Learnit Live - It’s GO time

Exactly one year ago, I started a new role as Chief Global Content Officer at Learnit. 

What a year it’s been -- what a journey for us all.  

Tomorrow morning, 8 March 2021, as schools across the UK reopen their doors to all students, and the world celebrates International Women’s Day, we at Learnit press GO on our first ever virtual global summit, Learnit Live. 

Our theme across this week (8-12 March) is The Future of Learning is Now. 

Why? 

Because in the face of this last year, and our collective experience with Covid-19, there is no more looking toward some distant, hazy future when education might look different, or when we might have to seriously rethink what it is that we need to know and be able to do in this life. 

The time is now, and in fact, those individuals, organisations and systems that have seemingly been most successful during the pandemic, are those who were able to demonstrate what we had been calling future skills: for example, communication, creativity, collaboration, adaptability, resilience.

We’ve got five days of meaningful content lined up -- on lessons learned, actions taken, victories and mistakes. I’ll share a quick whistle-stop tour now. 

• On Monday we’re focused on Systems and listen to stories and discussions about how leaders are working to Build Back Better at the system level in the context of the world’s largest unplanned technology experiment. 
• Tuesday we’ll take a look at K-12 schooling, where we’ve discovered that inclusion, well-being and tech are no longer optional parts of learning.
• Wednesday takes on Higher Education, which is faced with a reckoning, and the potential for a real renaissance on the heels of the pandemic. 
• Thursday, we’ll speak to leaders who are bringing Learning and Work closer and closer together, and helping people find meaning and purpose in their work. 
• And Friday, we’ll talk about the Business of Education, and the incredible past year in edtech investment. As Maia Sharpley, Co-Founder of Juvo Ventures puts it, we are hurtling toward education 3.0 at breakneck speed, and we’ll hear from those who are investing in and building education businesses in an effort to make the concept of a lifelong learning ecosystem real. 

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Our first day of Learnit Live coincides with International Women’s Day. I’m delighted with this overlap for many reasons, but I’ll share with you just two here. 

First, one of the primary reasons our founder Katy Fryatt started Learnit was because of her bright, beautiful, boisterous girls, Eve and Rosie. 

She wanted the conversations about their future, their education, to be every bit as meaningful and substantial as those we dedicate to finance or politics or commerce. I joined her in no small part because I also want that for my daughter, Phoebe. Katy and I are joined by the whole Learnit team in also wanting this for the 132 million bright, beautiful and boisterous girls who are currently outside of education.  

Second, this International Women’s Day is focused on the tremendous efforts by women and girls around the world to shape a more equal future and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We share in that celebration by featuring just some of that work. 

We’ll hear from so many wonderful women leaders on Monday, and across the week, but I’ll mention just two: Edna Cristina Bonilla Sebá, Bogotá’s Secretary of Education and Rangina Hamidi, the Minister of Education for Afghanistan.

Edna will share with us how she seized upon the challenge of the pandemic as an opportunity for civic participation, and student agency, using a fairly simple series of town halls. Her approach was so successful in Bogotá, where there are 800,000 students in the public education system, and 2.3M people across all forms and levels of education, it became the foundation of Colombia’s national education response. 

Rangina is the first female Minister of Education in Afghanistan in over 30 years. She shared with me the efforts underway to extend technology-supported education in a country where so many of the learners have been hard to reach -- some due to infrastructure challenges, others due to conflict. At the end of my interview with her, she made a powerful vow: 

“As long as I’m the Minister of Education, it is my right, and my privilege, and it will be my priority, to allow many, many young girls to grow up and become educated...I was once almost hindered from becoming educated. My father stood up to fight for that, and if he hadn’t back then, I wouldn’t be the Minister of Education today. If I had this opportunity, I want to be able to make this opportunity available to all the little girls in my country.”

The Future of Learning is indeed Now, and Learnit is proud to be supporting and sharing the stories of the leaders and communities who are making it happen. Join us this week to learn more -- we can’t wait to see you.