With its second season launching earlier this year, Severance quickly rose the ranks to become Apple TV+’s most watched show of all time, achieving an impressive 6.4 billion streaming minutes across its 10 weeks, according to data from Nielsen. The show follows a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives.
Severance highlighted that when work and personal life are overly separated, employees risk splitting into two personas – one at work and another at home, losing those authentic interactions that fuel creativity and resilience. This idea clearly resonated with audiences, raising some key questions about balancing technology, work and human connection.
If we look at this in the context of higher education, then, are we starting to see the same separation between technology-led learning and creativity?
With institutions increasingly integrating AI into teaching, do we see students and educators acting differently in tech-led versus face-to-face environments? The answer is yes – at least according to Dr Jason Blackstock, Co-Founder and CEO of How to Change the World, a social enterprise delivering mass experiential learning focused on transforming careers for a sustainable future.
Edtech Tools Fall Short
Students and educators are currently not provided with online environments that effectively support interaction-based learning, Dr Blackstock argues. Most are structured in a way that create a trade-off between efficiency and emotional engagement, prioritising the passive, individual consumption of content over meaningful collaboration.
The biggest mistake, he says, is focusing attention on the technology, rather than on the learning and human-interactions that the technology is meant to be supporting.
Dr Blackstock gives the example of VR learning: “Learners and educators spend the majority of their cognitive energies on understanding the technology, learning what it can and cannot do, and playing with its features. That means their cognitive load is not being spent on the subject matter, or on the human interactions they are meant to be encouraging,” he says.
However, Professor Himanshu Rai, Director at India’s IIM Indore highlights the many benefits of using these types of tools, explaining that AI, VR tools and adaptive learning technologies allow for personalisation of learning, instantaneous feedback, as well as immersive exploration of subjects.
“A history student, for example, can now walk through ancient Rome using VR simulation, making their learning more rich and memorable,” he explains.
Still, despite its benefits, Professor Rai believes that technology cannot ever replace the compassion, guidance and morals a teacher provides. “Learning is far more than the gathering of facts; it includes an element of character and nurturing innate curiosity and critical thinking, which is fundamentally the gift of humanity,” he says.
To achieve the benefits of technology without losing the human touch, a hybrid approach to learning is essential. “Let the machines attend to tasks that are routine in nature, like grading, quizzes and content delivery, and provide the teachers with more time and opportunity to engage with students and hold discussions,” he suggests.
With that in mind, educators must become digitally literate and teach in a way that integrates technology meaningfully, not mechanically. Access to this technology must be universal, with investment in infrastructure and support for disadvantaged learners, he tells QS Insights Magazine.
“Education today is about shaping minds and hearts, with support from technology, to create classrooms that are not only smart but deeply human,” adds Professor Rai.
Battling Passive Learning
In hybrid or online environments, edtech tools can improve efficiency and effectiveness of content delivery, making them potentially more effective than traditional passive lectures. “From that perspective, there is some progress,” comments Dr Blackstock.
But while face-to-face environments offer rich opportunities for beneficial human interactions, edtech relies much more on limited tools for text-based communications, explains Dr Blackstock: “Simply compare texting with a friend to getting together face-to-face, and you can appreciate the difference.”
That said, successful experiential learning is not limited to physical classrooms. Most of the experiential learning programmes How to Change The World run are entirely online; and get as good or better learning outcomes and self-report learning experiences online as in person. “The ‘secret sauce’ is simply prioritising the design and scaffolding of the human interactions at the core of the learning experience,” says Dr Blackstock.
Another example of online experiential learning done well is Hult International Business School, which firmly roots its teaching, both online and offline, in experiential learning. Hult runs a significant portion of coursework through ‘live online’ courses, which have a variety of activities from global guest speakers, teamwork, live simulations and applied business challenges to keep students engaged.
“We keep engagement high in our asynchronous courses through optional live kick-offs and office hours with our faculty. We also increase engagement through the types of activities and content students consume,” says Jennifer Serowick, Dean of Online & Partnership Programs at Hult International Business School.
Read the full article on QS Insights Magazine.
