05. Where we are headed

There are multiple aspects each university must consider when designing a Digital Education strategy for the future. Tecnológico de Monterrey has redefined its strategy based on the context, learnings, previous experience, and greater knowledge of the needs and expectations of students, teachers, administrators, employers, and parents.

However, beyond each institution’s internal actions, Digital Education can be a bridge between various institutional strategies to create a regional-global training platform. This opportunity to create content, collaborations, exchanges, and joint projects to tend to the training needs of different markets throughout their life is a topic that can be addressed by creating interinstitutional networks supported by using technologies and strategies based on digital modalities. Furthermore, the result can be enriched through continuous work with other social sectors to help identify and narrow down answers to different training opportunities.

Digital Education has the potential to be a lifelong tool, but it would be severely limited if this approach only came from internal proposals from each institution. The value of the proposals would only be realized when built collaboratively. We must leverage learning and take advantage of the fact that geographic limitations have vanished, and we can have a “global virtual university.”

On the other hand, incorporating educational technology to enable innovative didactic strategies is part of Tecnológico de Monterrey’s essence. The knowledge acquired over decades in digital educational experiences, in addition to what was learned during the transformation of teaching during the pandemic, has been a catalyst to enrich the digital learning experiences of our students from various perspectives. The traditional face-to-face courses will integrate digital experiences to generate deep, lasting, and valuable learning for each student. Because of this, the different teaching modalities (enriched face-to-face, hybrid, and online) will integrate organically into the institution’s educational offering.

Nowadays, we know that digital learning experiences are actually “multi-experiential”: they occur in the classroom, but also in industry, in the community, at home, at a physical or virtual laboratory, as well as in immersive spaces with extended reality, including Tec Virtual Campus, Tecnológico de Monterrey’s educational metaverse. This variety of experiences allows for the generation of significant learning for the student, applicable to multiple contexts.

The vanishing of borders represents an opportunity for those students who couldn’t study at the institution to do so now. This globalization will also allow our faculty to share their knowledge with students from other countries and work on collaborative projects with peers from other educational institutions and the industry in general through virtual environments. Collaboration between higher education institutions, businesses, and organizations will be vital in transforming education.

Likewise, integrating artificial intelligence and using learning analytics to make decisions will be handy tools to improve teaching-learning processes. Thanks to adaptive technology and planned and effective didactic strategies, instruction will focus more on the personalization of learning based on the student’s experience, grades, curriculum, and interests, among other essential aspects to enrich their education. Individualization and personalization could include different paths for each student, different contents, different tests, and even different formats to gather learning evidence based on the student’s needs.

At Tecnológico de Monterrey, we are convinced that quality training should not be only face-to-face but that Digital Education must be formally integrated into the educational offering to enrich the learning experience of our students and ensure deep, lasting learning for them.

06.

What challenges and opportunities will there be in education?

The future of Digital Education represents not only the opportunity of assimilating and integrating all the new technologies on the market but also an opportunity for education experts to design innovative solutions, pedagogically relevant and that consider technology not as an end but as a means to enhance experiences and accelerate personalized and flexible learning processes.

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