Flexible Learning

Flexible learning was a theme that Commission on Higher Education (CHED) Chairperson J. Prospero E. De Vera III underscored in his online talk in the morning of June 2. Organized by CHED Region 1 Office in light of CHED’s 26th founding anniversary, the talk was entitled “Reshaping Philippine Higher Education” and was apparently meant to help clarify matters on how higher education should be approached under the reality of a pandemic here in our country.

Advising educational leaders to keep their ears close to the ground, as it were, one key message by the CHED Chair was that the country shall continue operating our educational institutions but face-to-face or classroom-based activities shall be kept to a minimum and, if at all, be done under very strict health protocols. HEI’s are now being told to engage in what is known as “flexible learning.”

What pedagogical creature Is this approach called “flexible learning”? First of all, it was clarified in the talk that it is NOT e-learning. It is a broader set of philosophies and bag of tricks that may include gadgets and IT tools to engage learners but it does not necessarily have to employ advanced technologies or electric and electronic devices. To clarify further, it may subsume old distance education approaches like correspondence education, where teachers and students send documents to one-another via postal services. 

The point of flexible learning is to create and continuously develop pedagogical means that would engage learners in more effective ways based on their actual life situation for learner-centered education. The broad driver for the development of flexible learning is the need to enable learners more choice in their learning. Today, the Covid 19 threat has magnified this concern for employing flexible designs for education work.

 For a Gen-Exer educator like me who had some glimpse of the fading world of the so-called Boomers and now is at the heart of the young world of Millenials and Gen-Zeers, I can very well appreciate this need for more engaged and outcomes-based education. This reminds me of the first time I had the responsibility of truly handling a child’s learning experience way back in the early 1990s.

The learner was a student in a private elementary school in Manila. I was his private tutor. He was initially very disinterested in further studying after school. In our first few meetings, it was a challenge to get his attention and to guide him to do his homework. One day, however, he began warming up to me. How? While explaining one of his science--lessons to him—he just suddenly asked me about a topic totally unrelated to our lesson and rather advanced.  

He raised the notion of time travel.  

Instead of just dismissing his query and forcing the day’s lesson on him, I stood up to get some materials to begin illustrating to him the possibility of time travel and what he had been hearing from one of his favorite TV shows (Shaider) as a “time-space warp”.

From that day on, I had an easier time with that child—who is now a licensed Architect and a social media contact of mine. I even had the privilege of teaching him how to play the turumpo. This, was part of my means to keep him engaged as I taught him science topics.

That experience, to me, smacks of flexible learning—the need to personalize our approach to the education experience.

Of course, managing the learning experience of a class of over forty teens or twenty-somethings is different from handling a single child. However, the description I just shared here of my experience with that then young learner should somehow help our appreciation of what being “flexible” would mean in designing and doing education work.

To my mind, and based on my over two-decade experience in teaching, to be flexible works. At the very least, it helps to better engage and sustain the learning interest of students.

In education work in general, one must consider these basic and broad-stroked questions in managing pedagogy—who needs to be taught what and why? Who should teach and how (this include the “when” or for “how long”)? With or for what outcomes and impact? And necessarily, the question of who decides about all of these concerns? The point now is how do we answer these questions considering flexibility to engage our learners based on their actual and varying situations in life.

Flowing from these questions and based on his talk, I realize that one thing I fully agree with the CHED Chair is this—that we need to train our teachers and prepare them for the challenges of engaging in flexible learning. 

 

Flexible learning is not the big problem, methinks, especially since I reckon it is in fact the default state of things if one thinks about it. The big issue we face is the flexibility of our teachers who have been trained rigid in certain approaches and who may have developed a one-size-fits-all approach to education.

However, I am optimistic and hopeful. Our teachers and professors, in general, given their passion for pedagogy, can manage. CHED has only to truly relax its policies and allow teachers and educational managers and administrators to fully explore what they can do to best protect our learners while continuing to educate them.

The words of the CHED Chief himself suggest that we cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to managing formal education work today to advance the agenda of flexible learning and not merely e-learning. #