by Garry Pawitandra P. | Learning Innovation and Information Specialist at SEAMEO Secretariat

Much of Southeast Asia have always been filled with stark contrasts. Extremely wealthy urban areas sitting next to slums. Well-developed regions close to underdeveloped ones. More recently, areas with stable digital access and areas without.

This last point is vital in terms of education. As the digital wave crashes in with might, particularly during the covid-19 lockdowns, educators in marginalized areas simply cannot cope. Stable internet access remains a challenge for many Southeast Asians. According to World Bank Data, five out of eleven Southeast Asian countries have lower than the global average percentage of individuals using the internet in 2021, which was at mere 63 percent.

Those with internet also tend to access via mobile, meaning there is a chance that is the only method many can afford. This is not surprising, given the region’s continuing low GDP per capita. With the exception of Singapore and Brunei, other Southeast Asian countries have GDP per capita lower than the global average. Plotted over a decade from 2011, Singapore is the only country with significant growth in GDP per capita, with approximately a USD 19k increase. Most others remain flat with less than USD 1,000 increase, showcasing the region’s persistent wealth gap.

Everyone knows that digital skills are needed going into the future, but how does one walk without legs? If people cannot access digital tools, it is practically impossible to conduct digital learning. Furthermore, the solution is no less complicated, as internet access provision is generally outside the realm of the ministry of education. Digital access is an education issue that requires cross-sectoral solutions, a huge effort in many developing countries.

It is essential, therefore, to inquire about how educators can cope. Indeed, while digital learning remains crucial going into the future, another vital approach with less of a spotlight is problem-based learning.

Like Southeast Asia, the world is also filled with dualities. On one hand is impressive technological developments, such as ChatGPT. On the other are crises that some might argue could have been eradicated years ago, such as hunger and stark wealth gap.

Problem-based learning invites students to make sense of the patterns in their surroundings. It invites students to identify the issues around them and ask the right questions in order to generate effective solutions. Teachers would switch their classrooms from one-way instruction to two-way conversations. Teachers would be challenged to logically curate students’ ideas and guide them to the answers they seek. It is a form of learning that stimulates creativity and problem-solving, skills often cited as essential going into the future, for both students and teachers. Perhaps most importantly, despite its vitality, problem-based learning does not necessitate digital access.

This is not to say that all education systems in Southeast Asia should set technology aside. Digital skills remain crucial. As Industry 4.0 approaches and various organizations go through digital transformations, a lot more jobs will necessitate a certain amount of digital knowledge. As technological developments become more rapid, digital skills would also enable one to adapt more easily. It enables one to access more information and potentially sharpen critical thinking.

That being said, as many programmers would say, programming is truly about problem-solving. The very essence of programming is to build solutions, and the process of programming itself requires a good amount of fixing errors. Consider ChatGPT. While it is tremendously helpful for a lot of things, it still requires effective prompts in order to generate the best responses. One way to come up with these effective prompts is to google them. Thus, a problem-solving process occurs.

The point here is that, while digital skills are an essential tool, problem-solving skills remain the heart of what is vital going into the future. If we go back a few decades to when some of the most successful Southeast Asians today began as entrepreneurs, many of the stories did not begin with them having a comfortable grasp of accounting. Instead, they had what was vital in starting and growing a business, perseverance. Accounting, like digital skills, was the essential tool to running a business, but at the heart of its success is the entrepreneur’s ability to keep going despite failures.

The future generation needs to know that the absence of digital access is not the end of the world. While digital skills remain important, at the core of future skills is problem-solving. Educators and education stakeholders in Southeast Asia must therefore be aware of the presence of problem-based learning. It is the approach that can enable the future for the future generation.