April 24, 2020

Source: Wenhui Daily

With the development of technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data, as well as the gradual completeness of new infrastructure, the bottlenecks currently encountered in online teaching will be overcome.

5G network coverage will make the transmission of sound, images, and teaching materials smoother and more stable. The wide application of large-scale full HD projection, virtual reality and other technologies makes online teaching scenes more vivid, more multilevel, and easier to be “immersed” in. Developed big data analysis techniques will promote multi-dimensional and in-depth utilization of teaching resources. Data resources used to assist teaching will be more abundant, with various databases, case set, and toolbox, improving teaching efficiency rapidly.

When all of this becomes a reality, what will happen to the basic form of university education in the future?

The sudden outbreak of the pandemic is silently changing many things we are familiar with. The pace of the originally slow-moving online teaching is therefore accelerated involuntarily. Despite the pace being inevitably staggered, we are able to unveil the future education.

For many teachers and students, online teaching has many unfamiliar features. The first is path dependence. Due to university’s long-term practice of classroom teaching, the scenes and patterns have been solidified. Secondly, many shortcomings in the infrastructure that support online teaching still persist. Present online teaching equipment mainly consists of “computer+ network + camera + microphone”. In a sense, equipment will restrict our imagination of how online teaching will develop in the future.

The Internet is the most important infrastructure for online teaching. Although our country’s network infrastructure has developed rapidly in recent years, there is still a huge room of improvement in the face of the demand for large-scale and high-quality online teaching. Another more prominent problem is the lack of sense of “presence”. Compared with classroom teaching, teachers and students generally mention that they have little sense of presence in online teaching. It is more difficult for teachers to identify and judge the students’ status from the “small window” of the computer or mobile phone screen, so as to make timely adjustments to the teaching content and methods. Coupled with the lack of communication of facial expression and eyes and body language, online teaching is difficult to encourage teachers’ enthusiasm for teaching and mobilize students’ enthusiasm for participating in interaction.

However, with the development of technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data, as well as the gradual completeness of new infrastructure, the bottlenecks encountered currently in online teaching will be solved.

5G network coverage will make the transmission of sound, images, and teaching materials smoother and more stable. The wide application of large-scale full HD projection, virtual reality and other technologies makes online teaching scenes more vivid, more multilevel, and easier to be “immersed” in. Developed big data analysis techniques will promote multi-dimensional and in-depth utilization of teaching resources. Data resources used to assist teaching will be more abundant, with various databases, case set, and toolbox, improving teaching efficiency rapidly.

When all this becomes a reality, what will happen to the basic form of university education in the future?

When learning is always under the supervision of equipment,

Will students learn much more voluntarily?

The reason is simple: the rapid development and in-depth application of teaching-related technologies will reshape the supply-side structure of knowledge learning and ability acquisition, breaking the established pattern with teachers as the core, classrooms as the scene, and the teaching materials as the medium. The channels, scenarios, and methods for acquiring knowledge and skills will become more diverse and efficient.

When a large number of high-quality online courses can be easily accessed at low prices or even for free, students will have more choices. More teaching resources are provided in a faster way and presented with a more friendly interface, which will create more possibilities for students to learn independently. The in-depth application of “smart supervision” and “smart tutoring” systems based on big data and artificial intelligence will also further enhance the voluntary learning of students.

Although educators have been emphasizing the mandate of “teaching according to students’ aptitude” for thousands of years since Confucius, in the traditional classroom teaching model, it is still impossible to perfectly follow up with the learning experience and progress of each student just by the teachers and teaching assistants’ efforts.

However, under the technical support of “5G+Big Data + Artificial Intelligence”, the smart supervision system can observe and analyze students’ behavior patterns on the client side in real time, capturing the interactive time of courses and homework, input operation frequency of keyboard and mouse, and facial expressions and eye focus caught by the camera, to determine students’ learning status and provide assistance.

The smart tutoring system can first classify the students’ data collected through their detailed performance in the classroom exercises and homework, then match it with the existing big data, in order to determine the difficulty in understanding and provide targeted materials to solve it. This refined and customized learning experience can take maximum care of each student’s knowledge base and learning habits to truly achieve “differentiated teaching”, and enhance students’ confidence and ability to learn independently.

When there is no information asymmetry between students and teachers,

Will the teacher remain a teacher?

When students can acquire all kinds of explicit knowledge in a more efficient way, the role of teachers to “pass on principles, skills and solutions” must be adjusted accordingly.

For a long time, teachers, as an occupation, existed based on various “asymmetry” of various “information”. The “information” referred to here is multiple and multi-leveled, including knowledge, skills, experience, and thinking. The “asymmetry” involves teachers’ one-way dominance and full control of the teaching process, and the students’ limited choice of course content, teachers and teaching methods.

In the past 20 years of development, general knowledge and skills have been available for free through ordinary search engines and portals. Higher-level knowledge learning and more complex skills transfer have also formed a relatively mature model for commercial supply.

From this perspective, teachers must accelerate their self-improvement in order to gain a foothold in society. They have to provide a broad-perspective, deep-level, and systematic knowledge and skill supply to guide the students to improve logical and independent thinking, so that they can quickly construct an analytical framework to continuously form regular cognition.

In traditional classrooms, teachers are the providers of knowledge systems. In the near future, since all kinds of knowledge information can be obtained on the Internet, the role of the teacher will be transferred to “the mentor of the knowledge system”. On the one hand, based on their own understanding of the curriculum and students, teachers select suitable knowledge resources on the Internet, and send them to students.

On the other hand, they focus on cultivating students’ ability to retrieve knowledge and analyze problems, so that students can think, construct analytical frameworks, and search for suitable knowledge resources independently for different learning objectives In addition, teachers can also play a unique role in suggesting, enlightening, and nourishing the mind to help students’ mental growth, based on their own virtue, experience, and perception.

When the logic of teaching and learning is reset,

Will university still be the one we are familiar with?

The function and layout of the university will be redefined. The organizational structure and functional design that we are familiar with are mainly based on the traditional “teaching” and “learning” logic. When the supply and demand sides of knowledge have undergone profound changes, teachers, classrooms, and teaching materials may no longer be the main channels for students to acquire knowledge and skills. The existing “production relations” must be adjusted.

The “production relationship” here includes the university’s educational philosophy, organizational structure, operating mechanism, and assurance system. Until today, through the operation of the teaching organization system and teaching quality assurance system, the university has attached various “labels” to “products” by issuing academic certificates and awarding degrees. These “labels” have naturally become an important reference for recruiters.

However, we cannot rule out one possible future scenario: if a more attractive, efficient and flexible knowledge transfer institution or method appears in society, students can obtain the expertise, skills, and even experience required by a work for a specific field in a shorter time. When a certification body or method for knowledge and skill that are even more impartial, efficient, and flexible appears, and its certification results are more accepted by employers and widely recognized by the society. Then, where should the university go?

In the theory of scientific and technological innovation, an important social role of the university is the ” pond of public knowledge “, whose goal is to produce and provide knowledge to the whole society, so as to support the innovation and development of enterprises and institutions. Under this new production relationship, with the socialization of students’ “production”, the status of the university as a “producer of public knowledge” may be further strengthened. The university produces knowledge for the society, and social education institutions use this knowledge to train students. Of course, the university itself will directly train students, but the training orientation may gradually be adjusted to “knowledge creation”, and students obtaining employment by their skills will gradually decrease in proportion and be transferred to social education institutions with better efficiency.

In addition, the extensive application of online teaching will promote the development of online scientific research, which will lead to changes in knowledge production methods. The boundaries of disciplines will become increasingly blurred, with more obvious characteristics of integration. The cooperation of scientific research crossing disciplinary, domain, region, and organization will be further deepened. In this process, the knowledge and skills of teachers and students will be rapidly improved in a larger scale, at a higher level, and in more integrated patterns.

The changes may be even greater in the spatial layout and architectural form of the university. A rapid decrease will occur in large-scale centralized student dormitories and supporting facilities. The scale and layout of classrooms and laboratories will be redefined, with wider application of a large number of intelligent teaching equipment and methods. Various remote-control robot devices will be introduced in professional laboratories to enable the collaboration among students and teachers of different regions and majors. Through remote operation, they can complete the experiment in the same building, and integrate the online and offline teaching as the norm in classroom teaching.

Perhaps this will be the future of university education.

Perhaps the future has already come.