The world evolves at breakneck speed, changing and adapting to today’s needs. The education sector is not alien to these changes, professionals are the ones who have the most contact with this reality.
Before, you would finish university and plan to do your master’s degree after three or five years. Today, this has already changed, those who have just graduated do not wait more than one to two years to start the master’s degree. The world of work also requires a master’s degree from professionals to further advance their professional career. However, education does not end there. If one does not continue preparing and evolving, one is left with knowledge and experiences that will no longer serve as much. That is why a series of courses and short programs have now been implemented in all fields of updating, from Law to Architecture and also Music and Technology, there is for everyone. Most of them are dictated online. Our pace of life does not allow wasting time in traffic, for example, to go to study. The distances in a city like ours are getting longer and more complicated.
In our country, distance education has not been seen much, and if there is, it is not as widely used as it should be, basically, due to the resistance that there has been to online education. I consider that it may have been because it is limited in the University Law itself. Also because there are different types of qualities and ways of giving oneself; which has led to a paradigm that online is of lower quality than in person.
What are the necessary conditions to provide quality online education?
In my point of view: if I have the appropriate technology, the teaching domain of these technologies, if the course has been designed to be delivered remotely and therefore has the software and materials to do it completely online. There are many practical online courses that are wonderful, and, in my case, a large part of my doctorate was done remotely, with a high level of demand, a wide variety of jobs and cases.
As in everything, when you are going to make a decision you must evaluate well. When you go to buy a car, you see if you like the model, but it is not all that you find out, you have to look at the gasoline consumption, maintenance costs, availability of spare parts, etc. In distance education, one must analyze the curriculum, the teachers, whether it is taught synchronously or asynchronously, what type of materials are available, what virtual classroom does it have, etc.
It is totally different to have a Learning Management System (LMS), such as Blackboard, than simply doing the class with a video conference system. In the LMS one can have all the information of the course there, they can submit their work and receive their notes, it can remain as evidence, they can count on the sylabus of the course, the videos and materials used, etc. In one place you have everything you need, even the possibility of interacting with the rest of the students and the teacher.
So whether it is asynchronous or synchronous is also different. For example, many of the short courses that exist today on different local or international platforms are asynchronous courses. That is, you can view the course content at any time of the day as if you were watching a movie on Netflix. Be careful, this is not bad, but, if we compare it with traditional education, it is as if they gave you the book and you only read and learn it. The teacher is not live, and you do not find other students with whom to interact and learn from what they say or the teacher corrects. What you do not understand, you will not be able to solve at the moment with the teacher. In those that are synchronous, the teacher is present in real time, and the material they assign you is for the basic use that is later discussed and learned. In fact, the costs are different. In one it is the cost of development and in the second it is the cost of development plus that of the teacher. At the beginning, many of the online courses were developed asynchronous and therefore their costs were lower than the synchronous ones.
In the case of teachers, I find that online education also gives you a great advantage, which is being able to have international teachers, which gives you a wider range of possibilities to learn. This for a country like ours that has not been considered in previous years as a creator of great content or knowledge, it is very good to learn about new trends at the same time.
We have a great challenge as a country, as I have already mentioned in previous articles, however, added to the points that I have developed, it is necessary that we can ensure the necessary conditions for online education to be sustainable, starting with a University Law adapted to the real needs of our situation, with good connectivity that favors inclusion, with teacher training in digital tools, and investment in the institutional implementation of online learning platforms.
Finally, I want to take this opportunity to invite you to participate in these webinars that we have prepared to share with you the most relevant topics on the current situation. A space to converse, learn, share and exchange ideas with the most outstanding specialists of our UPC Graduate School. We wait for you.
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