Changing Education Forever

Education, for very long, has been a revolution waiting to happen. We thought the EdTech entrants who emerged with digitization would ‘change education forever.’ Yet the universities prevailed. However, the very advent of EdTech was signaling to us that change had taken root, seeded by a shift in work, workplaces and workforce. This change, gradual for years, has now reached a tipping point during the Coronavirus outbreak from which there’s no looking back.

Back then

In the past, problem solving was the common denominator for all learning. We spent the first third of our lives educating ourselves to acquire the skills we would need to become problem solvers. We learnt a broad range of skills just in case we might find use for it later at work. We then applied them, for the next two thirds of our lives, to solve known problems of a specific kind depending on the vocation we chose. The tasks we executed were typical of our professions, and sometimes we changed jobs, but rarely our professions.

With digitalization, work has been reshaped – from tasks executed by humans alone to projects driven by humans+machines. With software-powered machines evolving to be our problem solving partners, we must learn to frame the right problems for machines to solve. This means being able to navigate unfamiliar situations, and gaining new skills for new work. Just-in-time learning, on the job, in short spurts, proves so much more valuable for problem-finders than years spent earning degrees. This shift from degree-based education to skills-based continuous learning was first facilitated by the early EdTech innovators. They enabled emerging lifelong learners.

Just now

Today, as our workplaces evolve faster and the half-life of our skills are cut short, we’ll learn new skills to work new kinds of jobs and even change our professions several times before we hang up our boots. Education must transform to match this new reality. Gone are the days when we thought governments must focus on education, and enterprises on creating employment. Educators targeting enterprise learners, policy makers and businesses themselves have been coming together in consortiums to expand education for a changing workforce. The post-pandemic reality will bring bigger shifts in our work, workplace and workforce. We are discovering the merits of making smaller packets of effort, in bursts of greater intensity and learning must follow suit. It must reach across distributed workspaces, beyond the workplace and include gig workers who will become an integral part of our workforce.

The future

Big tech companies will come to serve many of these needs as they step forward to offer higher education. Professor Scott Galloway, at NYU Stern School of Business, makes the interesting observation that higher education is the only space where the biggest brands count their worth by the number of potential customers they turn away. He describes the likes of MIT, Oxford, and Stanford as luxury brands offering value through education certification and the college experience. With the experience part muted and intermittent at best in the new normal, the value of traditional elite education, almost overnight, has begun to feel less compelling. And according to Galloway, big tech partnerships enabling universities to offer hybrid online-offline degrees, will now ‘change education forever’.

These big tech players will democratize education. They will act as mega platforms offering micro services in the form of modularized learning content, that can be consumed lifelong in highly personalized, smaller sprints of education made possible by data unbundling and digital delivery. Now education, in the form of micro learning made available just in time, will follow work into our workplaces, homes, anywhere and anytime.

Lasting change

For education to be reinvented in the truest sense, it must nurture lifelong learners as early as from their K12 days. We must go from the current constructs of passive knowledge transfer by a sage on the stage to developing a sense of agency in every child shaping her own learning, driven by her own goals, with a guide on the side. Schools like Red Bridge run by teachers like Orly Friedman are doing a fine job here. We must find a way to scale the change. And change education for good.

I have invited a panel of America’s finest thinkers, in the space, to share their thoughts with us.

Joanne Berger-Sweeney, President, Trinity College, Dr. Michael M. Crow, President, Arizona State University, Indra Nooyi, Former Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo, and Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times Columnist and Pulitzer Prize Winning Author will join me in a webinar on Thursday, June 11th for 60 minutes 8:00 am PDT | 11:00 am EDT | 4:00 pm BST. We’ll be talking about all this and more. To join us, please REGISTER here.