And a Zoom class is not the same as a face-to-face class. We already suffered with PowerPoints that never ended, now the new tool of torture is endless videoconferences. Crying children, people wearing shirts but pajama pants, the barking dog, and all this with bad lighting have become part of our daily lives.
The typical lack of preparation, both of people and many companies, for change, leads to an unexpected external impact (such as the closing of offices because of COVID) pushing the pendulum to the other extreme. Before they didn’t even care about remote work, now…. “the world is going to be completely virtual”, but without really thinking about what this means, or how it is done. COVID has accelerated (thankfully) several trends and technologies that were already obvious. But human beings usually only change for two reasons: pain or extreme pleasure. Digital has a huge set of advantages, but it is not perfect. And even more important than using new tools, we must think about the experience that supports customer satisfaction.
The case of education is probably one of the most obvious ones to reinvent. Education is still based on methodologies that have not been adequate over the centuries, and now what we have done is to put cameras on that experience. Of course, the effectiveness is going to be much lower. To begin with, a current classroom segments students in a simple way, age and interest (e.g. I’m 20 and want to study architecture), but completely ignores the level of knowledge or learning methodology of each student. What is the goal of the classes? To learn in the most efficient way for each student and to promote new ideas? Then we must design them for this. For example, using adaptive education in which the student is continuously and receives content appropriate to his or her level until he or she reaches the desired one.
Returning to work, what are referred to as the “future of work” and “remote work” are different, but often confused. “Remote work” is remote work. The “future of work” aims to maximize experience and productivity with the best possible combination. Body contact and communication cannot yet be replaced. Apple didn’t spend $5 billion on an office building, designed as round just on a whim. It was because it believed in the importance of contact between people and maximizing the meetings between the various areas of the company. In the same way that remote work (I am at this in a network in Tulum, Mexico) will increase, but it will not be the only version and a combination of the two can be great.
As the sometimes-wise people say, “in the middle is virtue.” Yes, more and more the virtual will have more meaning, but not as we are doing it. The return to what was normal no longer makes sense. Why not take advantage of the excellent changes that have happened in this period? We need to rethink the experience of work, education and commerce and other industries from the ground up, based on real goals and achieving them with available technologies, rather than trying to replicate the old ways digitally. No more low budget movies with bad actors and no lighting, come Hollywoodesque work.
