

• Education will be available to people from all walks of life and ages at will.
• It won’t cost an arm and a leg to get educated or get a higher degree.
• Degrees won’t carry the weight they do now and the application of knowledge will be more valuable than being able to recall of information.
• Soft and communication skills will be part of the core curriculum.
• There will be personalization for students of the same age who may be at different levels.

The Importance of Collaborative Learning

Collaborative experiential learning, as we experienced at IIT, is the foundation for critical thinking and problem-solving skills. It shouldn’t be confined to engineering degrees. It’s part of the model that is showing great results. If our education systems go fully or even partially online, how will we recreate this environment?

As important as class time, it’s the downtime with peers, the casual conversations, the walks across the quad for tea that give us our biggest aha moments. How will this be reproduced in an online space? We have the technology, but right now it’s solely being used to facilitate study time.

The Future of Collaboration

Another silver lining of covid is that it’s fundamentally changing how we collaborate, how we think about collaboration, and how we share information and space. Take the Pan IIT Global Summit, for example. We are taking it online this year making it convenient for anyone to attend safely right from their homes.

Zoom and other platforms have made it easier than ever for people to attend events and for administrators to have a global presence.

When you remove physical five-sensory barriers, you can dream bigger and do more. We are moving out of the paradigm of the physical, of the commuter, of the office and into a more creative and co-creative space that maximizes efficiency and minimizes our carbon footprint.

These changes aren’t temporary. There are some things COVID has set in motion for good. The pandemic has redefined how we work, how we learn, and how we seek medical help. It has posed the important question of whether we physically need to be somewhere to have a successful human interaction.

People are finding innovative ways to collaborate. The removal of physical barriers is allowing for different viewpoints to be heard and more diverse groups to share space. We are beginning to think globally instead of nationally. As we learn from each other in real-time from across the world we realize we are all the same.

Share Your Story

Sharing will be one of the biggest ways education will change going forward. Classes may become larger, more diverse, more inclusive. School won’t be limited to the kids from the neighborhood and work won’t be limited to the people from your office. People from all over will be able to learn and work together.

Varied perspectives enable us to solve complex problems. If we come together and share we will be able to create a new and improved blueprint for the future, one that represents our diversity. If we can overcome the idea that we are tied to one spot on the map, and belong to one nation, then we can create solutions for everyone. Tech and social media are allowing us to do that more than ever.

The COVID Fasttrack

Because of the pandemic, we are being pressured to accept the concepts that once threatened us. We are being forced to expand our mindsets along with our comfort zones, for the better. COVID is breaking down barriers that have been a source of frustration.

The best example of this is healthcare regulations. The tech necessary for telemedicine existed, but the red tape was preventing it from taking off. In record time, we have seen these regulations lifted and now we can utilize this resource. After years of little to no growth, telemedicine is finally off to a good start.

In terms of education, we are learning to think of classrooms in a different way. Precisely because necessity is the mother of invention, it makes change much easier for us when we have no other choice but to adapt or perish.

Step Up To The Challenge

A theme emerging from the Impact Video Series interviews is that IITians and other successful people thrive on challenges. We can learn the following lesson from Jain and from COVID: challenge yourself to learn and grow in times of calm and times of upheaval.

Stay curious and discipline yourself against complacency. There are no shortcuts to success. It’s a lot of hard work and taking risks and being open to adaptation that moves us forward.

Think of how you want to change the world. There are opportunities everywhere from education to healthcare to world hunger. Now more than ever we must apply ourselves and take action. The future is in our hands. The choices we make today, create tomorrow.

Conclusion

Covid is providing a global challenge, inviting us to unite. From necessity springs innovation. Some institutions are thriving and some must learn to adapt. Forced to shift, the education system will never be the same. Ideally, as with other industries, COVID will fast-track stalled developments. The greatest silver lining of the pandemic is the opportunity it has afforded us to reflect on the utility of our infrastructure and make the necessary changes. The future of education will be what we make it.