This week families across Missouri are stuck in their homes, waiting for the month-long stay at home order to pass, waiting to find out if schools will go back into session, waiting to see what a return to normalcy may look like.
But on the other side of the world, China has reached the other side of the curve and they are starting to create a new normal in an A.D. (After Disease) world.
Joy Chen, U.S. Chief Investment Officer for the TAL Education Group, recently shared some insight into how China is reimagining its education system post-coronavirus as part of a GSV Ventures virtual panel discussion on the future of education.
Chen’s insights highlight how much the coronavirus may transform education norms across the world, and stand as a stark warning that the United States needs to pay attention to how other countries are creating new, improved education systems for the 21st-century.
“We now have received more and more support from the government side to help us to provide high-quality online education,” she said. “The whole society is kind of like getting well educated or better educated about how online education can be and how online education can help them to learn more.
Chen said that while certain subjects like science labs and the arts are still better taught in in-person classrooms, there is a growing movement to create what she called an OMO (online merged with offline) learning system in the country.
“I think the China education industry will undergo a faster transition to OMO,” she said, “where online learning is complementing offline learning to overcome the limitation on time and space. We also have seen tech giants like 10 Cents and Alibaba starting to add teaching and learning features to their existing collaboration tools. Also, we have seen social media platforms in China become one of the players in the education area.
“I think moving forward in China in the online education area will see more support from government and also interesting to see how those tech giants and the social media companies will move into this education field,” Chen added.
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, said his company had also seen dramatic growth in interest in online learning from governments across the world.
“In previous years we saw governments focus on upskilling their civil servants, working on workforce development from you know, basically job-relevant skills to get people jobs,” he said. “What we’ve seen in the last 60 days is governments are now coming to us saying ‘I need you to help my schools.’ We’ve not seen in the past governments being so engaged in trying to provide services to help their schools, we’re seeing governments take that kind of a role, you know, much more dramatically than we did even 30 days ago.”
It seems clear that the global pandemic is forcing more countries and governments to consider the benefits of online learning and figure out ways to use those benefits as they develop 21st-century education systems.
Let’s hope that we can follow a similar path in America and that we do not let a rush to get back to normal blind us to the opportunities we have to transform how our kids learn.
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