The Innovation Loop: Learn to teach to learn to teach… OR How Covid-19 brought the future to the present

Those were pre-Covid times. Online sessions, blended learning and their ilk were just a trend. People visited YouTube for fun, not to learn anything. In fact, some even deemed online teaching a dead trend. The Executive School knew better, which is why I got the job in the first place. We had to experiment and learn how to teach digitally. We had to be innovative.

Back then, even simple webinars were not common among educational institutions. They were considered a marketing gag instead of a true teaching tool. Still, we believed that was going to change and started learning how to create such webinars. To do so, we used the then-unknown tool called “Zoom” developed by a start-up. That was in early 2018, when Zoom stocks didn’t even exist.

 The webinars were very well received and that led us to thinking. What about we use the learning nuggets from the webinars in classes as well? So now we had to learn how to make those available to students and how to edit and enrich videos. There wasn’t much client pressure to take part in these experiments. Until Covid-19 came along. And with the pandemic, the future of education.

 We were ready for the changes (or almost) because we knew how to create content and how to stream classes. Now it was a matter of equipping the entire university. A new problem raised its head: mass streaming. We had to learn how best to handle cameras, audio and the legal aspects of recording content (and people).

Fast forward to nowadays and all that seems like ancient history. Online sessions are ubiquitous. Blended classes are the rule, not the exception. Education had to undergo a massive innovation wave. What we learned during these trying times, we now flow into our classes. The disruption that the education field undergoes is an excellent case study. Here at the Executive School, we have learned from disruption. Now we are ready to teach it.