“There are pros and cons to online education as well as education in person,” Bredenoord tells us. “A combination of the two in a more hybrid form is, in my opinion, the future of academic education.”
Offline, online or hybrid? The future of education is uncertain thanks to the corona crisis. Will everything be different or will it go back to how it was before? In this week’s topic EM will be looking at what corona education has meant to students and lecturers, how it can be improved, and what we need to consign to the past as soon as possible.
“I think we need to look at each study programme and even each subject to see how we can improve the quality of education,” Bredenoord proposes. “The standards of education and standards of knowledge transfer are key to in this. Educational innovation is always on going; that is what the Community for Learning & Innovation is for. As far as I am concerned, student welfare is something we should never lose sight of in the process. Meeting one another and coming into contact is crucial. I believe that academic education via a monitor is not the only way to teach.”
The university’s education counsellors are drawing similar conclusions. It is hard to get interactions online, and they believe that interaction is necessary for working groups and tutorials. That said, offline education is not always necessary. Big lectures in large halls are not always the best way to teach students, reckons education dean Michel Landers of the Rotterdam School of Management, among others. After all, students are perfectly capable of listening passively in their own homes.
