Reinventing Education During Covid-19

Sheridan Tatsuno, Dreamscape Global, San Francisco

President Trump has urged schools to reopen, but there is enormous opposition among governors, mayors, school superintendents, teachers and parents. Since Covid-19 may last for years, is there a safe way to reopen schools and universities? If so, what are the options?

In 2009, I co-taught a class on Creative Marketing at JIBS.se in Sweden as the Associate Dean of Business Creation. We provided "blended learning" integrating face-to-face and online learning. The professor eliminated all lectures, suggested reading, and divided the class of 125 students into teams of 5 students. I mentored three teams, meeting them at the kick-off class, at their mid-term presentations, and their final presentations. I spoke with my student teams from Stockholm over 200 miles away using Skype. My teams met face-to-face and also used Skype for daily sessions since they were scattered around town. My teams excelled; their data analysis and presentations were so professional that they were invited to present to the boards of local companies, towns and the airport. They proved that professors can eliminate lectures and students can learn effectively. In fact, they surpassed my expectations and I had worked with engineering students at Stanford. How can this experience be adapted to pandemics on a broader scale?

K-12 Blended Learning

Online classes may work for college students, but younger children are much more active and difficult since they get bored easily and need much more structure and guidance. They are locked down at home with their families, making learning difficult if not impossible. How can they be taught effectively? Current "mainframe" educational approaches where all students sit in one large class are over, at least until a Covid-19 vaccine is developed and the pandemic passes. Several better, safer social distancing approaches are possible:

1. School "bubbles": Using teller-like plastic windows, younger teachers could sit in their office "bubbles" surrounded by separate bubbles for up to ten students, which would enable the teacher to provide group and personalized mentoring. Older teachers could appear on large displays. School bubbles would address the problem of poor children not having Internet access at home.
2. Mobile classrooms: RVs could be outfitted with retractable bubbles under canopies so teachers could drive to different neighborhoods and manage groups of 20 to 40 students, each studying her/his bubble. The RVs would have to be designed for rain, heat and cold weather, which would limit them during adverse weather, but they could be supplemented by vans with separate bubbles inside. The RVs could also serve as mobile data centers for outdoor events, as chipmaker AMD demonstrated a few years ago, to amortize their cost when not being used for K-12 classes.
3. Smartphone "Pocket Schools": In the mid-1990s, Santa Cruz and Watsonville public schools gave free PDAs loaded with schoolwork, assignments and tests to migratory farmworker children who moved often, disrupting their education and disappearing from school teachers and administrators. The PDAs worked well since the students did not need Internet connectivity and could easily update their school work at the next school. Today, smartphones are supercomputers compared to the 1990s PDAs. Unfortunately, this innovative idea has not been continued, with educators, policymakers and parents arguing over the "educational divide" due to the lack of high-speed 5G Internet when it would be faster, easier and cheaper to give students free smartphones loaded with their school work so they could study anytime and anywhere. A free smartphone program could be implemented in months nationwide to all poor communities if funded by state and local governments. Curriculum could be stored on shareable libraries for all states.

Older teachers and those with underlying conditions should be retained, not required to teach in classrooms, but outfitted to teach from home. https://people.com/health/arizona-teacher-dies-of-coronavirus-warning-against-school-reopenings/?fbclid=IwAR2XU3R13kMe6qEkUJJmZFjD9HwOpQlGtBn_D8p3XoeyNSlsGsseK0-T8ws

For ideas, see this article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271973/Sick-colleagues-Why-work-bubble-Fantastic-French-invention-keeps-sealed-office.html

https://www.fastcompany.com/90305213/the-hip-new-open-plan-office-trend-cubicles

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/health/coronavirus-schools-reopen.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/opinion/coronavirus-schools-reopening.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR1e2Hf_1CuI4ejQXKctDaKbmiDXgqllAVNWpTp1F87lBPyRz4Rpb8N2cz4

Blended Universities

Like K-12 schools, colleges and universities could adopt school bubbles, mobile schools, and smartphones beyond their direct-to-home online classes. The major difference is that universities typically draw students from around the world so they are faced with an either/or situation: large classes on campus or online courses. Blended learning is harder since students and courses are dispersed. To provide a half-way solution, universities could offer remote learning centers near campus and at centers with many enrolled students to provide opportunities for face-to-face socializing using masks and social distancing. It's not the same as campus life, but overcomes the loneliness, depression, anxiety, frustration and disruptions of studying at home. Many students want to get out of the house and meet their classmates and friends, so dispersed telestudy centers designed for safe social distancing could be a way to connect students. To reduce costs, universities could co-rent space on a time-sharing basis.

Covid-19 is accelerating the 4th Industrial Revolution of digital transformation to months from years. During the past five years, I've been advising my teacher friends that they need to move some of their classes to online, but most said "we're not techies like you." Now they're all shut down and panicking over whether to quit their jobs or not. They do not have to quit. They can go online and meet students in their "bubbles" if we redesign our schools to enable blended learning.

I welcome your comments, ideas and suggestions to update and expand this article.