Going forward to normal

In the April of this year, I had suggested  that verbal examinations can replace traditional, paper-and-pencil, physical examinations in schools and universities, as is the norm for the award of a Ph.D. degree. That interview is here: 

( https://www.tes.com/news/exams-phd-viva-sugata-mitra-school-cloud-future-technology-world-ed-summit ) 

In August, the UK government declared the results of the GCSE and A-Level “examinations”. The scores were computed by groups of teachers and based on many past tests and interviews with students. The results showed large improvement in performance across the UK. Students celebrated and Universities drooled over the possibility of more and better admissions. There was an overall reduction in stress across learners, parents, teachers, schools and employers. So, what went right – and was it right? The government’s stern warning: This will not be the norm – soon we will go back to normal. The normal, in this case, consisting of stressed-out students, spewing out memorized material, not allowed to talk, listen, look at or type to anyone or anything. Like a deadly game of The Chase, in real life.  

What these recent results tell us about education are quite simple, and often obvious. I have a list and here are a few of the key ideas:  

Do not teach learners what they can learn by themselves – rather obvious is it not? It is just that the list of things learners can learn by themselves, using the internet, is getting to be uncomfortably large. 

Allow the use of the Internet during examinations – everybody googles all the time, but for some reason, we want to prevent others, particularly young learners, from doing so.  

You need to know when you need to know – you don’t, anymore, need to know things just in case you ever need them. It is no longer normal. Maybe it was normal in Robinson Crusoe’s time. 

On the internet, schools, teachers and learners can be anywhere – you don’t have to “belong” to a school.  

Conversation and interaction with teachers can provide accurate assessment of learning – as we saw from the recent results. 

During the pandemic lockdowns, schools closed everywhere. Teaching and learning moved into the virtual world of the internet. It was no longer fashionable to say, “I am not good with tech”. Instead, teachers who had resisted using the internet for years, and indeed the rest of us, all became experts at digital video conferencing, bandwidth, cameras, lighting, microphones and acoustics. But we all made a mistake. We thought we would create virtual classrooms using the internet. It did not work well, and we said, “It’s not like the real thing, we need to go back to normal”. We did not realise we were trying to make an automobile behave like a horse and cart. We do not need classrooms over the internet, we need different kinds of learning environments. Some self-organised by learners, some guided by teachers. 

 As the Corona Virus pandemic reaches a plateau in most countries, it is increasingly evident that the virus and the related disease is not ‘going away’. It will remain for a long time, although relatively benign. Perhaps the virus will become just a nuisance like the common cold, or a slayer of old people like influenza or even a vicious but rare killer like rabies. As restrictions are lifted, it is common to hear of “going back to normal” or “as life returns to normal”. Expressions of hope and positivity – that are unfortunately naïve.   

 

We cannot move backwards in time; we can never go “back” to anything. Even if we could - to what “normal” shall we return? Is 2018 the “normal” we want to go back to, or is it 1918, or perhaps even 1818? The past is always glorious to the human mind, possibly because our brains keep good memories and bury the bad ones. “Normal” is the way we used to do things in the past – not the recent past because the bad memories are still not submerged enough, and not too far in the past because before an (unspecified) period of time, we were “primitive”. There is a gloriously rosy spot somewhere in between, when everything was Nice, and Proper, and Normal. The trouble is that this magical period is different for different people. It was the “Roaring Twenties” for the West in general and Britain in particular. It was the 8th century in the Middle East, and the 5th century BC in Persia, China and India.   

What do we do then, if there is no normal, we can all agree upon and no time we can go back to? Fortunately, there are some things we can do quite easily. We can go forward in time, whether we want to or not, as a matter of fact. And “normal” is what most people like to do, at least that is how it should be. Until recently, we had primitive methods for figuring out what most people like. An easily manipulated voting system, or a monarch who knew “the pulse of the people” or even a supernatural entity who would whisper, in some suitable language, into the ears of an unsuspecting bloke. We had to live with these methods for defining what normal was, since the beginning of civilization. 

“As of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - 59.5 percent of the global population. Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices.” – the internet told me in less than a second on 13th August 2021.  

(https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/). 

However, mobile devices are not allowed during examinations. It is not normal. It is no longer normal to desire a non-human entity that stares out of a screen and says, “ask anything”. But it is here. 

Osiris found this article interesting and I did a webinar recently. You can view it here: 

(https://osiriseducational.co.uk/webinars/learner-assessment-webinar/).

A new world is creating itself, partly real and partly virtual. Not just schools, but workspaces, jobs, banks, hospitals, supermarkets, cinema theatres, and too many things to list, are all heading into a hybrid reality.  

If we wanted to, we have the means to find out what most people like or know or believe in – in seconds. 

If we wanted to, we could go forward to normal.