The skills, attributes and technology know-how we need to help prepare future-ready learners: Meet Aishah Davis of FutureLearn

Aishah is Partnership Development Director for Spain & Latin America at FutureLearn, where her role is to create partnerships with higher education institutions, industry partners, and other educational organisations to make quality education accessible world-wide. It’s therefore her job to know about trends in digital education and in remote learning, especially for career readiness. We caught up with her to ask her about her own career, and to share her tips with our Educator Tribe at Xperienceships so that our careers leaders can prep students for the working world they will face very soon.

Read on for the full interview, or watch a snippet on our YouTube Thought Leaders Playlist.

Xperienceships: How well did your formal studies prepare you for the job that you're doing today, and what did you have to learn outside of your formal training?

A:  I think I'm no exception to the majority, whereby they end up working in a very different sector from their formal education. The degree to which my formal studies are applicable to what I do now, no, I don't use it on a daily basis, let's be honest. But the experience of that time and the skills that I learned during that time, those were important for my current role, and every role I've held up until now. I'm talking critical thinking, communicating effectively and persuasively, those types of things. Those are things that you all that we tend to cover in a formal education, and they're invaluable skills.

I think one of the things that every university graduate has trouble with when they're interviewing for their first “proper jobs”, after getting out of formal education, they really struggle to communicate their value. And I think that's because they haven't been trained or even told what value they've acquired, yet they have acquired so much. So I think that's an important thing for universities to consider in terms of preparing students for the workforce: making sure that they're actually conscious of what skills they've gained during the university experience, because it's not only about knowledge transfer, it's about what you can do with the skills that you've acquired during that that time?

X: We work mainly with high schoolers. Do you think that consciousness of skills acquisition is something we could start earlier on?

A: Most definitely. I think the same thing applies to secondary education. In high school, we had to give presentations relatively frequently, we had to do research analysis projects, things like that.These are things that you come out of high school with, but we're not told, or even made conscious of the fact that these are skills that we've gained. So the same thing applies to high school as it does to higher education. Only that in higher education, you hone those skills a little bit more.

X:  Could you tell us a little bit about working at FutureLearn? 

A: FutureLearn is a learning marketplace, and the overarching business model is lifelong learning. Originally founded by the Open University in the UK, what we've always done at FutureLearn is partner with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This was good for HEIs in that they could increase their global footprint by accessing new geographical regions, and learners. For universities that had a light digital footprint, it would give them the opportunity to increase that digital footprint, in the early days of edtech, and give them more international recognition. 

What this did for students around the world was give them access to really high quality educational experiences at a fraction of the cost and with ultimate flexibility, because it could be done in your own time and online. That’s the essence of what FeatureLearn does. 

But now: one of the really fun and interesting things that we're doing is we're partnering more and more with industry partners. And this is very exciting. Often we're partnering with industry in coalition with a higher education institution, whereby we're bringing the experience of higher education, as well as the relevance of industry, to the learners; making sure that the educational experience isn't only high quality, but really the latest in the field.

X: You worked in corporate training for a while, learning the skills, knowledge and attitudes that companies identify are missing from new graduates: so what can we start working earlier on?

A: I think everyone would give you a different answer to this question in terms of where are the big skill gaps that we have in the workforce. But where I think the main emphasis should go is on what we call “soft skills”. There's nothing soft at all about soft skills, they're really hard to develop, to master, and they're hard to implement with regularity in your day to day work. 

There are a few that I think are most critical ones that we need to continue to develop in the workforce. These are things like attention to detail, which is something that in a hyper-connected world, we are losing the ability to focus and to capture detail. We're looking at critical thinking, problem resolution, effective communication, right at the heart of which is empathy, you need a large dose of empathy in order to, to communicate effectively. And also you need a large dose of empathy to collaborate well with others, which I think is another really important soft skill. 

X: What would you recommend that educators do to start working on these attributes early on with students? 

A: Well, first, be conscious of them, and be conscious of where you have opportunities to develop these skills. Make a daily practice of thinking critically, find a problem, devise a solution for that problem. You've got the base of entrepreneurship right there. 

I think that's something really important for every person to be doing right now; young, old, doesn't matter:  we should all always be learning something technical. This is important for two of those soft skills, which is attention to detail, and also critical thinking. So whether you're learning coding, which helps a lot with attention to data detail, or data science, which helps a lot with critical thinking, it's going to help you not only learn something technical, which is important for other reasons, but also to exercise some of these softer skills.

X: What are the trends that you have seen working in the tech sector that you think could be useful to students and educators alike to know?

A: It’s important to set the scene a little bit in terms of education as an industry. If we think across different industries, and the transformation that they've seen over the course of the last century, it's really very, very impressive. Yet, in education, we see relatively little. 

I'll give you an example. Looking at medicine in the last century, we were still bleeding people and using leeches to remove infection from the body. Whereas today, we can do robotic operations that are meant to be minimally invasive. In the transportation industry, we went from steam engines to being able to call an Uber on your smartphone. In education, a century ago, we would get a lot of students into a room with an educator who was an expert in their topic, and that educator would impart knowledge. And today, we continue doing very much the same thing. So I think, whereas there have been numerous advances and much progress in education technologies, the industry as a whole hasn't yet revolutionized. 

COVID-19 has been a major accelerator for this, because the main learning that we can all take away from COVID-19 is that there's not much that can't be done remotely. Over the course of the last couple of decades, we have seen a variety of different advances in edtech. Some of those are video learning, micro learning, mobile learning, gamification, edutainment, to name a few. I don't think there's anyone that doesn't know what video learning is nowadays, particularly, since YouTube has surpassed every other platform in terms of video learning content.

Microlearning is the idea of taking learning modules in a bite-sized format that can be consumed in one sitting very, very quickly. It's nuggets of information rather than a whole big topic that should be consumed over time. Mobile learning has also taken root; there are all kinds of learning apps out there now. I think it is a trend that's going to continue growing. Two-thirds of the world's population back in 2019 had access to a smartphone already, this has increased exponentially. 

But mobile learning is going to continue in terms of gamification; applying the principles of gaming and psychological theory around games and what motivates people to play - it's going to continue. And then edutainment, which is a mix between education and entertainment, seeing if you can teach what you're trying to teach in an entertaining way. A pretty great example of this is the masterclass, which is video learning mixed with entertainment. The people who are teaching these courses in many cases are entertainers producing some really great quality content in video format, using their natural talents. It's a quite effective and successful model.

X: What are the emerging technologies that you think will shape the near future of learning?

A: One major area in terms of emerging technologies impacting the education space is artificial intelligence and machine learning. The possibilities are really endless on this front, because AI is so new, and it's even newer in the education space. It’s so powerful if we use it, if we take full advantage of it, that we need to use it ethically, responsibly, and inclusively. So I think we're going to see increasing efforts on that front to make sure that particularly in the edtech space, because education is so fundamental, and it should be ethical, responsible and inclusive by design, I think we're gonna see a lot more a lot of efforts going into making sure that AI in the education space is is taking all those boxes.

X: Finally, how do you think educators could support learners to prepare for the scenarios and the technologies and the trends that you described? 

A: The first advice to educators, if you're trying to educate learners who are both human literate, and machine literate, then you have to be those two things as well. So my first point of advice to educators is to be technically literate. I think educators by default are often human literate, because you get into education because you have a love for education and for educating people, in general. But I think what's important to highlight is you're more likely to find a technical skills gap amongst educators than you are to find a human skills gap amongst educators. 

So in the same way that you put emphasis on your human skills, put emphasis on your technical skills. I don't mean you have to learn to code, but get a basic literacy around the technology that drives the things surrounding your fields.

Don't be afraid to incorporate technology into the learning experience. Because your learners are already doing it, whether you're conscious of it or not. So be there with them and that process ?