As we are all experiencing, the global community has waded into uncharted territory these past few weeks, struggling with the new normal of working, staying, and doing just about everything from home. And every sector of society is feeling the effects in ways small and large. Education is no exception.
Learning hasn’t stopped, it’s just different
When Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered schools closed across England, it kicked off a mad scramble to figure out how to educate tens of millions of British children now stuck at home. And in the US, school closures have impacted at least 124,000 U.S. public and private schools and affected at least 55.1 million students, according to Education Week. It’s a monumental task, to say the least.
The restrictions of social distancing and lock downs may very well result in the largest shift in learning we have ever seen, where bedroom desks and kitchen counters stand-in for schools and classrooms. And due to the breakneck speed with which we’ve had to transition, it’s no surprise that educators, students, and parents have been caught off guard. I don’t doubt that working out the kinks will prove to be a long journey.
Language learning serves as a model
One area I take a particular interest in is language. It’s a subject I have been interested in ever since I taught myself French with a homemade language learning prototype I created. Back then I realized how hard it was to learn a language in the classroom, and I see now the challenges that lay ahead for students trying to learn one at home.
For instance, while lectures can be streamed using video-conferencing tools, we know that the interactive nature of foreign language instruction makes it particularly complicated to recreate. One doesn’t just learn a language from a book or from being isolated, but from experiencing it.
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We’re all worried right now, but there is reason to stay upbeat amongst everything happening, especially for educators and learners globally. Edtech startups and established players are seizing this moment to tell their stories and how they are pitching in to help people as they adapt to a new way of learning.
Practical applications
Digital language learning tools and applications have a real opportunity to serve as a model for how we move forward in education right now, bringing a more interactive and customized approach through innovations. For instance, with machine learning, language courses can be tailored to individual learners, so that they don’t become bored while at home with their education journey.
And for teachers using language learning apps, such as Lingvist, they can keep track of different groups of students no matter where they are located. They can track students’ statistics, and see how many words they have studied and their active learning time. It’s easy to see how these remote applications might serve in future instances when students would not be able to attend a physical class.
Once educators get on board and students get acclimated, the upside to digital language tools and apps is infinite, and the lessons learned now will carry over. It’s very hard to see it now, but when the storm of this pandemic is over, the way we learn will be revolutionized by this collective experience.
Could this tumultuous time in our global history also prove to be a true milestone moment for learning? I believe the answer is yes.
About Mait Müntel
Mait Müntel is a nuclear physicist and an entrepreneur. He received his Ph.D in Theoretical Physics in 2008 from the University of Tartu in Estonia. During his studies he worked as a teacher, teaching physics to secondary school students. In 2009 he was awarded the Republic of Estonia’s Young Scientist Award by the President of Estonia. Mait worked at CERN within the CMS experiments division for 9 years and was part of the Higgs boson discovery team at CERN, Switzerland, in 2012.
After the particle’s discovery in 2012, Mait got the idea to use the same algorithms from particle physics to help people learn new languages 10 times faster. He co-founded Lingvist, which has since grown from a great idea into an amazing team of over 30 people, including both the technical co-founder and core technology team leader of Skype.
