Adapting to ‘Student Z’ – takeaways from the Digital Innovation Summit at NEOMA
Despite the best efforts of the SNCF to keep delegates away, we were able to go ahead with our Digital Innovation Summit at NEOMA Business School in Paris in early December, with a hybrid event that brought together senior leaders, instructors and learning designers in the auditorium and online. Inadvertently, the train strike gave us a perfect illustration of one of the many benefits of technology in the service of education – its ability to bring people together who are geographically dispersed, even cross-borders. And it also served as a reminder that, while we hope that the lockdowns of the pandemic are now fully behind us, there are always going to be circumstances that surprise or disrupt us.
Yet of course hybrid, remote or blended learning isn’t just for times of crisis. While the pandemic accelerated our use of digital tools in education through necessity, it has been slowly filtering into schools, colleges and universities for many years, from the book + CD Rom, to whiteboards, LMSs and just the good old internet. In more recent years, McGraw Hill has developed digital learning solutions that combine trusted content with learning theory to help students learn smarter and offer instructors an arsenal of tools to address the challenges that they are facing today. Our panel at this event was comprised of educators at the vanguard of technological innovation - who as Deans and instructors have seen the benefits of edtech both strategically and tactically, both before, during and since Covid-19.
Chief among the challenges discussed at the summit is the changing demographic of students. Dean of NEOMA, Delphine Manceau, spoke in her introduction of the rapid and radical societal transformation that is producing a generation of students that are very different even to those of five years ago. Students today are the product of a digital upbringing, where often they have been exposed to screens and swiping before books and reading. This is creating a shift in attitudes, behaviours and norms that has rarely been seen on such a scale and so quickly.
Haithem Marzouki, Director of Pedagogical Innovation at NEOMA, is pragmatic about the changing demographic, saying that when considering course design, he always starts with the principle that students today have different expectations and shortened attention spans. At the end of last century, the average length of time that humans could maintain effective attention was around 20 minutes, while Haithem estimates that for some students today it is much shorter, at around 8-10 minutes. Engagement is therefore an important issue, in terms of the design, delivery and cadence of the class. Equally important though is the pace of teaching and learning in classes with mixed ability, mixed preparedness, and mixed ability to concentrate. It is here that Haithem sees one of the biggest benefits of technology for learning, in allowing students to learn at their own pace, in their own time, within the structure of an adaptive learning environment that gives automatic feedback and responds to their needs.
While zoom fatigue is a real phenomenon in a post-pandemic world, we must guard against flushing the baby out with the bath water and look deeper. What actually worked better virtually? Which of the tools we came to adopt can we continue to take forward in order to support students to get the most out of their course? For each of our panelists, their focus and experience has been slightly different, pulling at separate strands of a common thread of ‘managing’ often very large numbers of students, to maximise engagement and minimise drop-out or failure.
Fabienne Autier of E.M Lyon described to us how she is using a combination of tracked readings and simulations to flip the classroom and help them understand the relevance and practical applications of human resource management theory, turning an unpopular course into one with very high levels of engagement and student satisfaction.
For Donal Palcic, Assistant Dean of the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick, it’s been more about using ongoing assessment and data analytics to keep track of student performance, giving him the tools to intervene before it’s too late. As an economist, Donal is looking at whether the university can use the various pieces of student data available (including prior attainment) to predict outcomes and use that as a motivator for students to engage more deeply with reading, revision and practice.
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Valerie Moatti, of ESCP Europe, explained how from her point of view, digital and face-to-face learning are two sides of the same coin, neither one a replacement for the other, but two complimentary channels that offer different pedagogical benefits. For her, the draw of technology is in breaking down barriers to access, enabling students at different campuses to receive the same quality teaching simultaneously, or indeed from anywhere, widening participation for those who, for any number of reasons, find it more difficult to commute into campuses.
There were many additional takeaways from the summit, such as the need to support instructors to use technological tools in their teaching, to take the heavy lift out of it, provide best practice and guidance, and remove barriers to tactical implementation. Much discussion – and some consternation – also centred around where students go for information, and the need to ensure they have reliable sources in an age of false news and careless misinformation by non-experts with a reach. But perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we are in the foothills of something truly exciting – that in embracing ‘Student Z’ and making use of everything digital tools (like McGraw Hill’s Connect) have to offer, instructors might discover a new freedom to teach differently.
Catch up with the summit on YouTube:
Find out more about McGraw Hill Connect.