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What Educational Institutions Need to Do Now to Continue Innovating After the COVID-19 Crisis

It’s all hands on deck in education: schools are closed, teachers are sick, and yet classes must go on. A lot is being asked of teachers, support staff, and administrators right now to get the situation under control. It’s all very frustrating, but it also presents some great opportunities—opportunities to really accelerate educational innovation. What can you do now to keep innovating after the COVID-19 crisis?

The Struggle to Innovate

Every year, Turner supports ROCs, colleges, and universities in implementing their strategies. Increasingly, this involves education innovation—such as personalized learning paths with tailored guidance, greater flexibility and digitization, modern pedagogy and tools, adaptive learning, and so on. In practice, however, most educational institutions appear to have great difficulty in truly achieving the necessary impact in these areas. We described this, for example, in the research report “Colleges: Where Is the Real Innovation?” And now, suddenly, that’s changing—at lightning speed.

To Learn at Lightning Speed for Learning​

We are therefore seeing a tremendous sense of solidarity among all educational institutions as they work to overcome this crisis. In a short period of time, tremendous strides are being made to ensure that education can continue, with maximum use of digital tools. And yes, some teachers are more adept at this than others. And no, it’s not perfect right away, and things do go wrong. But everyone is making progress, and the learning curve is steep. Just take a look at the great examples on communities.surf.nl and lesopafstand.nl.

“How can you continue to innovate after the COVID-19 crisis?”

Continuous innovation

The COVID-19 crisis actually presents the perfect opportunity to permanently shift educational innovation into a higher gear. To reinforce this shift—and to prevent you from falling back into old patterns later on—we’re sharing three must-dos. These are actions you need to take now to make the most of this unique opportunity for innovation:

Define what you want to learn from this time of crisis

We are, in fact, embarking on a very large experiment. Experiments require clear learning objectives—both with regard to Education itself and with regard to how we work (together) on Innovation. What do we want to learn about our distance education? And, how effective are certain teaching methods? What do we want to learn about a different approach to implementation? Consider, for example: What are the Success Factors in short-cycle implementation? Or: What can we learn about effective and efficient meetings and decision-making?

Gather evidence​

To truly learn from this experience, you need to carefully document how this “experiment” is progressing and turning out. There are various ways to do this. Fortunately, digital education offers opportunities to collect a lot of data. It also helps if those involved (teachers, support staff, students) document their experiences so that they can be shared later.

Organize a reflection and evaluation process​evaluation process

Once the storm has died down a bit, it’s important to start a dialogue with one another. How can we translate these experiences into concrete steps toward the desired educational innovation within our institution? Undoubtedly, after this experience, people are more open to innovation. After all, it’s clear that some things really do work (while others do not). Therefore, explicitly identify the “key areas to focus on” with regard to both Education and the approach to educational innovation.

In any case, we’ll be closely following these developments over the coming months and would love to hear about your examples and experiences. Bring on the educational innovation!

Meet the Author

Insights

All insights on educational innovation and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, as shared by our specialists.

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