Use of technology as enabler for transformative learning
The technological and online learning revolution in education offers great benefits and new opportunities. Consider, for example, the development of Massive Open Online Courses, enabling people all over the world to receive education at prestigious universities or learn from their favorite experts. This revolution has dramatically improved the accessibility and affordability of high-quality education, which has consequences that are hard to overestimate in terms of its emancipatory, innovative, and transformative potential.
Simultaneously, it’s clear that learning “through screens” entails certain disadvantages and limitations:
“The modern sciences of learning, which are ignored in the design of most educational technologies, tell us that learning is optimized when it involves sustained interpersonal relationships, emotional connection, embodiment, and dynamically interactive hands-on experiences. … Technologies ought to help us customize learning and provide universal access to information through useful, well organized, and curated content. They should not be the primary locus of attention or main source of interaction and instruction” (Stein, 2019, p. 75).
We develop our programs with these considerations in mind. On the one hand, we focus on developing high-quality educational materials that can be used in, and scaled up to, a wide range of contexts. At the same time, we focus on interactive live sessions (either online or on site), in which participants dynamically engage with each other, having conversations, doing exercises, exploring practices, and going through a learning process together. We’re thus aiming to use educational technologies as an enabler for group participation and transformative learning.