"Students must constantly learn and grow"

 

The CIDUI 2021 Congress, organized by the eight Catalan public universities and the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP), is taking place between 29 June and 2 July. Dozens of experts will meet to analyse and consider the challenges facing education in the digital society. Among them will be Anna Pons, an analyst and project manager at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, who will be discussing whether we need to think in terms of a new pedagogy. She believes that today, "students must be able not only to constantly adapt, but also to constantly learn and grow".

 

The CIDUI 2021 Congress, organized by the eight Catalan public universities and the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP), is taking place between 29 June and 2 July. Dozens of experts will meet to analyse and consider the challenges facing education in the digital society. Among them will be Anna Pons, an analyst and project manager at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, who will be discussing whether we need to think in terms of a new pedagogy. She believes that today, "students must be able not only to constantly adapt, but also to constantly learn and grow".

We're still teaching for the world of yesterday. A generation ago, teachers could expect what they taught to last a lifetime. Today, you can find content on Google, routine skills are being automated, and the demands of the labour market are changing quickly. Education systems need to place a much greater emphasis on training for lifelong learning, to manage complex ways of thinking and complex ways of working that computers cannot handle easily. Students must be able not only to constantly adapt, but also to constantly learn and grow, to position and reposition themselves in a rapidly changing world.

 

Yes, the new generations and non-traditional profiles require learning which is much more active and flexible, and more closely related to their real situations and interests. Teachers are asked to personalize learning experiences to ensure that all students have the opportunity to succeed, to take into account the increasing cultural diversity in their classrooms and differences in learning styles, and to enable students to learn in the way that is most conducive to their progress.

The coronavirus has been a big shock. It's highlighted the limits of the lecture format and forced teachers to rethink their teaching practices. If we want to take advantage of the immense individual and collective potential that these changes are facilitating, we have to rethink the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values we need for the future. Although it'll always come as a surprise, the best vaccine against the complexity and uncertainty of today's world is training to be autonomous in learning, namely learning and relearning. Among other things, this involves making the interests of students the focal point; fostering a more active pedagogy in the classroom, in high-quality interactions in smaller spaces; giving students a sense of empowerment over their own learning and their choice of training pathway, and striking a balance between learning and assessment by means of continuous monitoring and support. Obviously, this also involves changes in the traditional model, in which academics are expected to know how to do everything, in contrast to various specialized roles.

The process of mass university education has focused an increasing amount of attention on the quality of teaching, based on indicators of progress and completion, and student learning. While the myth still persists that being an expert in a discipline is enough in itself to become a good teacher, an increasing number of countries and universities are requiring or encouraging teachers to have some pedagogical training, and the support units for teaching quality have been reinforced. Research still has the biggest influence on career decisions, but in some countries the importance of teaching in the evaluation of teachers has increased, and incentives such as awards and new professional profiles for teaching have been created. At the institutional level, some countries such as Ireland and the Netherlands have introduced specific funding for teaching excellence, for institutional projects and teaching initiatives, or to reduce departure levels.

As for teaching innovation involving new technologies, we're going through a period of experimentation in terms of public policies. A cooperative partnership between the ministry and higher education and research institutions has been launched in the Netherlands in order to coordinate digitalization policies to create a single student number for all institutions in the country. This is combined with a microcredit system, making materials and resources available under free access conditions, and encouraging the use of learning analytics for monitoring learning. In New Zealand, they've made considerable progress on recognizing and promoting alternative credentials by defining formal quality criteria and developing a public funding system for those credentials.

Educational success would mean everyone reaching their full potential, and we shouldn't be thinking about academic talent alone. Failure is talent that's been lost, those people for whom the current format of lectures doesn't work, who end up dropping out or taking a long time to obtain their degree, and obviously all those who can't even consider higher education because they've left the system without a secondary school certificate. Despite the progress made in recent years, we mustn't forget that Spain is still one of the countries with the highest rates of school failure in the OECD.

There are no magic solutions, and each country has to find its own way. However, I would say that a systemic alignment or consistency in policies is needed. For example, digital technologies have enormous potential to improve quality, equity and efficiency in higher education. If they're adopted properly, they can extend access to non-traditional students, reduce teaching costs, and expand individualized and adaptive teaching. However, in order to take full advantage of the potential of digitalization and avoid the risks it involves, the policy framework needs to be thoroughly reconsidered, including how institutions are financed and students are supported; how teachers are trained and supported; how quality is guaranteed, and how learning is recognized.

The unstable situation and the dual role of teaching staff is one of the major issues that needs to be resolved, since it could end up leading to a brain drain in the current economic situation. Funding constraints and variability are important driving forces behind the instability, but so is the current culture of research, in terms of evaluation processes, power relations between senior and junior and even individual academics, and institutional incentives. We need to rethink our human resources policy if we want an academic career to appeal to young people, and thereby boost the quality of our research and teaching.