HYBRID LEARNING- PREPARING TOMORROW’S SOLUTIONS

Our world is changing. As countries began to recover from the pandemic, Covid -19 showed us that our learning strategies also need to change.  While education has always been a pathway to learning, success and opportunity, we find that in Asia, 60 percent of schools surveyed believe that hybrid learning is the way of the future for education.

When the pandemic displaced millions of children worldwide out of school, and displaced millions from the comforts of the work place, and changed the overall dynamics, we realised for the first time that with the right technology, learning could happen from anywhere. This also led to the conclusion that one thing was certain-Education will never be the same again, post Covid.

And when it comes to the future of education, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, leaders in education, technology and public policy must work together to design intelligent tools and systems that will characterize the future era of democratized, digital education.

Classrooms will need to increasingly shift between physical and virtual venues, necessitating a broader set of skills to accommodate all participants.

This transition presents a critical turning point in the history of education and will have a long-term impact on our lives. We don’t know where hybrid learning will take us yet, but there’s no denying that it’s a critical opportunity and fertile ground for world-changing innovation.

For educators who have long enjoyed using both technology and face time for promoting collaborative learning, the imminent transition to hybrid learning can be a welcome change. This transition if anything has been accelerated significantly due to the constraints the pandemic has brought about. Now that learning has been predominantly online means for over two years, it is very likely that even as the world bounces back, a certain ‘hybrid’ model will settle in as the new norm in educational institutions.

It is in this context, that we at Chinmaya Vishwa Vidyapeeth organized this conference and put the efforts to bring the proceedings of the Hybrid Learning Conference as an edited book.

We had talks from speakers from all over the world and from many parts of India.   We had participants from India, Bulgaria, United States, Germany, Malaysia making this conference a truly international one, speaking on variety of subjects ranging from Advaita Vedanta to latest development in the Education field. This being the first time we were hosting such event, our team was pleasantly surprised that almost one third of the papers were related to Indian Knowledge Systems.