Why We Need An Education Re-design Now.

About two decades ago, my family lived in Dakar, Senegal. We’d often visit nearby villages, where my parents – who took us around the world, multiple times – encouraged us to hang out with local kids.

During these visits, the number one ‘toy’ children we met asked for was a pencil. Something many of us take for granted - simply, a tool to express, learn and create.

The global education system may be one of the most outdated models many of us are forced to operate in. Yet, it’s precisely in a rapidly changing and highly volatile world that we need to focus on re-designing education.

Tackling global challenges in the learning domain requires holistic, comprehensive, and scalable approaches to bringing quality education to students and employees in a personalized way. With skills that can be used today. The goal is to actively deploy new methods of learning while leveraging an agile approach to content. Our focus should be on bridging gaps and preparing a future global workforce, while combatting real issues like the spread of misinformation, a collective lack of awareness around physical and mental health and well-being, and the fact that we find ourselves in the middle of a violent global crisis.

We need to enhance our ability to relate in complex relationships, workplaces, and frameworks seeing as our interconnected world requires skills like agility, empathy, and conscious decision-making.

Having developed and deployed numerous effective learning vehicles (from USSD technology, to Augmented Reality, to AI, to books, community theatre and storytelling) the main purpose of the work my team and I do lies in predicting learning trends, tapping into global needs, and building effective tools for human-first skills development.

Choosing a human-first approach to education means we can get to the heart of connection and collective evolution. We can upskill millions of people faster as our world faces destruction and change.

We’re ultimately going for happy, healthy people that lead powerful lives in ways that resonate with their skillset and environment. This can mean anything from building a business or working with others, to using creative potential to support community development.?There are so many powerful solutions that achieve the above goal. At Beenova AI, we’ve uncovered some of the most effective ways include:

• Building models that scale: Quality, personalized learning is possible today but it means designing with inclusivity in mind from the get-go. Policy-makers and educational institutions have to come on board.
• Leveraging a range of talent and perspectives: Besides the fact that it is super fun, one of the reasons I work with a global team (from Nepal, to India, to The Netherlands, South Africa, Greece, the UAE, UK, US) is because it’s precisely diversity of thought that helps us leverage our collective intelligence. And it’s this collective intelligence that gets us closer to solutions we can adapt to meet different learning needs.
• Spending more time being curious: Solving problems by asking: “What’s not perfect yet?” gets us closer to answers that improve product design, development and deployment.
• Using technology only when it genuinely makes things better (which is not always!): Technology is a means to an end, it’s not the end. What’s more important is that we focus on human-centered skills, manage learning needs as they evolve, and that we further develop systems (which exist today) that allow us to evolve at the pace in which our world requires it.

We leverage AI - in the form of AI mentors - in part to achieve the aforementioned goals. AI can support with predictable tasks, which leaves humans to do more other types of complex and challenging work - for example, tapping into empathy, using clear communication, engaging in social interactions and managing people, critical thinking, complex problem-solving, negotiation, and creativity – areas where machines are unable to match human performance. Developing these skills as part of our human character and intelligence is so important right now.?

Our world needs empathy - it is arguably one of the most important skills we can possess. We need freedom to create, design and develop models that work for all of us - not just some of us. And that requires a holistic approach to re-thinking how learning and education work.

We use AI to achieve certain learning goals because education needs a global overhaul and AI allows us to do this at scale. We need this overhaul not just because current systems fail students, but because we're failing our world. And, despite the fact that we use technology to solve learning problems, I started drafting this note using a pen - a tool that has always helped me think, create and design. And for that, I remain grateful.