The Future of Education Is the Video

 “The Future of Education is the Video”

        What is education? Education consist of curriculum which has been designed to provide the students with everything they need to learn in school (Sterns, 2016). In Malaysian context, we often neglect some important elements when we talk about education. We thought we know about education in details, the truth is we only see it based on our own experience in our previous school years. For some people, education means a teacher teaching Science or Mathematics in classroom. If you ask again for more answers, they could just add physical education, playing football, throwing and catching balls. Even worse, people could only see and think of examinations when they come across the word education in school level.  One should know what education is, what makes the education an education. What is the role of education? According to National Philosophy of Malaysian Education (NPE), the education in Malaysia aims to shape and produce students who possess intellectuality, spirit, balanced emotions and physical control and harmonic. In other words, education is the most important thing for every child who is growing up because it aims to shape the overall values of growing and learning which are cognitive, psychomotor and affective values. In order to achieve this, educators all around the world need to come up with a new kind of education that allows them to focus on all three important values in learning. I would definitely agree with the given statement “The Future Education is the Video” and this essay will focus on discussing the reasons for my choice of agreement.

        The main reason I came to a conclusion to agree with the statement is after I watched the videos by Sal Khan as attached with the statement. It is not that I have not try or use any videos in my teaching before, but now I see how importance it is to the world of education. Further explanations will be discussed throughout the essay. Usually I only use one or two days in a week in presentation stage where I let my pupils to watch any videos according to the current topic and learn something out of it before they apply what they have learnt from that videos in production stage. Now after watching the videos, I would definitely increase the number of videos I am going to use in my language teaching classroom because that is the future education. How could not I agree when Bill Gates himself called upon on the guy to give a talk to a mass audience who makes hundred thousand of videos to teach millions of people all around the world? Apart from Sal Khan himself, we can see in the videos that some of the schools have already adapted the learning style amongst the students and have been producing positive results. As an educator, it is very hard to disagree with the statement above especially after seeing the power that a video can bring into a classroom.

        As we know, children are always attracted to videos. Play any videos about anything in a classroom, they would stop doing whatever they were doing at the moment to watch the videos even before they gradually lose interest and decide not to watch it anymore. Even if that happens, the point is that the videos get their attention at first before they choose disapproval, and this only happens when they are uninterested with the content or the presentation of the videos. Hence, it is important to choose interesting videos that relate with the topic they are currently learning to keep them occupied with the video without losing interest. This is when they can relate with what they already know and most importantly add other important information from the videos. As a teacher, I can always relate this with my Year 4 classroom. It is a normal mainstream Malaysian classroom where it consists of children with multiple learning differences such as visual and kinaesthetic learners altogether in one classroom. The setting of my school is a very rural area where there are several long houses around the school with no facilities as we are situated in a deep jungle. The closest town to our school is Kapit town which is at least 3 hours away using water transport. In my teaching experience, most of kinaesthetic learners in my class tend to get easily bored with “chalk and talk” method that I have been using in my classroom. But when it comes to watching videos, they would even promise me to behave as long as they would later be rewarded with watching the videos. We can see how young children are motivated to watch a video because they do not get that chance every day.

        Motivation is an important factor in learning for any stage of education. Videos can inspire and engage students (The University of Queensland, 2016) to learn. When learning takes place, there are times when students get so stressed out and they definitely need a time out if we do not something about it. As educators, we can see when our students lose interest or start to get tired with the teaching especially when they have been going a series of different subjects in a single day. Effective educators would usually play a fun video to the whole class just to grab their attention back and refresh their body and mind before continuing the teaching and learning process. I still remember my educational psychology class when I was doing my degree in Victoria University of Wellington. It was Mr. Chris Brown who taught us the subject. He always used videos in his lectures at times. The way I saw it, students always laughed and talked about the things in videos after watching them. He would give everyone a couple of minutes to talk about things we saw. The best part of the videos was that he always used his old photos and stories to teach us about the relation of the subject with the real life situation. That what makes his lessons interesting. It was a meaningful class with him. I remember more about stories in the videos rather than the things that he told us verbally. As Zane Education (2016) sates in its website “The more interested and engaged students are, and the more interactive each learning session is, the more students will enjoy, learn from and retain information from the lesson.”

        On top of that, learning using videos opens many opportunities for the students to work independently. In an article review by (Meyer, 2010), the writer states that the use of ICT in teaching promotes independent learning. As we know videos are one of the tools is ICT teaching. During my school years, I did not many chances of learning using videos for my own learning. Mostly the methods used by my previous teachers were Direct Translation Method. It is the same for most subjects at that time. The only student-centered activity I had was group discussion. That was the only time I could practice my English amongst my friends but very little of it because everyone seemed to face hard time using English to talk. So I was used to relying on the teacher to provide all the information for me. As a result, I was not really independent through my first year of degree. There were couple of times when I had to watch and summarise a video for my assignment, I faced hard time working alone trying to figure out the important information in it. But then I kept receiving various videos during my learning and some lecturers even gave us videos for our extra readings. Then only I learnt on how to learn using a video. I can always replay the video on my own time when I could not understand. When I felt I need extra information to fulfil my curiosity about the current topic I am learning, I would go online myself and look for extra videos for my personal understanding. This phase of exploring on my own has taught me to be independent learner where I can interpret a video on my own. If I were given the chance to learn using videos during my school years I believe I would be more independent and productive than I was before.