"FAKE EDS" IS BECOMING FOR EDUCATION WHAT "FAKE NEWS" IS FOR MEDIA - With advanced EdTech as medicine, education will be next area for disruption!

In a world with less stability for society as well as nature, education and peoples' firm knowledge has traditionally been the safe haven that we are used to rely on. Still the traditional ways of learning are not doing its job anymore. And this primarily for two reasons, related to quality as well as price. This in turn renders two alternative solutions from the market, the first being as much disaster as the second is giving us hope - let's do everything in our power to make the latter the winner!

The double trouble with traditional learning

The first thing most people know - In the dynamic world we live in, traditional education is getting more and more obsolete. First all the different scientific research projects takes time to plan and finance, then even more time to assess data, then going on to process and analyse data, and finally structuring and presenting the result.

Then it takes even longer time to transform all these different findings into an aggregated "knowledge" and to translate that into a pedagogic format printed in text books. Then the teachers have to invest a lot of time and energy in learning the findings, while the printing and publishing cost so much so schools have to keep them for years. And by the time the teachers knowledge and the text books findings reaches the students...

... the knowledge taught is totally obsolete. Check.

Check to the degree that leading tech profiles declare that they "don't even care if you graduated from high school" :-O

And then there comes the second issue. Because one would think that with the relevance and quality of traditional schools getting poorer and poorer, it would be compensated by a corresponding decrease in price?But, on the contrary, during the same time the price has instead totally exploded.

Or, like it was defined in an assessment in Forbes recently "If car prices jumped as much as tuition, a base model Toyota Corolla would cost $90,000 today". In fact, the average kid in U.S takes out $35,000 in debt, a 75% increase in 10 years and a rather deep hole for someone who hasn't earned any money to speak of yet. And all this making Americans now owing more for student debt than they owe for credit cards and even for auto loans :-/

If student debt were a stock, every Wall Street analyst would be screaming “bubble.”

The two responses from the market

So, with decreasing quality and increasing prices, what should happen? Well there are two solutions, one on the student side and the other on the market side. The first one is already happening today, with a total tsunami of cheating, where fake eds is soon playing as disastrous role for education as fake news has done for the media world.

No degrees you see on Linkedin have been secured, and people can in fact claim they have whatever credentials they want to. And, in fact, they do - not only lying about anything from PhD degrees to Harvard graduation, but with companies making 7-8 digits a year selling hundreds of thousands fake qualifications from fake universities - slowly making the first huge busts and even wakening up FBI:s interest. And it's not some few bad guys doing this anymore, but instead studies show that more than 70% are willing to lie about their resume, 40% (!) actually do it, and nearly 1/4 even falsify their credentials or licenses. The current formula in the education sector thus is becoming this:

Quality DOWN + Price UP = Fake eds skyrocketing!

So with decreasing quality of traditional education, actually corresponding to increasing prices, one of the two solutions are easily foreseen. With no other alternatives, people stop educating themselves and lie instead.

Luckily, there is a second solution, and this time on the market side. Because all this point to a huge potential for disruption in this market. As one of the last bastions on the market, the education area will eventually fall, and new species will arise to take its place. Already now EdTech is one the five fastest growing industries in the world, with more than 260% global EdTech investment increase during the last five years. The big difference ahead is that this time the development will not merely be conducted by using new technology to repair old processes (MOOCs, OPM, eLearning and LMS etc), but actually innovating totally new ones.And this time these "new ones" will not only be totally fraud-proof, but even fun, relevant and engaging. It is this process me and my team is totally devoted in achieving.

IF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IS AT STAKE HERE, COME JOIN US IN THIS MISSION NOW :-)

Rufus Lidman, Fil. Lic.

Rufus Lidman is one of the worlds’ top 100 tech influencers with 50.000 followers for input with emerging technology within emerging markets. As such he draws his insights from a broad tech experience with PhD-studies within change processes, 5 books on the subject of digital strategy, a serial entrepreneurship with 6 ventures and 2-3 ok exits, and honoured member of the exclusive group of 0,1% companies that has developed apps with more than 10 million downloads. His latest venture is called AIAR, based in Singapore, reinventing learning for emerging markets in general and emerging Asia in particular.