While the world is getting more digitally flat, so are the ways of learning. It brings more opportunities and challenges for future generations in acquiring knowledge faster and retaining them for a more extended period. In this context, we have seen thousands of learning applications worldwide that offer learners opportunities to take their studies online at any time from anywhere as long as an internet connection is available. What remains is a question that lies upon the phenomena, i.e., “how we could further optimize the online learning approach for building and/or developing an individual’s capability and capacity, and whether such a way brings more value to the individuals.?”
Through some observations and reviews, we find that most of the existing online learnings focus on and are built upon cognitive aspects that emphasize the uniformity and mass-oriented of deliveries. We say that this approach is ordinary online learning which has its own merits to help learners acquire knowledge. However, although such an approach could be considered sufficient to meet current demand, an elaboration to seek a practical method remains as the world becomes more dynamic, and future generations might need a different and more effective way of learning. Further, the need to address individual specific during the online learning mechanism is rising, yet less currently evidenced.
In this context, we observe the possibility of using the combination approach of learning, which intensively uses digital technology and relevant psychological elements. As such, it might give learners room to acquire knowledge broader, faster and at the same time provides them longer retention of the knowledge that has been acquired. The combination approach is called Dichology – an abbreviation of the digital-psychology way of learning.
Dichology tries to embed psychological elements into digital platform learning so learners could acquire knowledge broader, faster, deeper, and longer retention due to individual contextualization and internalization. It might require features that would touch not only the brain but also the emotionally sensoric driven of learning. Some partial efforts and experiments have been made to observe the effectiveness of Dichology-based online training instead of ordinary-based online learning. As such, random observations were conducted over adult participants who attended a series of training in risk management at some executive education series. It was found that the participants who had been given a dichology-based learning approach showed a better result in terms of the acquisition of knowledge during the training and longer retention of the knowledge post-training.
Whilst this thought of dichology is still very much basic and the observations are still very limited, the concept is worthwhile to be elaborated through systematic and well-structured academic and/or observation-based empirical research. The findings might open a new horizon of the way of learning for future generations.
By Dr. Antonius Alijoyo, 4 October 2021
Founder of Center for Studies in Governance, Risk Management, Compliance and Sustainability
