“Distance education in the Meta era.”

Prof. Dr. Kyriakos Kouveliotis

Today more than ever we must consider education as a valuable global asset with the main role of supporting and promoting cultural diversity and individual freedom. COVID-19, among other things, has taught the world how important education and research really are. The tremendous progress made in these areas based on new discoveries, the use of technology, innovation and modern teaching philosophy has opened new avenues.

The way in which countries have worked together to address the pandemic threat, coordinate emergency plans and evaluate the effectiveness of their actions has shown a great level of global solidarity and alliance. It is obvious that the education sector was greatly affected (approximately 1.6 billion students from 192 countries, or 91% of the world’s student population, experienced interruptions in the educational process), but not only did they respond effectively but also came out stronger. We have embraced the challenges in the most productive way when we need it most. Within a few days, the educational community had to move traditional teaching online. In this sense, teachers had to improvise, innovate and adapt the way they run their classes. What was expected to happen in years or decades happened immediately.

The world has become a global education hub, an “international learning village”. This change was cataclysmic. It is expected that the future of education, will eventually eliminate the traditional classroom, the borders between countries and many of the traditional traits of acquiring knowledge. Technology can turn our whole lives into learning experiences. Scholars argued a hundred years ago that higher education was on the verge of a technological revolution. The spread of a powerful new communication network, the modern postal system, enabled institutions to distribute their courses beyond the boundaries of their campuses. Anyone with a mailbox could enroll in a class. Today this little historical reference seems incredibly distant.

In 2021, Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of a new 3D world in the ‘Metaverse’, as he called it, borrowing the Greek word meta. For all of us who have gone through many years in distance education it has been an expected development. The use of WEB 3.0 tools, modern and asynchronous distance learning models, avatars, “smart” books and multimedia have already been integrated into distance education.

Today, however, we have the opportunity to ensure that the integration of emerging technologies and Meta reality is further accelerated and that distance learning becomes an integral part of education. This in turn will lead to more holistic, comprehensive and creative pedagogical solutions.

Distance education not only kept the traditional educational structures active during the pandemic but also made the learning process more open and accessible than ever. Courses are now global, and the student community is composed of different nationalities and backgrounds. Education today has abolished international borders and become a global commodity. This commodity is accessible to all, 24 hours a day, regardless of geographical or other restrictions. In the near future, all the latest innovative technological developments and modern educational methodologies such as open learning, social media, learning through smart devices, blended learning, augmented reality and artificial intelligence will be fully utilized. Modern education is a commodity that brings a new stream of positive thinking about diversity and continuing learning. Alvin Toffler had said that “the illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who can not read and write, but those who can not learn, learn and re-learn.”

Today, educators must be able to:

• Recognize and achieve goals and aspirations in response to global challenges
• Enhance their knowledge with a global perspective
• Recognize that they belong to an international community
• Practice their skills and creativity beyond their close environment

In this context, what we need in modern education is a teaching model that achieves the following changes in learning dynamics. A shift from:

• Teacher-centred to student-centred learning
• The transmission of knowledge to the building of knowledge
• Passive and competitive learning to active and collaborative learning

We are now talking about the “knowledge economy” that needs to be developed to absorb the growing talent pool. All the big companies and organizations have been very active in the new educational environment that is being built. Microsoft has Altspace, Facebook has just released Horizon, and VictoryXR has created the world’s largest academic campus on the Engage platform.

We can now easily imagine the enormous potential that our students will have on a digital/virtual campus both for their labs and for their theoretical lectures. They will also be able to travel back in time and into the future. The digital/virtual campus will of course not be intended to replace the regular one but to complement it.

At a completely different level, one of the most important developments in education in addition to the application of new technological developments, is the translation of qualifications into practical skills and achievements. In this way, it is now easier to measure educational values, so that we can transfer knowledge more easily and more efficiently.

Some researchers have observed that we have moved away from the model in which learning is organized around fixed, usually hierarchical institutions (schools and universities), that have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing this model is a new system in which learning is better perceived as a flow, where learning resources are not limited but widely available, learning opportunities are plentiful and learners are increasingly able to delve autonomously in and out from continuous learning flows. Instead of worrying about how we should distribute the scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to address in the age of socially structured learning, is how to attract people to the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do so. This will in turn create more opportunities for a better life for more people.

The individual student becomes the centre of the educational process. The legacy of what global education has achieved during the pandemic has created an educational revolution. The new innovative and modern teaching methodologies that were adopted led to a better knowledge of the world around us and helped us to deal with things.

Global developments dictate more than ever the reorientation of existing educational structures and the creation of new ones to meet the new challenges faced by pupils and students. As education continues to shift from the national to the international environment, countries have strong incentives to develop the skills of their populations through new training initiatives. At the same time, the explosive growth of online education raises an important question: Will traditional teaching methods continue to attract students at the same rate as in the past, now that the world has seen the creation of a new international and multicultural audience? I think we all already know the answer!

Professor Dr Kyriakos Kouveliotis is Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Berlin School of Business and Innovation (BSBI)