Fabien Maurin
Manager of the French market at Wooclap
“Rather than fighting smartphones, Wooclap turns them into an exceptional learning tool.”
You are an interactive platform that aims to revolutionize the way we teach. In your opinion, has this crisis triggered or accelerated the revolution we are facing today?
Fabien Maurin: “I think we can actually distinguish two revolutions, which feed each other: a digital transformation and a pedagogical revolution. In both cases, I think that the current crisis has acted more as a speed-up for changes that had already been underway for several years in higher education*.
On the question of digital technology, the transformation was already well underway before the crisis: most institutions had set up dedicated teams several years ago and already had a base of tools (notably LMS platforms). The challenge was to complete the systems, by equipping themselves with video platforms or interaction tools, for example. The other acceleration was the adoption of these platforms: overnight, Covid forced teachers to adopt these tools – in this respect, the crisis has undoubtedly saved institutions two or three years in their transformation strategy.
What the crisis also revealed was the need to rethink the way we teach. The lecture model was no longer adapted to a distance learning or hybrid teaching format. It was therefore necessary to work on the scripting of courses, to rethink the link between synchronous and asynchronous teaching and to reinvent face-to-face time. Methods like the flipped classroom are not new, but the crisis has brought them back to the forefront – and that’s actually good news.”
*Higher Education & Research
What did the health crisis change for your company?
Fabien M.: “At the time of the first containment, few teachers knew that they could also use Wooclap in their distance learning courses: the first step for us was therefore to train teachers and educational engineers to give them the keys to this new teaching method, to share the best practices from our community of users, to create resources…
The crisis then accelerated the thoughts of a certain number of establishments about interaction tools: we therefore accompanied them in this process to enable them to deploy Wooclap and to quickly respond to this need for interactivity in distance or hybrid courses.
And then, like all companies, we had to learn to collaborate remotely, while doubling our workforce in 2020, which led us to rethink a lot of things internally to make this growth go as smoothly as possible!”
And for the future, what are your outlooks for evolution?
Fabien M. : “There is still a lot of uncertainty about how the new school year will unfold in September, but I think that, whatever happens, teaching methods and practices will continue to evolve in the coming months. Teachers have learned to teach differently, students have learned to learn differently – with the disadvantages that we know, but also with a number of advantages. For many institutions, we will probably not return to a pre-Covid mode. In this context, the challenge for us will be to adapt to the uses that will emerge in order to continue to meet the needs of our users.
This crisis also have been a real pedagogical laboratory: for us, one of the orientations that we wish to continue to investigate is asynchronous learning, on which there is still a lot to do. With Wooflash, our revision platform launched last year, we want to go further in the personalization of learning paths and recreate the link between teacher and students in these asynchronous times. Exciting challenges for the coming months!”
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