As I wrote to you all last time, I have decided to retire from the cybersecurity business. I am fortunate to still be asked to speak and write for the profession. I am watching as this pandemic environment is exposing the rotting foundation of our professional educational processes. Three main areas are being heavily impacted as I type this: academia, technical training, and conferences. Let’s start with conferences.
The normal cycle of our professional conferences has been turned upside down over concerns for spreading Covid-19. Nearly all of this year’s conferences have been converted to virtual events. This is a good interim tack, but it eliminates many if not most elements that attendees value by attending. Simply dumping a three- or four- day event into Zoom rooms for a low-cost option solves the immediate problem of what to do with your speakers, but doesn’t address the immersive environment that includes vendor booths, hallway meet-ups, evening receptions, and other social activities.
At first glance, these may seem superfluous to the stated objective of professional education. They appear as perquisites to provide social amusements for those privileged to attend. However, they have a far more profound impact that simply cannot be recreated in a virtual environment. These are the settings where people forge professional contacts, find new career opportunities, and reach new clients and business associates. Without face-to-face interaction, these are much poorer events.
Which brings us to the broader issue of our national education and professional training systems. The pandemic has exposed the depth and breadth of wasteful spending and unnecessary activities centered on higher education. For our national education system, we are tied to major investments in real estate, transportation systems, food service, and sports infrastructure. We have taken a nineteenth-century model and grown it well beyond its capacity to efficiently train up the next generation of productive citizens.
Virtual classrooms have been around since the 1980s, yet it took this pandemic to force broad adoption across the entire educational spectrum. However, we are failing to truly take full advantage of all the technology options available to us. Our children could be taking their algebra class from one of the top ten instructors in the country with local resources as learning aids. Instead, we settle for just hooking up existing teachers and instructional materials to an online meeting format designed for one-hour business meetings.
Online training has also been around for a few decades and we now have an opportunity to determine the best ways to create skilled workers for this century. We can leverage new technologies by diverting resources from antiquated and poorly employed systems. For example, all learning that does not require hands-on or face-to-face instruction can be moved out of brick-and-mortar facilities that require not only property costs, but heating and air conditioning, cleaning services, and maintenance among others. These types of changes challenge us to rid ourselves of centuries of cultural conditioning where we view physical elements such as office space and walls of awards as status symbols.
We are standing on the threshold for seismic change. Like the conference scene, we can opt to just drop our lesson plans and instructional methods into an online meeting application for the quick fix. But we really should use this pandemic as an opportunity to evaluate and completely change a hidebound and inefficient educational system and replace it with one for the twenty-first century. We will rise to the challenge?
