A Flight into Another Remote Year

Happy New Year, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Thought Habitat, it is my pleasure to welcome you aboard this edition with flight to another remote year 2022 from 2021. Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) protocols and regulations require that you all sanitize, keep social distance,wear face masks,with vaccination as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, our flight is ready for departure. I am sure you will enjoy your flight into and stay in another remote year of 2022 by observing and practicing the following: Remote, did you ask? Yes, remote is the practice of doing studies, shopping and work.

Such locations could include a home, a co-working or other shared space, a private office, or any other place outside of the traditional campus,shopping mall or corporate office building. This is basically Online or Telecommuting, the ability to do your studies, shopping and work at a location other than your official duty station. Telecommuting has shown increasing attention in the recent past and acceptance during the COVID-19 pandemic period.

Indeed,online learning is taking over traditional way of learning.Online learning takes place in an online format and content can be accessed on devices that are connected to the internet at any place or time. This means that students don’t all need to be in the same physical place to take the same course. In many cases of online learning, students are not directly interacting with the teacher or faculty.

Students interact with teachers via chat rooms, forums, email, live online streams where students can engage with their teachers in a live setting.A big chunk of the online learning industry is typically geared to working professionals looking to continue their education or pivot careers entirely through popular online learning platforms like Udacity, Skillshare, MasterClass, and Coursera.

We have YouTubers in India teaching Mathematics and Coding better than universities,free of charge without costly textbooks.However, more and more colleges and universities now offer undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral-level courses and programs conducted entirely online. For instance,Stanford University will start offering a class taught completely in Virtual Reality(VR) using Quest. It is great to see information technology make education more accessible and affordable.

Online learning offers new technologies that have not made it to traditional learning curricula.Traditional curricula and lessons are typically based on a standardized and approved textbooks.In traditional learning it is the teacher who communicates in-person with students gathering in physical classrooms during a certain time frame with the purpose of learning about specific topics or to gain specific hands-on job training and experience.

In the remote year of 2022, we should truly involve education,especially higher education with new technologies in order to encourage our next generation to stay in education and earn more professional skills. Virtual Reality could be used to teach remotely more effectively and is definitely more engaging. It is exciting for what the future holds, especially for remote education and the opportunities it brings for real innovation and change in a system that hasn’t changed much over the past few decades. The online shopping boom, accelerated by COVID-19, has turned millions into e-commerce enthusiasts. Customers will only visit physical locations if there is a profound reason to do so—a better experience, a better result.

Online shopping as a form of electronic commerce allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser. Alternative names are: e-web-store, e-shop, e-store, Internet shop, web-shop, web-store, online store, online storefront and virtual store.

An online shop evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or shopping center; the process is called business-to-consumer online shopping. In the case where a business buys from another business, the process is called business-to-business online shopping. The largest of these online retailing corporations are Alibaba, Amazon.com, and eBay. With or without COVID-19 protocols and restrictions, technology can be used to minimise commuting to and from work.

With modern communication technology,internet with virtual reality(VR) and video telephones,physical travel no longer remains as important. Using VR, we will be able to stay and work at home in a virtual reality office. When we were in the Industrial Age ,most of our jobs centred around on the job to use tools and equipment that could not be used at home.

We are now in the ‘Digital Age’ and more than 60 per cent of all jobs are information based instead of location dependent. With advanced digital technology ,a large segment of our workers and businesses will be done at home or on-line with little disruption of lifestyles and productivity.

With portable computers,mobile phones,high-speed telecommunications links and devices,many of us can work from anywhere in the remote world, and maintain a payroll at your job.Using the flexibility to work from home or a telework centre when it is effective to do so is clearly the wave of the future,and for many of us the future is already here. I write articles using my daughter’s i-pad and send them using my neighbour’s wi-fi home internet connection in my rural home in Africa.

ICT expert Mr Greg Okuogo believes that this technology allows closer proximity to home and involvement with family.He is convinced that “working in the home offers people a greater opportunity to share quality time with family members, to promote and develop family values, stronger ties and unity”. We all stand to enhance the quality of our lives and work through the flexibility that telecommuting offers.

Salaried jobs that can be successfully done at home include accountancy, administrative assistance, journalism, architecture, publishing, sales, marketing, secretarial, human resource management, education and training. Between 1998 and 2011, I did my consultancy work for a US Government funded project at Marquette university from my bedroom!

I run my business and consultancy from home.

Most of today’s jobs can be broken down into three stages namely:

Research: The stage where the employee gathers the needed information for the assignment. This is what I did with this story assignment by speaking with experts and practitioners as well as doing on-line research.

Production:The stage where creative work is done and is ideal for telecommuting. This is when the reporter writes and the architect draws. It at this stage where constant interruptions of an office or home environment often work to hinder the creative process.

Presentation: This is the final stage where the finished product be it a book,article or multimedia presentation is delivered to your supervisor,employee or client.