Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 26, 2022 - October 2, 2022

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, it was hard for many companies to change their work practices to deal with the unprecedented circumstances. This included top leaders in organisations who had to learn new ways to manage their teams from screens.

“Businesses today want people to be aligned around the direction that needs to be taken — not just aligned, but also [working] autonomously,” says Melanie Cook, managing director of Hyper Island (Asia Pacific), an online learning platform headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with a main campus in Singapore.

Cook says individuals have realised that they have survived the “never normal”, which is how she refers to the current situation, and are now thriving in their careers. “Career enablement is about stabilising [after staying afloat during the pandemic] and having the confidence to push the pedal down so that the ‘speedboat’ can start going again.”

Hyper Island found that, based on the last three quarters of the 2021/22 intake, apart from an increase of 125% in sign-ups for digital acceleration master classes, enrolees from countries in Asia-Pacific have a strong desire to develop in three main categories: leadership development, career enablement and focus area realignment.

Cook shares that from the huge selection of programmes and courses offered by the platform, the three with the most enrolees from Asia-Pacific are Data Storytelling for Business, Human-Centred Design and Agile Ways of Working.

According to Hyper Island’s website, the Data Storytelling for Business course guides students in developing a clear narrative with data; the Human-Centred Design course helps them learn to develop products and strategies through customer insights; and the Agile Ways of Working course focuses on honing the agile mindset and its application in a working environment.

Cook attributes the take-up of these courses to the career enablement objective — being equipped with the right knowledge and tools to keep up with evolving trends. Hyper Island also began to see an increasing need for entrepreneurship essentials such as exploring innovation and an experimental mindset this year.

“[This is because] people are now thinking, ‘Okay, this is it. I have room to innovate because I’m resilient enough to take whatever change might come. I’m ready to start experimenting and innovating [in] my career, my business and how we deliver to our customers,’” explains Cook.

As we continue to embrace the “never normal”, Cook encourages educators and key stakeholders to democratise access to education. Many parents are privileged enough to provide children with the gadgets needed for conducive learning, but Cook asserts that “there is still a small percentage of the world population that are unable to do that”.

Next, she predicts that high touch learning will be a trend, enabled by technology, especially artificial intelligence and virtual reality. According to academic publisher IGI Global, high touch learning is a student-centred learning experience that involves students doing hands-on exercises to gain knowledge in a specific domain.

Cook says the concept of high touch has already been applied through social media platforms and community gaming, where people directly interact with each other and are involved in challenges and campaigns.

“Another trend will be educators needing to concentrate on how to apply what people have learnt, rather than just teaching them what they need to learn,” says Cook, emphasising the importance of adaptation of knowledge in a hybrid working environment.

Revolutionising online learning

Most students have difficulty focusing during online learning. According to the Higher Ed Student Success Survey: Fall 2020 by Hobsons and Hanover Research, 71% students were struggling to stay focused on their coursework, and 57% of them felt that their overall learning experience was somewhat worse compared to 2019 (pre-pandemic era).

Cook says that is because of the way physical learning syllabuses have been adapted for online learning. “The reason is that the syllabus is not designed for learning outcomes online. They’re designing the syllabus for learning outcomes offline, and then just putting it online.”

To overcome this problem, Hyper Island incorporates high touch learning with interactive, problem-solving games. For example, it requires students of its data courses to join a data treasure hunt and solve murder mysteries.

Cook also says technology unlocked learning opportunities for Hyper Island’s students. For example, it is able to take students on a virtual tour of the Amazon office to learn about the company’s platform business model, which may not be achievable physically.

“The pandemic opened us up to the internet and what’s possible on the internet,” says Cook.

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