The World is at Our Command

Distance Education, The New Normal, Virtual Learning Environments, VLEs 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at Musée Oceanographique, Monaco (2019)

The World is at Our Command

A time for seizing new opportunities

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Saturday, July 25, 2020 Post 349

Attentively listening to one of the institution directors in one of the three education institutions I currently work for, it was clearly stated in a staff meeting that whoever is now enrolled in the institution’s language programs is a student who wants to study there and trusts the institution’s educational policies despite the pandemic the world is going through. Current learners, who have evolved with these institutions through the virtualization of courses and the use of synchronous sessions, have been able to also evidence that live, online classes allow for the learning of a foreign language such as English. Learning does happen in virtualized environments within social, vivacious communities of learning.

The spiteful seeds of the pandemic we all are living are now here to sprout up and bring new opportunities for innovative education institutions ready to analyze and profit from the chaotic surrounding environment. Language education institutions must work with marketing and academic bellows, anvils, and hammers to take advantage of the current situation to take their virtual language teaching across the countries where they serve their target audience. The virtualization of processes and the work carried out due to telecommuting platforms or services have allowed institutions to continue operating and teaching their students. However, this very virtual teaching can aid language schools to grow in every single corner of a country’s geography or to export their talent to other latitudes and coordinates in their regions or beyond. Virtual teaching has made learning opportunity boundaries nonexistent.

Long ere this pandemic, many education institutions had been amply and timidly discussing virtual teaching and learning through online language programs. We teachers can wager our heads against the skeptical people’s that virtual teaching has come to stay and that those ones who were ready to face the education challenges foreseen some 10 years ago are standing tall and doing better than the doubtful. And the questions we have to ask ourselves now are: Do we want to be part of that future where virtual teaching is part of the new normal? Are we already looking for opportunities to grow beyond the market we thought we controlled before? Are we surely planning to have access to all these numerous chances the new normal is providing us?

The so-called new normal has brought alluring challenges at various professional and institutional levels. Despite the inescapable skepticism that the working force in education institutions can operate remotely, many language companies have realized that they can telecommute, hold remote classes, and provide their students with all kinds of services. All these processes can improve to satisfy clients in the new everchanging, elusive, and volatile historical moment we are living. Companies can boost their language students’ experience and make them feel satisfied with their learning. On the other hand, if human resources offices ever thought that making use of the Internet to work from home was not possible because of the so-called surveillance environments they came from, cohort of teachers, finance workers, and IT personnel have demonstrated from their at-home desks that it is possible and profitable for their education employers to have them work from home.

Are our language teaching institutions walking to meet with their doom or with their new commencement? If the last planning block is not laid on the walls of our new virtual classrooms, our growth can turn lumpy. Shrugging our shoulders in indifference to what is going on in the building of our new virtualized institutions is not a valid nor reasonable reaction to the current circumstances. If the companies’ personnel used across a full gamut of marketing strategies to attract new learners, they can now spot new like-minded individuals who really want to learn English and bring them into the virtual classroom to help them canalize their dreams of speaking this language. Slightly rephrasing The Beatles’ 1965 hit, Nowhere Man, “the world is at [our] command.” The new normal is now the new land of opportunity to grow.