Virtual/Blended Delivery and the Future of Learning: A Reflection From Practice

This paper analyses teaching and learning practices in two diverse national contexts using reflection from experience. As an educator, I have experienced diverse teaching and learning contexts at different stages of my teaching journey. This diverse context experience, which ranges from my learning as a student in the traditional classroom environment in Nepal in the late 70s and early 80s with changing context of education delivery in early 2000 as an educator, and finally to the modern classroom environment with the virtual mode of delivery in the New Zealand tertiary sector, has encouraged me to reflect on my professional practice. I am using Mitra’s conceptual framework of the school in the cloud in my reflexivity. Sugata Mitra, through his school in the cloud concept, encourages disrupting the traditional system of education that acknowledges teachers as the core of knowledge. Instead, Mitra suggested that computer and the internet could act as a medium of knowledge without the active involvement of teachers. In this paper, I analyse and discuss how Mitra’s concept of self-organised learning could be applied to the future of learning in the 21st century.