Dr. Edizon A.

Fermin
To introduce our keynote speaker, please welcome the Dean of the CBSUA graduate school.
Dr. Claribelle C. Haber, Ph.D, we have a virtual round of applause.

Claribelle C. Haber, Ph.D: Morning, everyone.

It is a great honor to introduce our plenary speaker. Dr. Edison Angeles Fermin is the founder of
edge speaks, a professional development group that focuses on adaptive, innovative and
resilience education. He is currently the vice president for academic affairs of the national
Teachers College, which was acquired by AI law corporation education in 2018. He formerly
served Miriam College in various capacities, such as director for Innovation Development,
Director for basic education and high school principal. He holds a bachelor's degree in
secondary education major in English minor in Filipino Manya. Home louder, a master's degree
in teaching English as a second language, and a doctoral degree in Filipino language planning
and policy. All from the University of the Philippines in diliman. He received the up Garwood
chancel or be lumped in a coma Husein adinkra dragoman. Total number TAs at a company
founded in 2000, the Miriam college president's awards for research in 2005 and in 2010. In
June 2014, he was chosen as the youngest recipient of the professional achievement award of
the University of the Philippines College of Education Alumni Association for his scholarly work
on evidence based teaching practices. In 2016, he became the first recipient of the Oscar and
locus award for transformative educational leadership. In 2017, he received the outstanding
Alumnus Award in basic education from the river UC University of Science and Technology,
where he graduated valedictorian in 1996, a member of the International honor societies of tea
cup of tea and P gamma mu. He has written and refereed articles, delivered lectures, and
facilitated training concerning elearning, literacy, teacher education, social linguistics, Student
Affairs, program developments, and curriculum development in various parts of the country and
overseas. A published researcher and national trainer in learner centered outcomes based
education. He has trained teachers and education leaders from the preschool to tertiary levels,
and even technical and vocational schools. He continues to work with the British Council and
declared international affairs staff in developing policy and practice pathways in transnational
education and adult education, especially in terms of quality assurance. And in 2019, he
completed his training in equitable access to education as a scholar of the Asia Europe
foundation at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He was a member of the Department of
Education technical Working Group on the K to 12 curriculum as a member of the learning area
in four languages. The National basic education and higher education Commission's of the
Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines are saying he is currently co chair of the
Commission on Higher Education technical panel in teacher education from 2013 to the present,
and the chief consultant of the National Executive course for education leaders are xcell in
Senior High School of the private education Assistance Committee from 2017 to present
through reform for assistance to private education in responding to the complex educational
implications of of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. He currently provides expert advice to the
chair technical Working Group on the continuity of inclusive education through appropriate
flexible learning options. Friends, pleased to speak about reinventing education and research
flexibility in the new normal. Dr. Edison
Dr. Edison Angeles Fermin: Thank you so much for the very kind And warm introduction.
Please allow me to share my screen so that I can begin this hour long. We're very pleased to
join all of you this morning. What do we hear from Manila and deplete all of you? If I, if my
memory serves me right, my mother hi in that regard, and still I'm foggy. I have been a student
of intermediate and advanced classes in Bahasa Indonesia, Malaysia. And I'm very happy that
I'll be sharing this morning with some of our colleagues in Indonesia. And of course, the big cold
region is very close to my heart, because I am married to amico Lana. So this morning is an
opportunity for me to share with you my thoughts on reinventing education, research flexibility in
the new normal, with the title processor. In Bahasa, it is the Tanja this morning, I'd like us to
have a better appreciation of what we are to expect in the new normal. And what will entail from
us from the vantage point of educational research, which is, for the most part of my life, is
something that I have embraced as a major component of my responsibilities. I'd like to
emphasize that we are not yet in the new normal. Many people keep on saying that this is
already the new normal, and we are experiencing it. But if you look at the trajectory of our
adjustments, given the pandemic, we are technically still in the response stage. And in so many
ways, the Philippines and Indonesia share a lot of things in common. And the response stage
with massive school lockdowns, and economic closures happening, we are yet to find out how
we will actually recover what we have the vaccination currently being rolled out. The recovery
period happens in the early part of 2021. That's what's happening right now, all the way to the
middle half of our first half rather, of 2022, when we are expected to have at least achieved a
certain degree of immune immunity or herd immunity. And from there, much of what has been
shut down in COVID-19, will gradually recruit them. And from that moment on the
reconfiguration of all public and private spaces, education included will likely begin that period of
configuration is the period of the new normal. And what is being asked of people and educators
like smooth specially is what the World Economic Forum has explicitly mentioned, as the
generation of new paradigms, and not necessarily a new normal in the education space. I
always emphasize in the last 44 webinars that I have conducted, that moving towards the new
normal in the education space is likely going to be the end of schooling, as we know it, to
borrow the words of a scholar from Harvard University by the by the name of Professor Kevin
Kerry, who in 2015, I managed to listen to one of his thoughts. And he was kind of saying that
time will come when everything that we know about education or schooling will change all of a
sudden, and boy, he was right. That was 2015. And five years after we have COVID-19. I'd like
to go straight to the point on what is to expect in the new normal. from the vantage point of an
education, futures and cenarius perspectives. What we know right now is that learning will likely
take place anywhere, anytime, any any modality or technology. This is what we mean by
location agnostic systems. In fact, this webinar is an exemplification of what we call by one what
we call as location agnostic systems. We are coming together virtually but we are technically
coming from various other parts of the globe. And along with it is a reconfiguration of what we
mean by what we need to learn. You know, I have this assumption, but is this likely going to be
sooner or later? that not everything that we have declared in our course curriculum course
programs will really matter at the end This study. So the term essential, has become very
essential to curriculum studies, particularly in the areas of planning and delivery at this moment.
And I'm very happy about this because I am a huge fan of the curriculum that is an inch long,
but is a mile. And this translates to the use of assessments that are no longer the ones that you
typically find in pen and paper modalities, because it is no longer about how much one knows,
but how one transfers knowledge. And critically, this is likely going to shape the future of
education delivery systems, especially that in most nation states, the transition to remote
learning prompts us to ask questions relative to what will become the new measures and
processes of measuring educational attainment.
The other three important things that we are seriously more regarding are the behaviors
of educational institutions in so far as determining quality, his concern. Later, I will show you
how I would like to approach research in quality assurance, especially that we are no longer just
concerned with the compliance to state, state or government regulations during the period of
COVID-19. In fact, more we are considering the direction towards capturing the innovations that
have been implemented by higher education institutions, and even basic education tools. The
next would be a question on qualifications and capabilities. We have strongly asserted that a
certain professor of a certain degree program will need to have X number of qualifications to be
considered as an expert in that Yeah, but the idea of who gets to educate and teach has
changed during COVID-19. I have been part of many international families, actually covering a
lot of interesting issues in education, but they are not degree holders in education at all. Some
are coming from the health sector, some are coming from the public work sector, and so on and
so forth. Because this tells you the third important shift that I'd like to highlight, which has
something to do with the new academia and industry gap that will be brought about by the many
changes COVID-19 have already caused and have already exacerbated or aggravated because
of the lockdowns and the reconfiguration of economic systems, because it is true that as
industries reconfigure academia is still in a state of shock. So businesses industries are
changing rapidly from manufacturing to artificial intelligence and so on and so forth. But schools
are on lockdown mode and many of us are just, you know, getting by in terms of remote
learning professionals. Now, our degree programs will now be equal to the changes in the
employment and the industry landscapes is something that is worth researching on a serious
now, especially this early this year in February of 2021, a global survey on the mix of
occupations that will have to shift in all countries by 2013 in the boost COVID-19 scenario has
already been issued by the McKinsey group. And if you look at the top five occupational
categories that will likely increase the shear in most of the nation states in the world, you will be
talking about mercy in courses that actually cut across health. Then you have creatives and arts
management, and just a little of management, not even business. And this actually compels
institutions to think about which degree programs will likely matter to your students in the
coming days, months and investors. And for this reason alone, you will likely come to a point of
thinking whether your degree programs will sustain their full support scenario. And luckily
because of this condition, it is imperative for me keepers like us to start thinking along the lines
of how learning experience design will shift, which means that if the expectations of industries
have changed, we need to account for them in the way provisions at the level of programs and
delivery are right now happening. And this is where I'd like to highlight how Malaysia is
technically winning the game. Prior to COVID-19, the Malaysian government has actually
mandated three posts that go to pedagogical approaches, in order to run their higher education
system. They actually mandated the use of pedagogy, pedagogy, and cyber Golgi in its
educational institutions. And likely because they had about three years of implementing these
new types of coaches. So these are the posts, pedagogy and post andragogy approaches, they
managed to transition most of their universities and school systems very fast in remote learning
setups. In the Philippines, while we have the University of the Philippines Open University, our
disposition to actually resort to remote learning opportunities is yet to be enhanced. Even if
there's an enabling and enabling law to do that the pickup rate, prior to COVID-19 was very low.
But all of a sudden, in COVID-19, we had to expedite it. Just to let you know, three weeks ago,
a new Advisory Council to the chairperson on advisory learning was formed, and I'm part of it.
And we're already seriously thinking about creating the national learning hubs for open
education resources. And, and the truth of the matter is that we're already at the point of
creating the guidelines on how Philippine higher education institutions can maximize the use of
open education resources across degree programs. But the thing here is, even if we actually
signed up for open education resources, we would still have to understand what has changed in
the industries upon which we expect our academic programs to be anchored. At this point, what
I will do is see if there are opportunities that we need to become mindful of, because these
opportunities lend themselves not only as platforms for reinventing education, but also for
creating flexible pathways for inquiry and research, which higher education institutions are
expected to perform. The first set of opportunities is what I call the narrative of the schooling.
Because first and foremost, we are no longer just concerned about rule. And by bloom, I'm
talking about cognitive development, or cognitive science. It's no longer just about learning that
we understood it before. But more importantly, there is now a shift towards the more important
elements that constituted Maslow's framework on overall wellness. And to focus on wellness
would mean that you have to give way to a lot of flexibility and flexibility in learning within
smaller groups, even if Bridgeville is technically bigger in terms of scope, and impact. And even
if there's distance, the foreigner is now viewed as better, because if you're far from the city
center, then you're likely far from getting infected with the virus and all other things associated
with it. And of course, you're also talking about leaner school organizations that can function on
online platforms to manage the academic and at the same time, the business side of the school.
So we are now seeing more and more people who traditionally populate offices within
universities to be replaced by mechanisms and systems that can be bribed by artificial
intelligence and a lot of automation. And is this going to pose a lot of danger on the part of
higher education institutions, but this will also mean that for you to become relevant and for you
to stay in your respective job posts, you need to upgrade and upskill yourselves in terms of
competencies. And additionally, the discourse of the schooling will mean that universities will
now have to think very, very seriously how much hyper flexibility last year when we start
configuring the dimensions of remote learning, I asserted that eventually, colleges and
universities will have a choice to actually promote any of these available flexible learning
modalities and arrive at a very good mix of them, depending on the kind of learners and
communities they wish to serve. It is no longer just a question of which of these two piece
provisions Will you have more of, and which of the provisions for remote learning Will you have
less of, but technically, it's you're determining the capabilities of your students, their families and
your faculty, especially that we're talking about items on conductivity, availability of devices, and
so on and so forth. So it is interesting to note that whatever your decisions will be, they should
have, they should be based on certain parameters, which we don't know or don't have much
control of at the moment. So these are part of the unknown universe in terms of institutional
decision making, but likely, we will need the thread in the coming days, the next set of
opportunities will have something to do with nano, micro and mini credential pathways. Right
now, a lot of colleges and universities have actually discovered not only learning management
systems, but credentialing systems, you see if you have heard of the words or the means
Coursera, LinkedIn, Amazon Web Services Academy or AWS Academy, Google universe, and
x, you Danny, all of these are learning and credentialing platforms that are very much output
driven and outcome focused, but you develop the competencies not by (inaudible na sya sa vid)
each terms of subjects, but by hours and hours of focus from nc.so how all provisions for remote
learning that we have taken during the pandemic will translate to new academic qualifications.
And to illustrate this for you, let me show you what I have shown to the Advisory Council and
flexible learning as likely going to be the start of the evolution of credentials within a curriculum
component. In the Philippines, we have a general education for school, purposive
communication, which was for 54 hours during the semester, we have figured out that there are
now at least two traps by which open educational resources can help build the competencies
required. In prep one, where you have credit accumulation and class for scheme, what you can
do is to take x number of chat approved open courseware related to the purpose of
communication. So this is self paced learning and it is online, or it could be offline because you
can download the resources and take it on your own without the supervision of a faculty
member. And after completing the indicated courseware requirements, you will be issued one
Fall Of course, we're badge a badge. It's like a certificate that the automated system we issue
with you completing our segue and taking note, it's difficult for you to fool around the completion
of the hours because the AI mechanisms in these courses are rather very, very secure. And
after earning the badge you cannot turn that into the higher education institution for crediting.
Now this means that there will now be certain courses that will run on micro credentialing
pathways that do not room too many professors having too many classrooms in the first place.
But the second track, they'll see that slowly, what you can do is to just integrate first the open
courseware materials, either fully online or blended structures, but you will still report to the
university for prelims midterms and finals. So you technically have the university or the college
towards becoming an assessment center, not typically your learning centers. Now how feasible
is this? I would say this is going to be the game changer in those COVID 19 because
remember, we have to promote location agnostic learning. The next set of opportunities for
inquiry development will be our capability to question the discourses of access, quality,
relevance and sustainability. ask ourselves questions now, even bigger universities are doing
away with strict admission policies. Because Open Learning means that anyone can access
education. And we have proven that in so many ways during the time of the endemic Are we still
going to pursue the concept of accreditation, as we know we're in a little while I'll talk about how
these things are changing rapidly are we also going to push for verticalization. Because if you
have noticed the types of degree programs that will likely shape post COVID-19 societies do not
require so much of verticalization of qualification.
In fact, the more varied your background is, the better or the likelihood or for the greater
likelihood of your capability to adjust in situations of disruption will be in the fourth one will have
to do with how institutions diversify in terms of resources. Now you can have as many
international professors that you can have, but they don't have to sign a long term contract with
you. But you can only sign up for X number of webinars that they will conduct in aid of
instruction of your regular professors. This is what we mean by diversification through
internationalization at home. And with the Philippines trying to catch up in terms of its education
internationalization agenda, this is going to be a renaissance for most of Philippine higher
education institutions, especially within the ASEAN context. And this opportunity that you're
having right now is an illustration that we will diversify in so many ways. Now, I will just have to
speak a little about the way quality assurance has to be researched further, you know, before
COVID-19, if you notice the culture of compliance by a quantitative measures of quality, so high,
and we technically have lower appetite for innovation, which is opposed to the concept of
compliance. But in the post COVID writing scenario, we are likely going to celebrate the short
term wins that we'll have in terms of education during covid 19, where we are actually going to
enjoy more of being recognized for the kinds of innovative programs that we're developing and
less on really comfortable on the number of faculty members with a certain degree, or the
number of collections that you have in your library and so on so forth, which are called part of
our former culture of quality assurance, which will become outmoded, it will not really be that
helpful anymore, because, as I have told you, that single accreditation framework happening or
being implemented, nation states will no longer be the norm. What I am actually forgetting right
now is that if we give a lot of freedom to shape standards, from the vantage point of invitation of
innovation, then quality assurance will become more sensible, flexible and targeted, to borrow
the asset the analysis of again Professor Gavin Carey from Harvard University, and you know
what, I am happy to tell you that because on October 4 2021, cedd, in cooperation with the
Philippine business for social progress and Rex education system, through ese sung ion by Mr.
bata are one nation for children campaign will actually confer the first downward arrow
campaign and maybe your university central because State University of Agriculture may want
to vie for this because the guidelines will be released next month. We are going to select
institutions who have demonstrated excellence in flexible and responsive management, flexible
teaching and learning innovation, responsive research and development and public service and
community engagement. But here we will not just assign points. We will listen to the narrative
change of the institutions because narrativity will become a new norm in terms of quality
assurance in post COVID-19. Why is that? Because in post not COVID-19 quality assurance,
we will not just talk about numbers, but the stories behind the numbers that make an institution
really a beacon of quality, where it's no longer just about the feasibility and viability of
institutional life, that we will be zero important. But desirability, why are those streets desirable,
this means that there is a high degree of impact and innovation that they have created. And if
you haven't been reading the news recently, this is the reason I've named Mandela University in
the recent rankings of higher education institutions in terms of social impact. It's the amount of
social innovation that you're able to do. But what I am most happy about the outcomes is that
there was one state university who made it and that's the Turlock Agricultural University. And I
know how they have been moving away from too much compliance to actually more of
innovation. Now on the rightmost part of your screen is what we call the design thinking model.
See, design thinking is technically deeply connected to the pathways of the nerve activity of
quality assurance, because he talks about empathy as the primary guiding post for pursuing
innovation, because he talks about the actual needs and needs of individuals or institutions in
need of innovation. And then the process becomes iterated here, until they are able to disrupt,
now ignored, disruptive ecosystems in education are likely the ones who can survive any further
types of
discontinuity even in the time of a health crisis, war, and so on, and so forth. And if you are
planning on studying the Charles V beater model, for disruption in education system, you have
to be seriously researching on what programs that are informally structured, technically
supplement the squadron three, and those that technically transform that Squadron four,
because that is quite absent in the scenario that we have right now. Now, the last set of
opportunities for development in education via AI research back, we will have to talk about
emerging business models for schools. Admittedly, if you are a state run school, then you don't
have a problem in terms of funding. In fact, you have a surplus of funding, and there is just too
much for you to think about in terms of how you are, what you can access and how you're going
to maximize it. I don't know in the case of Indonesia, but secret institutions, I believe, are
capable of maximizing these resources. But for questions matter right now, if you are an
academic, managing the business of education, what kind of demands Will you need to become
more mindful of what are the new students or student markets that you will have to be seriously
looking into, for example, in the Philippines, next year, no mandanas clause in terms of
managing fiscal resources of the national government will take effect. This will mean that local
government units or agencies will have more autonomy and freedom in managing their internal
revenue allocations. And for the most part of it, this will benefit not the state universities and
colleges, but the local colleges and universities. And in a little while, I will show you why this is
an interesting area of government investment, because they can yield more participation,
increase retention of people in education, but at the same time, start expanding the sphere to
include other people that can eventually add to margins and revenues, especially for those in
the private sector. Who would like to expand the business of education? I know that for some of
you, you don't feel comfortable being told about the business of education, but you know, you
have to understand you have to run it like a business as well. While it is a social service, by
business, I mean, you have to ensure its viability and sustainability. So what are the trends in
terms of the Emerging business models for schools. First, you have to understand that there will
be a huge push for life wide learning, which means that you no longer have to learn for the sake
of
not of living alone, which means living by level, first year, second year, third year, fourth year
undergraduate, Masters doctoral, but it's really more of enjoying how you learn. So, if you have
programs that are very much restrictive, such that you cannot take one course unless you finish
10,000 requisites, your new emerging markets will feel off about it. And so you must be able to
actually give more liberty and freedom to students, or design their pathway to learning because
that is what we have seen as very effective in engaging students in the COVID-19 scenario. The
second alternative is what we call the believer squareline imperative or directory to academia
imperative, that this is the reason. The reason for this is that during COVID-19, many of us
suddenly realized there's just a lot that we don't know about how disruptions change our lives.
And largely because of that there will be a surge of people who might consider returning to
academia, pursue further studies. But take note, they will not demand full degree programs,
they would want to learn something new in so little time. So think about what I mentioned earlier
as nano and micro credentials, we are seeing the rise of more certificate and associate
programs that will address the needs of the post COVID scenario, because we need to know
more in so little time. The third, the third business model that I was telling you about earlier was
the rise of the Community College. Now more and more people have seen that Metropolitan
hubs and central communities are the ones that are likely to be on shutdown mode when a new
disruption is conceived. So the farther you are from the center, the better. This is the reason
many students from the National Capital Region in the Philippines or from Jakarta, for that
matter, are now shifting back to the provincial educational camps because that's where there's
less likelihood of getting infected. And if this trend continues, the new locus of creativity will no
longer be the cities, but even the small towns or the province that are safer, and actually more
enjoyable, because you can build your academic programs around other provisions for
exploration, leisure, recreation, and so on and so forth. The last scenario that will impact the
business model of school systems is what I call the move diversity movement. In the United
States, and in Europe, a lot of colleges and universities have already shut down in perpetuity.
That means to say that, they will no longer resume operations, even after COVID-19. They just
lost the business. But for some who are still in existence, the best way to actually continue their
operations is to create what I call the most diversity back. It's like a consortium where several
universities come together to offer common degree programs. But in the more diversity, you
don't offer a single degree shared by several colleges or universities. This is where borderless
and customizable degrees actually are offered. So you can have, let's say, the Central State
University of Agriculture and another partner in Indonesia, they don't have common programs,
but students have the capability of electing a new degree at Ace and this is exciting because the
pathway to learn will become heavily customizable. So, my dear colleagues, what I have shown
you here is that the quest for flexibility, both in reconfiguring education and research within this
space will be a concept search for alternatives where your inquiry focus will change. So if we
talk about emerging priorities and alternative methodologies in research in education in the new
normal, and will give you a very simple framework to begin with.
If you are familiar with And Gilbert's hierarchy of intelligence and economic progression
in 1999. You see, it may have been very early for them to think that noise is the capital of
transformation. But you see, when I look back at this framework, I have examined several
frameworks for determining inquiry across COVID-19 scenarios. And this is the one that really
captured my attention. In 1999, they were saying that anything that creates noise should be
what researchers should be picking up it makes sense, actually, because when you pick up
something from the from much of the noise happening around you, let's say disruptions in
education nowadays, you will naturally be drawn towards asking questions, why what is
happening in worse the noise stomach from the moment you ask that, then data arises, and
when you string together, sets of data information is created. And when you challenge what the
information tells you, then knowledge is created. And the moment you translate that knowledge
into useful practices and policies, policies, then wisdom actually begins. And on the other side of
it, you translate these into products, what can make noise can become a product or a
commodity, data can be translated to encode, and information can be translated into a form of
service, knowledge is have knowledge have be have naturally should naturally be translated
into experiences, and wisdom should lead us to transformation. And so this is where I'd like
institutions of research, such as colleges and universities, to promote what we mean by
alternatives that matter within your normal. So these are what I call inquiry pathways, you have
the train your students and faculty members to create what we call pathways to conversation,
allow first your