Published: June 5, 2020

LEARNTech Asia To Address The Mega Disruption Of The Education Sector

The Pandemic is accelerating change in an already disrupted sector. By convening the world’s top experts, LEARNTech Asia aims to provide answers to unprecedented challenges.

LEARNTech Asia

Sau Fong

[email protected]

Asia’s Response To COVID-19 Education And Training Disruption

SINGAPORE, June 2020—LEARNTech Asia is to host its first virtual conference with over 25 world education experts looking into the education and training landscape in Asia. The conference titled Learning Disruption2: Asia’s Response to COVID-19 Education and Training Disruption—Emergencies Measures, Solutions, and Opportunities is to take place on 18-19 June 2020. The aims of this conference are threefold:

  • To review the megatrends in learning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • To identify adequate new teaching strategies, progressive policies, and innovative business models.
  • To share best practices and review current and future solutions.

To date, more than 2,500 participants have registered to consist of academics, educators (teachers, trainers, private tutors), researchers, instructional designers, learning business owners, and government officials from Asia-Pacific, US, UK, Middle Eastern and other countries around the world.

Mr. David Yeo, LearnTech Asia Chairman commented:

The LEARNTech Asia 2020 conference is a timely and important event. We are witnessing a rapid acceleration of change in a sector that was already undergoing profound changes. For this reason, we have decided to use the squared symbol in the conference title: Learning Disruption2.

Global school closure reached its peak in early April. More than 91.3% of the world's student population was affected by school closures. 1.59 billion learners were forced out of school in 194 countries. Today, despite the pandemic seeming to have slowed down, schools in 150 countries remain closed. This has put the global education system to test, more in the underdeveloped countries where access to computer and internet connectivity are not to be taken for granted. This unprecedented situation imposes new challenges to educators: on the one hand, they need to maintain the quality of teaching; on the other hand, they must be able to assess students’ performance reliably.

What has become apparent is that online education cannot be delivered by simply replicating face-to-face classroom learning with online video conferencing. The whole pedagogical approach must go through profound rethinking. And simply there hasn’t been enough time to do so yet. Hence the need for this conference, where state-of-the-art technology is showcased together with emerging forms of pedagogy.

In response to the changing landscape of teaching and learning, LEARNTech Asia 2020 pays particular attention to Asia. The conference is structured to cover concerns at all levels including a wide variety of stakeholders: from policymakers to business owners, from educators to learners.

The three main topic areas of the conference are:

  • Education and Training ecosystem disruption: Megatrends, Threats, and Opportunities
  • Create effective pedagogical approaches
  • Solutions for emerging needs and future opportunities

The conference aims to devise and deliver concrete solutions by calling upon the world’s experts and by offering immediate scalable methodologies and tools to grasp long term opportunities.

Among the prestigious line-up of speakers, we have Prof. Albert Sangrà Morer, Director for the UNESCO Chair in Education and Technology for Social Change, professor at the Open University of Catalonia, and researcher at the Edul@b research group. Prof. Albert Sangra Morer believes that one of the challenges in online learning is the lack of social interaction. To this regard, he commented "Students must not feel alone. They must be made to feel that they are part of the community. Opportunities for exchanging messages must be created among students and even involving their families."

Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), shared a similar view. He commented, "In this age of accelerations, we need to think harder about what makes us first-class humans, how we complement, not substitute, the artificial intelligence we have created in our computers, and how we build a culture that facilitates learning, unlearning and re-learning throughout life."

Maria Spies, Founder, and Co-CEO of HolonIQ, an education market intelligence platform describes the challenge at hand as follows "Globally, COVID-19 will cost the equivalent of 250+ million jobs in the second quarter of 2020. 1.6 billion informal economy workers could suffer massive damage to their livelihoods. The Education to Employment pipeline is experiencing an unforeseen disruption and the challenge ahead is enormous."

LEARNTech Asia wants to play a catalyst role during this period of profound change. To this regard, LEARNTech Asia’s Chairman Mr. David Yeo said "By harnessing the power of technology, we can make teaching and learning scalable, adaptable and accessible to every person. We want to create a global community of educators and learners and the technology providers. The future lies in collaborative learning and technology."

Register now to get the conference free pass.

About LEARNTech Asia

LEARNTech Asia is a professional interdisciplinary conference platform founded in Singapore in 2014. Our secretariat offices are located in Malaysia and Singapore. LEARNTech Asia sees the adoption of ICT and Edutech as an enabler to achieve and accelerate quality learning, especially in the era of digital transformation. We aim to be Asia’s leading teaching transformation and education technology event. Uniquely created for this region, LEARNTech Asia holds an annual conference with renowned speakers from across Asia and the globe, interacting and sharing the latest knowledge and best practices.