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The health crisis caused by Covid-19 allowed the outlines of the “world after” to be drawn, which the press and professionals echoed: the formulation – although polemical – implies an idea of change that was largely accelerated by this historical period. In the world of higher education, schools, training organizations and universities have had to adapt to not only offer their courses online during lockdown but also reinvent tomorrow’s pedagogy for the very near future: the start of the school year in September 2020.
The famous digital transformation is now underway in higher education. And in the context of this transformation of teaching that is leading to the pedagogy of tomorrow, the words pairagogy, blended learning, peer learning, flipped classroom, synchronous online courses, etc., have flourished in the speeches of teacher-researchers, school directors and professional speakers. Let’s take a look at all these methods, not as new as they seem.
These formulations most often blur the vision of tomorrow’s pedagogy, including for the first people concerned by this transformation: the teachers. However, these teaching methods are not so new in the world of education: they have had to adapt to the boom of online education. For schools and universities used to face-to-face teaching, the challenge is to appropriate these methods and transpose them to their teaching, while taking into account the health reality imposing rules of physical distance to limit the spread of the epidemic.
INSEEC’s MSc & MBA programs have opted for a blended learning approach: a mix of face-to-face and distance learning, with courses delivered synchronously or asynchronously. We offer you an insight into these different teaching methods.
Peer learning, also known as pairarogy or collective learning
Peer learning, also known as collective or peer learning, is a learning technique that promotes collaboration and teamwork to acquire knowledge. In fact, it is the students who, from various elements given beforehand by their teacher, must answer a problem without his intervention.
The students have to work together, each one learning from the other to answer the problem posed by the teacher. In this context, the teacher intervenes to guide and advise the students without helping them to clearly answer the problem.
Course delivered synchronously
A synchronous course (whether face-to-face or distance learning) implies immediacy: the course takes place in real time for all students in a given time slot, regardless of how the module materializes (on site in the classroom or via videoconferencing on telecommunication tools).
Course delivered asynchronously
The asynchronous sequence course allows the student to take the course at their convenience during the week or according to the time allotted by the teacher in order to take note of the teaching resources that have been made available to them for that particular module. Educational activities can take many forms, such as forums, quizzes, video viewing, etc.
What is the flipped classroom?
The flipped classroom is a way of approaching pedagogy more than a teaching method: students receive courses in the form of online resources that they consult at home. They must become familiar with these different resources before the beginning of the class and/or the synchronous module: hence the idea of the “flipped classroom”.
This pedagogical modality frees up time during the synchronous sequence to organize activities, group projects and exchanges. There are many variations, but the main idea is that the teacher is no longer at the center of the students’ education but becomes a conduit for exchange and ideas between students, and learns from them.
Redesign of physical teaching spaces
These different teaching methods are also combined with a reappropriation of classroom space: in certain courses, face-to-face and distance learning can be done at the same time. A part of the students will be present in the classroom, while the other will follow the module remotely. This complementarity forces teaching professionals to rethink classrooms.
In the same way, during flipped classes or peer learning, this reflection on the reorganization of the space must be taken into account. The teacher is no longer in front of an audience but is part of the audience in its own right: how can we rethink the physical place of the speaker with these more prevalent teaching methods?
So many avenues of reflection and questions that higher education professionals must think about in order to reinvent the pedagogy of tomorrow. Next date: September 2020, to put all these modalities into practice in a blended learning context!”
Updated 24 February 2022