Abstract:
Closed campuses, working remotely, and physical distancing have changed the way we work, teach, learn, shop, attend conferences, and interact with family and friends. But the Covid-19 pandemic has not changed what we know about creating high-end online education. Two decades of research has shown that online education often fails to fulfill its promise, and the emergency shift to remote instruction has, for many, justified their distrust and dislike of online learning. Low interactivity remains a widely recognized short-coming of current online offerings. Low interactivity results, in part, from many faculty not feeling comfortable being themselves online. The long-advocated for era of authentic assessments is needed now more than ever. Finally, greater support is needed for both underrepresented students and for faculty to move beyond basic online instruction to create a strong continuum of care between the teaching and learning environment and the student support infrastructure. For those who have been long-term champions of online education, it has never been more important to confront the three biggest challenges that continue to haunt online education – interactivity, authenticity, and support. Only by confronting these challenges squarely can instructors, educational developers, and their institutions take huge steps towards better online instruction in the midst of a pandemic and make widespread, high-quality online education permanently part of the “new normal.”
Imagination is needed in marketing to create new value sets to consumers that separate new products from others. This requires originality to create innovation. Imagination is the essence of marketing opportunity that conjures up images and entices fantasy to consumers, allowing them to feel what it would be like to live at Sanctuary Cove in Northern Queensland, Australia, receiving a Citibank loan, driving a Mercedes 500 SLK around town, or holidaying in Bali. Imagination aids our practical reasoning and opens up new avenues of thinking, reflection, organizing the world, or doing things differently. Imagination decomposes what already is, replacing it with what could be, and is the source of hope fear, enlightenment, and aspirations.
Imagination is not a totally conscious process. New knowledge may incubate subconsciously when a person has surplus attention to focus on recombining memory and external stimuli into new meanings. Most people tend to spend a great deal of time while they are awake “daydreaming”, where attention shifts away from the present mental tasks to an unfolding sequence of private responses. This may be enough to activate our default network, a web of autobiographical mental imagery, which may provide new connections and perspectives about a problem we have been concerned with. Recent research has shown that the brain periodically shifts phase locking during a person’s consciousness, where neural networks activate and these brief periods may be enough to allow the dominant left hemisphere give way to the right hemisphere, enabling a person to see the environment, problem or issue from a new perspective.