My 21-year-old niece, a second-year undergraduate, mentioned that she watches video lectures offline at twice the normal speed. Struck by this, I asked some other students I know. Many now routinely speed up their lectures when learning offline — often by 1.5 times, sometimes by even more. Speed learning is not for everyone, but there are websites where students discuss how odd it will be once they return to the lecture theatre. One contributor wrote: “Normal speed now sounds like drunk speed.”
Education was adapting to the digital world long before Covid-19 but, as with so many other human activities, the pandemic has given learning a huge push towards the virtual. Overnight, schools and universities closed and teachers and students had to find ways to do what they do only via the internet. “This is a time for schools and systems to reimagine education without schooling or classrooms,” says Professor Yong Zhao. Dr Jim Watterston in Australia thinks that, while the traditional classroom is still alive and well, education needs to be more adventurous and flexible. Earlier this year, Zhao and Watterston co-authored a paper in which they identified some major changes that should happen in education post-lockdown.
The first concerns the content, which should emphasize such things as creativity, critical thinking and leadership, rather than the collection and storage of information. “For humans to progress in the age of smart machines, it is essential that they do not compete with machines.”, they wrote, “Instead, they need to be more human.”
The second is that students should have more control over their learning, with the teacher’s role shifting from instructor to supervisor of learning resources, advisor and motivator. This is where so-called “active learning” comes in with a growing body of research suggesting that comprehension and memory are better when students learn in a hands-on way — through discussion and interactive technologies, for example. It’s also where the concept of “productive failure” applies. Professor Manu Kapurin argues that students learn better from their own or others’ failed attempts to solve a problem before or even instead of being told how to solve it.
If the progress of the times is unable to hold back the coming revolution in education, it seems unlikely that the traditional classroom is going to have any luck in its attempts trying to turn back the clock. As Laurillard puts it, “It took a global pandemic to drive home what we’ve been saying for 20 years.”
【小题1】By giving examples of “speed learning” in the first paragraph, the author wants to show that _________.| A．digital world is dramatically reforming the way of learning. |
| B．speed learning completely replaces normal speed learning. |
| C．returning to the lecture theatre is strange after speed learning. |
| D．education begins to adapt to digital world after Covid-19. |
| A．It is essential for smart machines to be more human. |
| B．Students should possess more information about creativity. |
| C．Students value others’ failure over their own failure. |
| D．“Active learning” calls for diverse ways of involvement. |
①learning mode ②learning motive ③learning attitude ④learning focus
| A．①④ | B．②③ | C．①③ | D．②④ |
| A．Speed learning harms students’ learning efficiency. |
| B．The coming revolution in education is irreversible. |
| C．Teachers will play a less important role in the future. |
| D．The traditional classrooms will eventually disappear. |
