The future of the education and the Metaverse: how the workers of the future will be trained

A mutable job market

Have you ever heard of a Police Drone Operator? Or of a Robot Personality Engineer? Well, if not, that’s just as reasonable as mind-blowing. In a matter of a few years, indeed, completely new roles we have never heard of will emerge out of the job market, while many others will be completely taken over by technology.

Some other, such as construction workers, will undergo an evolution: from being purely carried out by humans, such jobs will be repurposed around technology and will most likely require some sort of IT training, as blockchain, cryptocurrency, the metaverse, self-driving transportation -among the other IT innovations - will become part of our daily lives.

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Given this profoundly mutable and complex context, how will the next generations of workers be trained? Let’s have a look at the skillset, technological tools and methodologies that the younger generations will be soon experiencing when it comes to learning.

Skillset

As we store more and more information in our devices rather than in our brains, we are now less dependent on gaining knowledge and memorising facts. In fact, many things we traditionally learned at school might start to feel a little pointless in the digital age: we don’t necessarily need to learn geography, math skills, or foreign languages…

The tools at our disposal can make the work for us, so what might be useful to master would be to know how to manage those same powerful tools to come up with creative solutions for the increasingly complex problems of our world. Indeed, presenting students with “problems to solve” aims to engage their natural curiosity, which rarely happens when they’re simply presented with abstract information they don’t see the point in memorising. And - correct me if I am wrong - I believe us all have witnessed this exact scenario for many, if not most, of our education years.

As increasingly more manual tasks are taken over by computers, workers will be valued – and already are - for the creativity and intuition that can only come from the human mind. In this scenario, skills such as communication, team working, creativity and critical thinking should be the focus to better prepare students?to apply their knowledge in the 21st-century workplace.

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Knowledge is merely the starting point of creativity; but unfortunately, it seems to be the endpoint of our current education system. Therefore, the education system will need to shift from how-to-do-something based training, to the when-to-do-it, why-to-do-it and how-to-do-it-even-better.

The role of the teacher

In parallel with the changes that will occur in the education field to accommodate the future’s need, also the role of the teacher needs to grows and adapts.

Long way away from the teachers of the past mentioned in Pink Floyd’s “Another brick in the wall, pt.2”, the role of the teacher is evolving into the role of a facilitator of the learning process. Now already and in the future more than ever, the teacher’s responsibility to empower students to take risks, be innovative and seize opportunities will be emphasized.

(Source:?Max Fischer?on?Pexels)

Students will have more control of their own learning journey and it is likely that in the education system of the next years, homework will happen before the lesson: you, as a student, will be watching a structured content recorded by your teacher for you to learn at your own pace. Then, you go to classroom so that the teacher can help you solve the problems. This pedagogic model called “Flipped Classroom” aims at using the time in the classroom to analyse ideas, get involved in debates and group project, while relying on the newest technologies and on the knowledge and experience of the teacher.

The physical space

To enhance a climate of collaboration and innovation, schools and universities will need to replace the formal classrooms with a much wider variety of places for learning — from spaces where large groups can work together to secluded corners for concentration, and everything in between.

According to a report by the?World Economic Forum, “Digital technology is increasingly present, but, as is currently the case, is primarily used as a delivery method to recreate existing content and pedagogies rather than to revolutionize teaching and learning.”

The digital space

The outbreak of the pandemic has accelerated a trend that was already – but slowly - emerging: online learning. Since early 2020 we’ve experienced a profound change in the way we work, study, and pretty much live, with 91 per cent of students worldwide seeing their education disrupted by the pandemic (Unicef).

Eventually, us students will finally be able to come back to class for once and for all, while online learning is here to stay.

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On a side, indeed, endless courses are popping up on the web, where you can learn in relatively short amounts of time basically any subject you might be interested in. Photography, business, arts and crafts, coding, and the lists goes on and on. Top universities are launching their online courses to be followed by curious learners around the world, often offered for free or at an affordable price - which, by itself, constitutes an awesome achievement for the world of education.

Nonetheless, in this era in which learning is right at our thumb and we are promised nanodegrees certificates that guarantees us to land a job in a certain field, the major challenge becomes assessing the quality and reliability of the content we are taught.

Online courses, by the way, is how I approached UX Design for the first time: I purchased a few cheap online courses to get started, and once being able to say that yes, UX was totally my thing, I decided to upgrade my skills to a professional level by pursuing a Master’s Degree in the subject at Barcelona Technology School.

On the other side, there is the formal and institutional education world, which has seen technology become a vital tool in these last two years, as it enabled students to keep up with their education when they couldn’t be physically presents at lectures. Right now, technology is a must when it comes to learning. It is no more just a motivating factor, rather something that needs to be incorporated into the school system to ensure students are equipped with the skills to thrive in a world that is dependent on technology.

Approaching the job market as a new graduate can be a challenge

When starting their career, new graduates often face a challenge: their degree doesn’t easily translate into practice, which can be overwhelming and frustrating when it comes to handle certain professional situation.

The time has come to step the capabilities of technology up another gear and employ it to ensure students are prepared for the demands of the workplace.

A way to achieve this is through digital simulations, which consist of scenarios that replicate real-world challenges, giving them hands-on experiences just like the ones they may face in the future. Simulations provide a safe space to make mistakes and learn from them, which is especially valuable for students pursuing healthcare careers, among the others.

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Developing such tools remains a challenge; however, technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, image recognition and eye-tracking technologies represents a promising beginning of this new frontier of education. On this note, virtual-reality-based learning has been shown to boost grades and students' engagement. A glimpse of what will be of the future of education is given us by the metaverse, accessible through virtual and augmented reality.

The metaverse and its application in the education field

The metaverse is another stage in the evolution of the internet. The same way in which the Internet represented a promising idea in the 80s to later become integral part of our existence, now the metaverse claims something similar: from a project under construction, it could evolve soon into a technology with new uses and capabilities we never previously conceived. ?

What an augmented world could potentially do for the education field is no less than revolutionizing the systems across the world. Everything, from the Milky Way layout to a race car structure, will be transformed into a next-generation learning opportunity. The classroom could be conducting field trips anywhere, from the Arctic to the the Ancient Rome.

(Source: Meta on Youtube)

As education syllabuses struggle to keep up to date with our fast-changing world, the Metaverse could allow expertise to come not only from textbooks and classrooms, but pretty much from anywhere, thanks to up-to-date analysis embedded all over the real world.

As previously stated, our way of learning is now outdated. Even though we now have incorporated the use of technology in the education sector worldwide, the way of learning remains pretty much the same: teacher talking for several hours and students having a hard time focusing and learning.

Given that learning by doing method outshines learning by memorisation, imagine how effective would be to gain hands-on experience through VR, all without the dangerous, real world consequences. This contextual learning experience will allow student to explore real-world examples that fuse multiple disciplines into a single holistic, engaging learning experience.

Studies have repeatedly shown that learning is most effective when it's fun. The metaverse offers the possibility to gamify the learning experience, which basically means that children could be learning without evening realising. Isn’t this the holy grail of education?

For what concerns the ill effects that are going to emerge with regard to the metaverse, it can be said that what happened to the internet will apply to the metaverse as well: although the internet has its own threatening sides, it represented a huge disruption for the education across the world. While this affirmation may oversimplify the complex ethical and privacy concerns that the metaverse arises, I will now leave this topic for another dedicated article.

Why going back to class, if we can learn from anywhere?

From what emerged by these last 20 plus months of online education, we’d be tempted to think that technology is enough to ensure a good quality online education. And, if on a hand this scenario exacerbated the unacceptable digital divide, on the other hand what came to light is that not even the countries with the highest quality technological infrastructure reported satisfaction with the delivery of online education.

South Korea, indeed, is one of countries with the best IT-infrastructure in the world: even before the pandemic, 99.5% of its population had access to the internet and 99% of the country had 4G coverage, which allowed a smooth transition from in-person to online classes. Despite all of this, student reported dissatisfaction, and expressed their preference towards a blended methodology, with a mix of pre-recorded content and in-person activities, rather than passive zoom classes. The case of South Korea is exemplificative, as it reveals that what is needed in this scenario goes beyond technological infrastructures: to fully embrace the possibilities offered by technologies, a lot has to be done about systematic changes and policy reforms.

Another factor that I believe had an impact on the dissatisfaction with online learning, is the lack of a social component. Indeed, learning is a social process and getting to learning with others seems to have better outcomes.

Whether we want to refer to online classes to be followed in groups or online courses to be followed on your own, I believe that the on-campus experience (or, one day, the metaverse immersive experience) can positively affect the learning outcome of us students.?

In my case, despite the uncertainty due to the pandemic, I decided to move abroad to pursue a Master on campus. Even though I could have received the same quality of learning by following the online classes, I didn’t choose to. What didn’t make me question my decision for not even a minute was the desire to meet my future classmates and get to learn, laugh and explore with them. In other words - and I should know well, as experiences is what I study – my decision came down to the desire of having once again the experience of going to university. This urge for the experience was more present than ever in me, especially after almost two years of online classes that culminated with my online graduation.

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Even though technology allowed us to keep up with our education in these last two years, the current advancements are not yet capable of recreating in a digital dimension the learning experience a student can have on campus – which is not perfect at all, either. Hopefully, the metaverse - among the new technologies - will bring about the possibility to experience online learning in a immersive, effective way, with a strong focus on the group learning experience, which, by the way, is the perfect setting to get to learn those team working, problem solving skills, essential to be a creative worker of the exciting future that lies ahead.