The Future of Learning

There is an old joke in venture capital circles that says the only two numbers that really matter are infinity and zero.  The truth is, we are starting to see the forces that will define education and learning in the next few years racing to these two numbers.

I increasingly believe the future of education and educational technology will be defined as fast, cheap, mobile and deep.  Networks are approaching near infinite speed improvements, costs are racing to zero, mobile computing takes location based barriers to zero, while deep virtual reality technology allows for infinite opportunities to teach with practice and simulations. To be sure, no force arrives at either number, but the direction and pace of change are staggering.

My profound hope is that these forces act as catalysts for the educational leaders of the future as they go about changing the world through the power of learning.  It is no small task. Too often we have looked to the past, only sought answers in data, or worse yet, educational mythology and anecdote, as the solution to our problems.  

I believe we are at an inflection point with respect to the speed of change globally.  And that speed of change demands a new speed of learning. We need leaders to unearth and understand trends in real time and to bring awareness to things as they are actually happening to better provide leadership at the speed of change. In the fields of education and learning, the only way to accomplish this is to have leaders that lead from the future.

I see the future of learning and education being defined by four primary forces:

Fast

Network speeds are exponentially faster than just a few years ago, and I expect continued increases allowing educators to distribute rich and highly dimensional content at massive scale at the speed learning happens.

Further, and in parallel, we are all hungry for shorter and more focused programs allowing us to deploy skills immediately.  Learning will be focused and atomized, allowing learners to enter and exit learning opportunities much faster.

As digitization has disrupted other industries, it normally collapses the traditional notion of time. We can now order items on Amazon for same day delivery, we can send large documents instantly instead of waiting on the mail....etc. Education is the next space to have its notion of time completely upended by digitization.  Highly focused learning supported by rich content delivered at blazing speeds will allow faster learning which more closely matches with modern learner demands. Students will be able to learn more, and they will learn it faster.

Cheap

Massive amounts of data can be stored for next to nothing. That data can be sent for next to nothing. Chromebooks are $200 and tablets are $50. The cost to deliver technology to an individual student has reduced 10x in 10 years.

This is allowing for costs to students in any learning environment to be reduced, and students have new models and options for pursuing learning.  Low cost subscription or membership models now offer extraordinary learning opportunities. Or, students are free to pursue an apprenticeship and still pair that with massive amounts of free formal learning content they can access online.  As economic barriers are reduced, opportunities and competition increase. The future will be won by educators that pursue fundamentally new and innovative revenue models and the students that leverage them.

Mobile

On a mobile phone, an 11 year old student has access to more information today than the President of the United States had at his disposal 20 years ago. This has profound implications for learning.

Increasingly, what we think of as the internet will be the mobile version and we will think of the desktop as the limited and knocked down version. By 2020, we will have 3 billion people across the globe with a mobile super computer in their pocket, and for many of them, that mobile device is the only internet and computing device they will ever know.

Mobile will cease to be a feature of a learning product as it will be the primary platform by 2020.  And increasingly, the interface for mobile is moving from touch to voice.

Too often, I speak to folks in education and they either "want to do something in mobile" or they have taken something like an LMS and pushed it into a mobile enabled delivery.  This is now a mobile first world.  In a few short years, we will all build for mobile as the first and primary platform.  The sooner you get there, the sooner you and your learners win.

Deep

Rich, immersive and highly dimensional simulations are arriving and are here to stay.  Commonly thought of as virtual reality, the impact of being able to put learners through deep and immersive simulations will usher in a new era of educational delivery. To be able to repeatedly simulate and practice in a highly realistic way has been every teachers dream, and the technological tools to do this will be at scale in a few short years.

Over the past few years, as we put the worlds courses and training online, we did a great deal to increase access, but we did little to enhance actual learning.  Consumer virtual reality tools will help us cross that bridge and will enable real and meaningful leaps in learning.

When combined with the rise of mobile, consumer virtual reality being used in a classroom or distributed setting becomes a reality.  I envision virtual reality viewers, like the GearVR, as the new top layer on the mobile technology stack representing a choice in display for the end user.  If you want to read 2-D content on your phone, you can do that. And when you are ready for a highly immersive virtual reality experience, you simply drop the same phone into your viewer and begin to simulate and practice.

Products that are Social, Experiential and Personalized

These forces will enable us to realize the core opportunities of the products we are seeing arrive now.  Learners are gravitating towards learning that is increasingly social, experiential and personalized. These three product domains represent where a great deal of exciting innovation is happening. We see a company like Yoi that has developed experiential learning platforms to manage new employee on boarding over the course of a year, and we know this represents an approach to learning that is future oriented. It is a brilliant use of technology to attack an age old problem.  RealizeIT is leveraging predictive learning technology to build learning maps for students to help guide them with content and exercises on their own personal journey to learning a subject and skill. There are many new and exciting examples of a social LMS which allows learners to learn from each other and to combine content in powerful new and more social ways. We should all challenge ourselves to consider what products like these might offer by 2020 as they becomes faster, cheaper, mobile, and deeper.

What is critical is that we continue to develop and leverage technologies that allow for maximum learning and eventual impact on our organizations. If we think of learning in teams and organizations as having layers, we can continue to look for innovative technology that allows us to support those layers and better unlock the inherent potential in each, as we should have new innovations for each layer to better segment the learning process and better capture ROI. 

For example, meaningful and rich content can be served in immersive and mobile environments consumed in virtual reality, leading to comprehension and thought we should explore and track in increasingly social ways on a social LMS, which allows us to develop processes that impact the organization and structures we work within.

The challenges before us are deeply engaging, and the opportunities border on infinite.  But with increasing opportunity comes accountability.  As educators, we must continue to understand our opportunity to change the world occurs one student at a time, and in a hyper speed world that is consumed with the idea of building scale, it has never been easier to lose sight of the individual experience. If we get that right, we can change the world one learner at a time, and do it better and faster than we initially thought was possible.  

I am glad you are thinking about this and a part of the journey, and I cannot wait to see what you add and create.