Learning Futures

Automation has the potential to replace or alter 35 million jobs worldwide, which means universities must adapt to survive, argues Nancy Gleason

Friday, 18 August 2017

Be inspired by future focused presenters, supported by a series of case studies and hands-on workshops across all education sectors K – 12.

Hear from world leading inspirational thinker, Lee Watanabe Crockett who will engage, excite and challenge delegates as he explores how we prepare global digital citizens of the future.

Designed to share pioneering and innovative practice, this conference will see delegates explore strategies to engage students in transitioning to student-centred 21st century learning.

The sooner we let imagination become, as the Walt Disney Company would put it, “imagineering,” the better off we will be. Immersive learning will surpass active learning, which in its day surpassed passive learning in effectiveness.

Campus leaders should support bold, visionary efforts at creating new learning models.

“Imagineered” innovation will not always work perfectly, and sometimes it will not work at all. But vastly improved student learning is at stake. Using our base elements of today, we can make gold and improve the lives of our children by 2025.

How colleges and universities can create a responsive classroom by using data to help courses keep up with changing markets and personalize learning.

When it comes to continuing education and skills-based learning, one of the biggest challenges that universities face is ensuring quality and uniformity of results.

Students trust universities to deliver on the promise that every topic taught is relevant, marketable, and will lead to clear returns on their investments (ROIs). But how do universities respond to changing market demands and variable classroom profiles, while also administering to the needs of thousands of students each year? How can institutions create a responsive classroom?

This is where data analytics comes in. By building infrastructures for data analysis, universities can more readily glean insights from the classroom and more quickly respond to the needs of students and employers alike.

In our own university-partnered web development program, we make use of a range of data analysis tools to create the responsive classroom, such as those for tracking everything from student sentiment and GPA distribution, to curriculum pacing and difficulty level, to market demand and requirements for job opportunities.

This is not a simple problem and we have to stop seeing it that way

Often, when I talk to rich people about the success of Crash Course, they get really excited really fast. They often see it as a path into something they want very badly, which is to address the extraordinarily broken system of education in America. A system that hasn’t seen significant innovation in a hundred and fifty years. A system that is leaving students behind because of nothing more than bureaucracy and stagnation. A system that treats students like products in a factory. A system that they, if only they had the power, could fix with their brilliant vision and ambition.

Erika Bachis, a student at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, and founder of children’s media startup Marabhale Pictures, recently asked me a number of interesting questions about developing multiplatform content for kids in the digital age. Since the talk offers a rare glimpse of how my company, Starlight Runner Entertainment, works with major studios like the Walt Disney Company, I thought I’d share the answers with you.

In a fast-moving field like education technology, it’s worth taking a moment to take stock of new developments, persistent trends and the challenges to effective tech implementation in real classrooms. The NMC Horizon 2015 K-12 report offers a snapshot of where ed tech stands now and where it is likely to go in the next five years, according to 56 education and technology experts from 22 countries.

http://www.weforum.org/

Australia's education system is not preparing students for twenty-first century success. 

Young Australians are studying for longer than ever before but are disengaged and struggling to find permanent jobs. Young people entering technology-rich, global, competitive job markets need different skill sets to what our education system has traditionally valued.

Unless schools broaden learning objectives, many students will fail to become capable, successful adults – putting Australia’s social and economic wellbeing at risk. 
Young people need to bring more than knowledge to the modern workforce. The most crucial capabilities for the future include critical thinking, creativity, curiosity and communication skills.

Our approach to education is not equipping young people with the broad capabilities that will enable them to thrive in complex education and employment settings. It is time Australia made changes to prioritise teaching, assessing and reporting capabilities. 

Getting Out of the Current Comfort Zone

At present we remain constrained, even trapped, by the need to stay close to traditional approaches. Intellectually, we understand the need to bend the innovation curve that implements cognitive neuroscience and related research to a nearly vertical climb, but we are nervous about doing so, based on the pointed and determined resistance from accreditors, evaluation systems, and/or internal constituencies.

Collectively, our behavior is at times reminiscent of toddlers who want to head off on their own and explore, but who stop every so many feet and turn to check in with an adult to make sure that things are still okay. It takes us a while to get comfortable heading off into the greater unknown, even when we know we must.

The sooner we let imagination become, as the Walt Disney Company would put it, “imagineering,” the better off we will be. Immersive learning will surpass active learning, which in its day surpassed passive learning in effectiveness.

Campus leaders should support bold, visionary efforts at creating new learning models.

Teachers, this playbook is for you. Some of you might be wondering how best to serve an increasingly diverse group of students with complicated needs. Some might be facing more devices and other technology in your classrooms and wondering what your role is in a world where instruction can be delivered from so many different sources. Some might be concerned with students’ low performance in school and failure to launch after school. If you have any of these concerns, then this playbook is intended to ease your load. Your journey to improve your classroom and meet the needs of today’s students is not in the dark; successful managers outside of education, combined with the teachers in the pilot schools in this playbook, together illuminate a number of moves that can help you better meet the needs of students today.

How can our education system better prepare us for an exponential future?

Sue Suckling on The Future of Education

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It’s no secret that there is an engagement issue in edtech. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most online courses have 3–7% completion. There’s also a large mismatch between consumer expectations (“I will become an expert in Python in a few hours”) and what these platforms deliver. Hopefully, as awareness grows about the immense value of lifelong learning and the commitment it deserves, this latter problem will disappear. Meanwhile, how do we build a more engaging learning experience online?
Like many others, I have registered on several online platforms and downloaded many apps for courses, skills and languages I would like to learn more about— Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, CodeAcademy, Duolingo and Stanford Online just to name a few popular ones. I also read weekly newsletters on design, analytics and entrepreneurship that often add up to the knowledge base of a course or a book over time.

New ways to deploy artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, gamification and robotic telepresence are making their way into classrooms across the globe every day. Two leaders in the field of online learning are building a website called Virtually Inspired to curate examples of what they consider the most promising efforts.

Susan Aldridge, senior vice president for online learning at Drexel University and president of Drexel University Online, and Marci Powell, chair emerita of the U.S. Distance Learning Association, looked at more than 250 projects deploying new technologies in online learning and initially narrowed that number down to approximately 50 they plan to highlight on their website, which is still a work in progress.

If you ask kids today why phrases like “hang up” the phone or “roll down” the window exist, chances are they’ll have no idea. Fast-forward to the near future and “search the web” may also cause a few head scratches.

“We’re evolving, but remain electronic ‘hunters and gatherers,’” explained Ralph Lucci, cofounder and user experience director at Behavior Design.

But that’s about to change thanks to today’s quickly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology for practically every industry, including education. “The day will soon come when we’ll sardonically ask ourselves: ‘Remember when we had to visit a website and look around for what we needed?’ Now the data comes to us.”

And while mainstream AI isn’t at that level just yet, innovative industries and some schools are already either beginning to implement AI basics or planning to structure entire departments or services on the potential power of AI.