In February's blog post, CEO Juha, Training Coordinator & Trainer Tiina, and Customer Support Specialist Antti write about the obstacles to the digital leap in language training observed by Promentor.
Juha: I feel that universities' conservative approach to training is a significant obstacle to realizing the digital leap in language teaching. When I hired more language teachers in January, interviews revealed that a language teacher graduating this spring from the University of Helsinki had not taken a single course related to digitalization at the university. Such courses are not included in the curriculum at all, which greatly surprises me. What decade is the university living in? This graduating language teacher had never used a single digital educational program and had no readiness to train live online. Tools completely unknown to them for training included Skype, Adobe Connect, and WebEx, among others. The situation was identical for graduates from the University of Jyväskylä. As a result, there is now an enormous need for continuing education in digital content and digital tools in the field. This is not the only issue, of course; the entire infrastructure and technology pose their own challenges. Networks lag, audio doesn't work, video fails, connections drop, settings aren't configured correctly... Sometimes it feels like the array of problems is endless.
Tiina: I have observed that the obstacle is often teachers' and trainers' established teaching methods and hesitation to jump into the unknown. Teachers are also far from always trained for online instruction. Whether due to lack of resources or other factors, there are certainly many different reasons. Furthermore, many organizations have established ways of handling training, along the lines of "we've always done it this way..." One client estimated that it takes a really long time to get employees to use a cloud-based platform where training materials are stored. Employees in many traditional organizations are simply not used to using such platforms. Technical challenges also continue to slow down the transition to online training. Especially if many issues occur initially, people may get discouraged about online training altogether.
Antti: I feel that traditional teaching methods still strongly influence decisions in the background. Digital materials are often thought to be expensive, which may be because people don't know how to request a quote for digital materials and/or aren't aware of the possibilities. Some online materials are not good enough, or a teacher might have the impression that online material is never good. For many teachers, digital materials remain a "bogeyman". The teacher fears whether students will learn with them and what happens when they make mistakes themselves. Additionally, using digital materials can feel cumbersome, and teachers might fear that technology will replace their jobs. A teacher might also think that it's impossible to track whether students actually use the materials or that studying online requires extremely high motivation to succeed.
Yet Promentor runs live online courses, and tens of thousands of people use Promentor's online material. Promentor operates very stably; support services are requested for only about one hour a month. So challenges are by no means endless; despite everything, we believe Finland is on its way toward technically smoother and pedagogically superior online education.
