Throughout the years, we find numerous terms or buzzwords in business press and academic literature that refer to an increasing inability to grasp the world and keep up with the issues happening around us.
Introducing VUCA. It stands for the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in the world around us right now.
When we see VUCA, we naturally think of the Covid-19 situation that resulted not just in the disruption of the world economy, triggered societal panic and groupthink behaviour – panic buying, but also dragged down Singapore’s economy leaving shopping streets and eateries empty and employee pay cuts by companies in order to stay afloat. Many companies are opting to work from home and small businesses in the service industries are taking the brunt of the whiplash effect with front-line employees fearing for potential job loss.
Indeed this brings short-term pressure on some industries that require physical labour, however, it also brings about opportunities for companies to adjust and disrupt their industry by bringing in new ways of doing things to meet customers’ needs.
Knowing to digitalise processes and ways of doing things then allow individuals to react fast in face of volatile and ambiguous situations like this and come up with alternative solutions. This definitely applies to us at Kodecoon Academy as well. Being in a traditional brick-and-mortar education business teaching technology courses to kids, some of our parents and our internal team have expressed concerns about continuing physical lessons amid the virus situation.
Knowing how to deal with the uncertainty and sudden drop in student enrolments led us to be more innovative when it comes to continuing our students’ learning journey. #NeverStopLearning
For the past few weeks, we have started our online classes for our regular programs. From our experience over the past weeks, we observed many benefits for students in virtual learning that we believe are critical in fostering their learning development.
No doubt having to change from our usual physical classes to online versions challenged our teachers to change the way they interact and deliver the materials to students. Our students now miss out on the physical interaction with their teachers and our teachers find it harder to seek immediate feedback without being able to observe body languages in real time.
However, our students not only learn to be more independent learners, they figure out how to problem-solve by themselves and become more accountable with their communication when it comes to gathering feedback. This led them to be more open with asking questions in class. These are all important soft skills that we want our students to have for their learning development.
We have also launched our free trial classes in a digital version, providing educational materials for students to try out coding for the first time and assessing them remotely to see if they are suitable for programming classes. Feel free to chat with us to find out more!
One last concluding thought: preparing for the next crisis (or the next phase of the current crisis) definitely is more effective than an ad-hoc, reactive response when the crisis actually hits. With this, we would like to extend our thanks to all parents and students who have continued to be supportive of us.