As the pandemic swept the globe, more than a billion pupils from all over the world suddenly had to switch to online education. Pupils, students, teachers, and parents are all trying to adapt to these new circumstances. Different countries are using different models, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as a number of other organisations, is looking into the impact these extraordinary events are having on the future of education.

Finnish entrepreneur Vesa Perälä, the founder of Claned Group which specialises in global innovative solutions in digital education, sat down with N1’s foreign affairs editor, Ivana Dragicevic, as part of N1’s ongoing series “World in Times of Corona” to talk about the future of education.

Basically overnight, we have found ourselves in completely new circumstances. One billion pupils and students around the world had to transfer to online education. You’ve been working in this field for quite some time. First of all, I want to hear how you feel about all that is happening.

From the human perspective, this is an obvious crisis. But if we coldly look at it from this perspective only, this is basically digitalisation of learning better and more strongly than anything ever before. Now there is a reason for schools, universities, corporations, to shift their basic traditional classroom training to digital settings and that’s what is happening now. Like in so many cases, when the learning platform is there, people start transforming, they start improving things and that’s pretty much what’s happening right now in the field of education globally.

We know what the statistics of Finland are in terms of education; the model has always been looked up to as an example. But the pillar of the very concept of Finnish education are people, more precisely, teachers. How is Finland handling this situation?

In Finland, the education system is definitely very good, very robust. It’s very much about the teachers, like you said – every teacher has at least a master’s degree in education teacher training has always been very well taken care of. Also, there is a lot of respect for the teaching profession. Still, there hasn’t been a digital learning platform in Finland. It’s been the traditional kind of classroom learning, and I would say that we are struggling as much as other countries right now. But of course the foundations are still there. So, when the schools were locked down, we had a discussion on how we were going to do this. There was panic, multiple tools used for different elements, overreactions by both teachers and parents. And then in the period of some two weeks, things started to get normalised. It’s still not distance learning or digital learning at its best because it’s very tool-focused and that’s some kind of a necessity right now. But the Finnish teachers are handling it reasonably well, with the circumstances in mind.

The OECD published several analyses and studies in recent time, especially on this kind of education, and some of them say that this kind of home schooling during the coronavirus pandemic should change education forever. What do you think about these, rather strong statements?

It’s not just the education, it’s also the way we work and do things – there’s some kind of a fundamental shift definitely happening. There is talk now how you have to go digital and I’m having daily discussions with different kinds of customers who say ‘we need to go digital, yesterday.’ When this is done well, a bit part of it will remain digital and it’s not going to be going back to classrooms. Of course, classrooms and schools are not vanishing anywhere – it’s not just the learning, it’s also the social environment and everything. But changes will happen for example in the corporate training area, and the same goes for travel – when the company sees that, actually, there’s no need for someone to go to London every week because meetings can be held online, it will reduce the travel. Similarly, when they see that distance learning can be done really, really well, and it can be measured better than classroom training, the amount of digital learning will increase and stay on a higher level than before the crisis.

Your company is making learning design programmes and trying to, on the one hand, make learning accessible, and on the other more personalised. You also work in various countries; you exported your programmes elsewhere. Can you tell us more about that?

Fundamentally, we are a tech company, and one of the things we say to everybody is that learning technology is a great enabler for better learning, but without the pedagogical parts, the risk of simply deploying software is substantial. Traditionally, learning platforms have been used as digital content storages. So, no learning design had taken place. Schools, universities, corporations have simply been uploading materials to whatever platform. Then they basically hope and suppose that people go on there and learn actively. And it’s not happening. In classrooms, you have the teacher, the instructor, who is personalising, who is answering questions, providing guidance, making sure that everybody’s on board, but all this is lacking fundamentally from digital solutions. So you have to bring life into it, and that’s basically what we do with our learning design. We don’t want to do bad digital learning that isn’t going to deliver results, we want to make sure that the highest possible quality is there, so we basically help our customers design engaging, effective, and really good digital learning experience. We also have platforms where you can study anything, where you can run team’s meetings or use videos or whatever on a very social platform because we need the people to have social interaction, like they do in classrooms. So we’re supporting that in the digital setting as well. And then the third component, which we are bringing into the picture is learning data, meaning we’re measuring the impact of learning – how we can improve learning outcomes, and if not, whether there is something we need to change in the content. It’s some sort of an interactive data-driven process where we use technology as the enabler. Pedagogy is really the key, and that’s probably coming from the Finnish roots of the company. Forty percent of our people have background in pedagogy, of course we have the data scientists, but pedagogy is the key. Digital learning can be really, really great, but if you don’t pay attention to the pedagogical parts, it can be really, really bad as well.

Basically what you’re saying is that you cannot replicate classroom lessons into another medium, but you have to find new responses to what, how, where people learn?

Exactly. People make the false assumption that if they simply upload a video or a Powerpoint they use in the classroom onto whatever platform, that they have a digital learning solution. That’s not the case. That’s actually why most of these things fail. You need to design everything properly in that new channel. I’d say this design-thinking is really key, we use terms such as learning-design or pedagogical service design and that’s really helping because people see how they need to utilise the digital channels. And they offer much more actually, in terms of, for example, measuring the impact of learning, which can be done much better digitally than in any classroom. You need to know the elements of digital and how to use them for your benefit in terms of design of services, and that’s how all the great apps the kids are using already on daily basis are done. So why not do the same for learning as well?

We have various models applied in different countries. Some countries have their own government platforms, which are often slower, or not user friendly. On the other hand, there are tools by global tech companies, like Google and Zoom, which are making profit from this. So how do we combine this?

To put it maybe a bit black and white, in most countries politicians call for easy solutions. It’s obvious we need to buy tablets, or we need to get Office licence or other programmes, those are obviously very useful tools. What the decision makers lack, actually, is an understanding of digital learning and how it should be done. And then they’re rushing to take Microsoft Teams or Google Classrooms. And those are great tools, but they are fundamentally designed for working life, not for education. And we actually see in Finland and other countries as well, is that everyone is calling out for webinar tools, some form of a virtual classroom. Which is fine, but that’s only one tiny element of digital learning. You need to organise support, cooperation, building knowledge together, it’s a much wider spectrum of things which delivers good learning. And we see cases, here in Finland as well, where children were given tablets, and then they remained completely unused, some are without software and some that do, don’t have content. People are not thinking about the big picture, they go ahead and buy something in panic, hoping it will solve the issue, and unfortunately it doesn’t. There needs to be a holistic approach in building this and, as I said, using pedagogical tools, but in a different channel, understanding how to do it well. Then you can have a better solution.

You talk about the holistic approach and understanding the digital. There are interesting questions in that framework, for example about motivation and habits.

I would say the key is engagement. We know that the majority of global learners are social learners by their learning orientation. They want interaction with the content, with their peers, with their teachers. So we need to build these engaging elements into the systems. If you only dump, for example, the whole book at once at anybody, people get frustrated, they lose motivation. You need to slice it into, let’s say, micro learning elements, present things in the right way, maybe something like storytelling or a movie script kind of a way. And only then can you combine different elements: you can have a webinar, or you can record a number of videos out of one thing, then you maybe build some engaging activities together with the other people. So, instead of simply doing the broadcasted webinar, you can provide a much richer experience if you engage the students. The students know, in any country, how to use any kind of a device, that’s not the issue, maybe more on the teachers’ side I guess, but it’s very much a part of understanding how to build engaging experiences in a digital setting. Unfortunately, the teachers are not trained to provide digital learning and this is a new situation for them. Some of them do know how to do it, maybe they are young adults interested in tech, but we cannot simply expect they can do it in no time. But the knowledge is there. What the decision-makers should be doing is provide training for digital learning, there are professionals who do that in every country. So, this kind of expertise can be bought. Now we are using the budget for buying hardware, software, tools, but what we need is a holistic approach to everything, which would mean fundamental improvements. When talking about improving any education system, we should be investing in professional teacher-training. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the results of that in less than four or five years because that is obviously a big nationwide programme, but then again, the sooner you start, the sooner you can see the results.

As you said, we have to teach the teachers, but also we have to pay the teachers. In Finland, they are very well paid. But in countries, for example on the periphery of Europe, it’s not the case. It’s important to understand the role of teachers in the society, whether the environment is digital or analog.

I absolutely agree. We have a luxury situation here in Finland, even though teachers here are saying they are not really well-paid, but I think if we look at things globally, they are definitely well-paid and respected here. The good thing about digital is that, according to UNESCO, we will need 69 million new teachers globally by 2030, two thirds of them in southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. To get 69 million teachers trained, I think that estimate was published in 2016, we should have opened two new universities every single day globally. Of course, that’s not happening. So, there will be no time to train all those people in a traditional, conventional way. You need digital tools which provide a larger scale. That’s the beautiful thing in whatever country. Those courses are available – of course you need to invest in them as well – but a lot of professional online teacher-training can take place already today. In Finland for example, we have done professional teacher-training on 21-century skills, not all teachers have taken it, but it’s been pretty popular. You can get these things up and running in a few days in any country. We need to think outside of the box. Conventional means will not fix this; we’re way too late already. The 69 million teachers – that’s really one of my favourite lines because it’s so true and it shows that you have to figure out other ways of doing it.

How do you bridge the inequality gap in this? We have our inequalities within Europe, within countries, within societies – access to this kind of education is probably easier for someone who lives in the centre of Helsinki or a child of immigrants in a suburban community. Also, we can talk about this issue globally.

Absolutely, we don’t live in a completely democratic world. However, our approach is very data-driven. The data part is a very big portion of our solution. The customers who use our data most intensively – and we have customers from 31 countries – are two universities, one in Uganda, and another in Zambia. They are, by far, the most advanced users of our really, really modern data. Digitalisation will be more equal than any kind of classroom training can ever be. Wi-Fi hotspots are everywhere. We did digital solutions in refugee camps. So access to internet and online education can be arranged. It doesn’t have to be 24/7, it can be occasional. Seventy percent of global population has some kind of a smartphone, and that is enough for the highest possible form of digital education. One of the aspects we should be highlighting in this crisis is that digital education is, by default in my opinion, more democratic than for example getting into an Ivy League university. Which I never went to myself, I must add. Access to highest possible quality education is digitally available to, I would say, anyone. Of course, not everybody is in the same situation; some children’s parents may be more supportive than others, but the basic access is there. You have the opportunity of doing it and the kids can be supported in a lot of different ways. There are no limits – of course you need money to do things – but if you think about content, the rule of thumb is that digital content is about 40 times cheaper than the book.