As online learning continues to evolve, educators now have a range of tools and modalities they can use to engage learners. Discussing this in a fireside chat at the 2024 THE Digital Universities Arab World event were Fergus Rea, general manager and senior project and scholarship programme director for Kaplan Saudi Arabia, and Hoda Mostafa, director of the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo.
The panellists suggested that, to provide effective online learning programmes, all stakeholders’ perspectives must be considered and that course designers must always create programmes with desired learning outcomes in mind.
“The secret is to always have it as an active learning process. Historically, a lot of online learning was passive such as reading or looking at materials,” said Rea. The range of tools available today for online and blended learning – from virtual reality to gamification – means teaching staff can curate programmes on a more personal level and adapt them to different learning styles and paces. Adaptive learning, powered by an algorithm, will adjust its speed based on how quickly a user responds to questions. The data produced by these tools and algorithms is highly valuable in building future learning mechanisms and offering insights into what works for each learner, he said.
Mostafa shared how the American University in Cairo had the “unique positioning and privilege” of being able to start from scratch in digital education. Although the university had been offering web-enhanced teaching for almost a decade, it set up a digital education unit in the Center for Learning and Teaching in 2018. “We could identify what our aspirations were as an institution and were given the right to experiment, to take risks, fail and self-correct,” she said. “This has allowed us to define what we mean by excellence in online teaching.”
Mostafa argued that a false dichotomy has emerged between online learning and face-to-face learning when, for many programmes, a multimodal experience works best. At the American University in Cairo, all students must take one fully online self-paced course as part of their academic requirements before they graduate. She believes that preparing students to learn online is as important as building knowledge face-to-face in classrooms. This also goes for teaching staff, and the university is focused on building capacity in instructional design so the digital modules and tools it offers complement its in-person offering.
“Every human being needs to learn how to [learn online] and it may not come intuitively to everyone,” Mostafa said. “We have to introduce learners to ways they can do this more effectively and curate their own learning journeys.” The university is also looking at how it can build custom AI tools on top of existing courses and platforms so students can take their learning further. For example, this could be a custom chatbot built to complement a language course that helps learners practise pronunciation. Doing this within the university learning environment rather than leaving students to seek support from ChatGPT provides an added layer of security, she explained.
The key is to recognise that this field will continue to evolve and that learners will increasingly demand greater personalisation, inclusion and accessibility. “The learning outcomes will never change but the mode of delivery will,” concluded Rea. “Whether it’s purely online, hybrid or face-to-face, everyone has to benefit and no single way of learning suits all people.”
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