The Educational Rollercoaster

The educational rollercoaster

Schools, universities and the academic world will need to act as trees, generating the oxygen of the digital revolution by developing skills and capabilities to future-proof and make learners ready for the 21st century. The distance between the skills needed for the jobs of yesterday and the ones of tomorrow is widening. Fundamentally education has not truly evolved over the past few decades, and an educational digital evolution is not defined by using iPads in the classroom or one or two hours of IT classes.

Tintin Snack: teaching didn’t change. In 2014 my son decided to start his five year studies of Business Engineering at the University of Ghent, the same studies as I completed at Brussels University 1988–1992. What had changed since then? The presentations are done in PowerPoint with video and a student university website. Beyond that nothing had changed in more than twenty-five years. It was as if time hadn’t moved on, despite the digital revolution, having digital at our fingertips, the new digital savvy generations, the entrepreneur and start-up culture.

How do we adapt the current models of education to bring it closer to the real world? How do we save students from boredom? How do we teach in an appealing way? How do we integrate business with students? How do we give the same access to the poorest and the richest in our society? How do we leverage the newest innovations like artificial intelligence, bots, virtual reality, 3D printing and gamification in the classroom?

AI could help us, through machine learning, to personalise education as it could learn from each student. Gamification could be used to reward and motivate people. Remote access to educational platforms, like the Peer-to-Peer University, Khan Academy, Coursera, etc., already give us a whole offering of online educational courses. The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) allow educators to create courses and reach students wherever they are in the world. Are we going to see an educational world that’s future-proof, flexible and adjusted to the needs of today and tomorrow? This debate is heating up around the world.

The question is how do we not only teach the basics, but also prepare students for tomorrow’s job market where innovation will automate some tasks or replace jobs? Completely new jobs are being created and specialised skills are needed to cope with the robots and sensors of the future. Teachers and the education system need to embrace the mindset of the digital future by seeing what is happening and understanding new generations.

‘Schools and universities should not be built to produce more teachers and professors,’ Sir Ken Robinson, English author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts to the government, non-profits, education and arts bodies, once said, ‘but should help them to unleash their creativity, and focus on how to be creative with technology.’

This race for talent is happening in all parts of the world, across all industries, sectors and establishments. We will need an education system that people can go to for constant learning at different stages of their lives. In the old sequence of learn, earn and return, the main constant will be learning. If we don’t sign up, we risk being left behind. The way we think about constantly enhancing our teams’ capability and technology adoption, as well as spurring creativity, is already a critical differentiator. As Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important that knowledge’.

How can we try to address this?A second language is a must have for new generations. That second language should be computer coding. Teaching people to code opens them up to the digital world. There are many initiatives, like CoderDojo and Minecraft for schools, around the globe to help get more people coding, and attract more women and get youngsters exposed to it faster. Digital seeing is the language of understanding in this new digital world. Programming teaches us how to think logically and how to solve problems going far beyond the one or two hour IT courses we know today.

The language of understanding is digital seeing.

The World Economic Forum published the ‘Eight Digital Skills We Must Teach Our Children’. Those skills, called Digital Intelligence or DQ, are a set of social, emotional and cognitive abilities to make children ready for their digital life, covering areas like safety, digital identity and digital communication, and they’re all embedded in core values and norms such as respect, empathy and prudence. Governments, schools and parents will need to work hand-in-hand to make these skills happen as they will need new types of teachers, and teachers to teach teachers.

In addition to coding skills, only 18% of companies believe they have the skills necessary to gather and use insights effectively. Only 19% of companies are confident that their insight-gathering processes contribute directly to sales effectiveness. Simply collecting data does not unleash its business effectiveness. It’s not the amount of data that’s important, it’s what we do with the data that matters. We need the talent to understand, organise and report on the data so we can use it. These data skills need to be taught.

In her book Rookie Smarts: Why learning beats knowing in the new game of work, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explains how experience can be a curse. Being in the mature quadrant of the Dualarity model can actually hold you back: Careers stall, innovation stops, and strategies grow stale. Being new, naïve, and even clueless can be an asset. For today’s knowledge workers, constant learning is more valuable than mastery.

As you can see, new capabilities and skills are needed for the jobs of the future. Digital literacy is needed together with numeracy and literacy. And STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) will remain important, but will need to evolve. As Peter Vander Auwera, Co-founder of Innotribe: SWIFT’s innovation initiative, says, ‘Add the A of Art to STEM and you have STEAM. STEAM would also be reformulated as Social, Technologies, Entrepreneurship, Aesthetics and Mindfulness.’

We might see the emergence of the University of Things connected to the Internet of Things and to business.

Move yourself into the healthy quadrant. Be open for constant learning. Complacency is the curse in the mature quadrant.

Olivier Van Duüren

The Dualarity™

+32 475 41 32 44

www.thedualarity.com