This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 21, 2020 - September 27, 2020

Since April, most countries around the world have closed their schools and universities in order to reduce face-to-face interaction during the Covid-19 crisis. In place of these interactions, schools and universities have implemented virtual instruction and online learning.

This is crucial to enable students to continue their studies, graduate on time and enter the working world to begin their “real” lives, and has resulted in a great increase in demand for effective online learning solutions. Apps such as Zoom and Hangouts have become popular. Millions of students around the globe are benefiting from online learning platforms such as Coursera, Lynda, Skillshare, Udacity and Udemy.

It is not that online learning was non-existent in pre-Covid-19 times. Then, however, it was merely an option that was sometimes resorted to. For example, guest lecturers from abroad would occasionally be invited to address students and staff at the university online if they were unable to make the trip and be there physically. In fact, online learning has been growing in the last 10 years.

Universities in Singapore, for example, have had online learning systems for years. In 2012, the National University of Singapore (NUS) launched its “Learning Innovation Fund — Technology” grant to help faculty members redesign classes with the integration of online and in-person learning.

In 2013, NUS worked with global learning platform Coursera, making some modules available to the world online. It is precisely because of the early adoption of digital technologies in education that these institutions have been able to make the rapid and smooth transition from face-to-face to online learning during the pandemic.

Today, online learning is a necessity and dominates the lives of students and lecturers. Live broadcast of lectures, lessons via video conferencing, and online modes of assessment have all become the norm. Tens of millions of students around the world are currently in online courses.

The fact that many universities had already embraced online learning long before the outbreak of Covid-19 leads some to ask to what extent online learning will remain with us in a post-Covid-19 world.

Technological barbarism

There is no doubt that technology has vastly improved our lives. If we look at what had been achieved during the first two decades of the 21st century alone, we may have an idea of the staggering achievements made. The touchscreen smartphone was introduced in 2007 by Apple. Today, we take it for granted that it is possible to take pictures, listen to music, play games, message friends, make free international calls and drive to destinations without maps, all using our smartphone.

Talking about driving, that may become a quaint practice in the future. Driverless cars have been created and are now being tested. It is possible that these automated cars will be manufactured and become commercially available within the next few years.

Bluetooth is another great technology. It has been adopted for use in computers and mobile phones since the early 2000s. Today, Bluetooth can be said to be central to many people. Another amazing invention is the flash drive. A 128GB flash drive, costing less than RM100 on Amazon, has a storage capacity of more than 80,000 times that of the ancient 1.44MB floppy disk, popular in the 1990s. Other spectacular products that appeared in the last 20 years include Skype, Google, Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, commercial electric vehicles, 3D printing and Amazon Kindle.

Despite these great achievements, we remain barbaric, often utilising the latest digital technologies to engage in war and genocide, perpetrate acts of terrorism, discriminate between religious and ethnic communities, commit misogyny, and practise kleptocracy.

The end of the university?

Some fear that the technological barbarism will extend to education. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben made an intervention, ironically online, entitled, “Requiem for the Students”. It appeared originally in Italian on the blog, Diaro della crisi, at the website of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici on May 23.

Agamben claims that the pandemic is being used as a pretext for the greater diffusion of digital technologies in education. He complains that “the technological barbarism that we are currently living through is the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen”.

He fears the end of the university as we know it, noting that universities were created in Europe from student associations, that is, the universitates. In fact, universities are named after these associations.

In these medieval universities, as was the case in the jami’ah of the Muslim world that preceded them, being a student meant forms of association that included not only traditional modes of studying and attending face-to-face lectures, but also involved interaction, exchanges and encounters with scholarii who came from other lands and who resided together according to their place of origin in nationes. This has continued until today.

In Malaysia, where tertiary education has been for years open to the world, every university has students hailing from all over Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with a few from Europe and Latin America as well. This makes for intercultural and inter-religious interactions and the forging of close friendships and other forms of ties.

As Agamben notes, this has lasted for centuries. But he laments that it may be coming to an end. The implementation of digital technologies to enable online teaching, learning and assessment would mean that students need no longer live in the same cities where their universities are located.

They may attend classes virtually while living hundreds or thousands of kilometres away in their own countries or elsewhere. The classmate as we know it would disappear. The small university towns that exist throughout Europe and North America would lose their communities of students. The life of these towns would disappear.

Agamben may be exaggerating the problem. He lambasts professors who have willingly submitted to the “new dictatorship of telematics” and teach online, and likens them to the university lecturers in Italy in 1931 who swore allegiance to the Fascist regime! He suggests that students who have a genuine love of study should refuse to enrol in such universities. They should, as they did centuries ago, “constitute themselves in new universitates, only within which, in the face of technological barbarism, the word of the past might remain alive and something like a new culture be born”.

While I find it extremely doubtful that universities will cease to practise face-to-face learning in the post-Covid-19 world, we should resist the urge to take online learning too far. Face-to-face teaching is important because it makes for more effective learning through meaningful interactions.

Among the advantages of face-to-face learning is the ability to concentrate better without the distractions of being at home while learning online. It is also well known that students learn better when they are able to read the body language of their lecturers as well as the other students in the class. Furthermore, nothing can replace the opportunity given to students to meet and network with each other, and form lasting friendships and associations that remain with them for decades to come.

Syed Farid Alatas is professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore

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