1. Online Education after Covid - predictions
Ormond Simpson
ormond.simpson@gmail.com
www.ormondsimpson.com

2. We have so many world problems at the moment…
The Pandemic – not over yet
2

3. Global Heating
3

4. Pollution
- atmospheric
- plastic
4

5. Species extinction
5

6. Terrorism and warfare
6

7. Poverty and social injustice
So many problems - How can we possibly solve them all?
7

8. “Civilisation is in a race
between Education and Catastrophe”
- H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Author
1866 - 1946
So can education be the answer to the world’s problems?
8

9. “Universalising Higher Education”
“we need to universalise access to higher
education so that everyone’s brains can
develop their best talents”
- Tim Blackman
https://world.edu/universal-higher-education
-is-the-key-to-combating-misinformation/
26 November 2020
Tim Blackman
Vice Chancellor
UK Open University
9

10. Conventional face to face higher education – two problems:
- Expensive
- Exclusive
Is there an answer to these problems?
10

11. So is online education the answer to ‘universalising higher
education’ and avoiding catastrophe?
But still problems:
- Access to online education – still limited and still
costly – currently the internet is making the difference
between rich and poor worse
- Too much dropout – Still high levels of dropout – often
more than 80% of students do not finish their online
education course 11

12. Access to online education
“Far too many young people remain
excluded and unable to use the web
to share their talents and ideas”
“A third of young people have no
internet access at all. An
investment of US$428bn over the
next decade would provide everyone
with a quality broadband connection”
- Tim Berners-Lee
Open letter to mark 32 years of the web
https://webfoundation.org/2021/03/web-
birthday-32/ (12 March 2021)
Tim Berners-Lee
Founder of the Web
12

13. ANNUAL arms sales of the world’s largest arms-producing
companies US$420bn in 2018
- Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2019)
13

14. Dropout in Online Education
How can we overcome the dropout problem?
14

15. 45 years in distance education summed up in one sentence…!
- “You learn best when there is someone (or something?)
who cares that you learn”
So is online learning just too impersonal for many students?
15

16. 16
”I have 300 students on my
Health Sciences course. How
do I make that personal?”

17. How to ‘personalise’ online learning?
Mentoring Study Dating
Families Artificial
Intelligent
Tutors
17

18. ‘AI will have the biggest
impact. In the future, every
single student will have their
own personal AI tutor’
- Professor John Domingue
Professor John Domingue,
Director
The Knowledge Media Institute
UK Open University
18

19. But what to teach?
“Most people would rather die
than think, and many of them
do” – Bertrand Russell
Lord Bertrand Russell 1872-1970
-mathematician and philosopher
Nobel Prize winner
19

20. Or to put it another way…
Daniel Kahneman
1934 -
Economist
Nobel Prize winner
We have two ways of thinking –
• System 1thinking– fast, instinctive
and unconscious
• System 2 thinking – slow, analytical
and conscious, using evidence
20

21. 21

22. Above all –
teach thinking and the ability to judge evidence
“Only public universities can perform that role, with
their quality-assured teaching backed by rigorous,
properly funded research and undertaken by dedicated,
independently minded professionals”
- Tim Blackman
22

23. 23