David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre forecasts an education revolution over the next 30 years that will include whole of life learning and personalised instruction in any topic, anywhere and anytime; driven by the knowledge explosion, the new social media and Intelligent Web.
Over the coming decades the process of learning and education will undergo a profound shift, from the traditional classroom/face to face method of knowledge transfer to a much more abstract model, where teaching will be largely separated from its current physical infrastructure, such as classrooms and campuses, in much the same way as the content of a printed book is becoming abstracted from its physical medium in digitised eBook form.
The human learning process will be driven by the need to adapt to its social environment; primarily the increasing rate of change in the knowledge and skills required to support future civilisation’s technology, culture and services. This will occur in tandem with society’s immersion in an increasingly cyber environment.
The Education Revolution is therefore inextricably linked to two major drivers -
The Knowledge Revolution- the hyper-fast generation of information and knowledge processes;
The Cyber Revolution- the transformation of the world’s knowledge base, including all processes and services to digital form, distributed via the Web.
The trends in this revolution are already evident and will become pervasive in the near future on a global basis. They include online teaching access, open content, real-time wireless web delivery, independent courseware provision, virtual reality teaching environments and lifelong education at a personalised level.
By 2020- online education will dominate university and school learning. This will allow resources and investment to be more effectively applied to the quality and delivery of courseware- anywhere, anytime.
Already a growing acceptance of online learning in major universities and schools, has generated the development of hybrid curricula- a combination of online options and traditional face to face classroom teaching and tutoring. However some institutions such as the global Phoenix University already operate solely as virtual campuses, offering global online courseware.
This shift will have many beneficial flow-on effects for both individuals and communities, including reduced travel time and more flexible delivery of courseware, making learning more affordable and accessible, particularly for working and part time students.
Studies have already suggested that students in online learning environments perform as well as or better than those receiving face-to-face classroom instruction. Traditional teaching institutions therefore will find it increasingly difficult to compete with online cyber innovations on a cost, convenience and quality basis.
The Open Content movement is also generating momentum in the new educational universe. Open content allows all sectors of society, including poorer populations in developing nations, to benefit from the education revolution, using the Web to deliver the collective courseware of major teaching institutions across the globe, free of charge.
This valuable resource is already offered by a number of prestigious tertiary institutions including- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, and Harvard. In addition the Open Courseware Consortium now has 200 members, 4000 courses and 44 sources in 7 languages
At the same time the development and provision of formal educational curricula will no longer be solely the preserve of schools and universities. Most larger business enterprises already provide in-house training and even accredited degree programs in specialised areas related to their own services, such as computer communications and hospitality. There is also a trend towards companies offering supplementary training on a modular basis, credited towards traditional graduate and post-graduate qualifications.
In addition, knowledge reference sites such as Wikipedia are providing free semi-structured online courses and books by aggregating existing reference material. This trend will continue, with independent courseware developers eventually dominating the growing market for expanding on-line content.
Developing countries such as India and China are also funding massive expansion programs in their schools and universities, for example graduating over 250,000 engineering and computer science students each year; rapidly catching up with the West in the quality and innovation of teaching methods.
To compete with the rise of the new breed of online training institutions, traditional institutions have linked with global partners, as well as fostering local community and business relationships. This trend reflects the shift in urban environments towards lifestyle autonomy, incorporating the full range of essential support services for local communities, including- education, health, leisure and knowledge access, primarily utilising the very high bandwidth of the Web. Such centres will typically combine online training with practical vocational and workplace experience.
Learning technology will be dominated largely by the new social media- social networks, augmented reality, virtual worlds, video gaming etc, delivered via smart mobile multi-purpose devices connected to the web.
By 2030 the full power of the web will be deployed towards this new learning paradigm, including powerful simulation training environments based on immersive virtual reality.
Augmented and virtual realities will allow procedures and knowledge to be absorbed within 3D virtual worlds and games, capable of simulating most services and applications; supporting the full range of training needs from trade apprenticeships to strategic management skills.
The benefits of teaching in such VR environments include the capacity to explore real life situations without risk, as is currently practiced by pilots using flight simulators and the more objective and automatic monitoring and assessment of performance criteria.
The application of virtual worlds to education will become a standard function of school and university teaching and research in the near future. Users are already using such technology to socialise and connect through personalised avatars. These worlds can therefore be quickly adapted to provide learning support and feedback between students, with the added potential to create teaching avatar support. Gaming environments can also be adapted to offer student support for the solution of complex real world problems in areas such as conflict, climate change and economic analysis.
Traditional human teaching supervision with still be vital for young children, but games already play a large part in their development and this role will accelerate in the cyber age.
Social media sites are also creating environments where scientists can experiment with new research techniques, by applying intelligent agents to simulate interacting populations. These methods are increasingly being applied to studies of educational modalities between students and teachers. Worlds such as Second life are already providing virtual campuses for some of the world's most prestigious universities such as Harvard and Stanford; offering a research environment in which to come to terms with the transition from the traditional to the new networked cyber campuses.
2030 will also see the acceptance of two additional trends- whole of life learning and personalised instruction. Both will be driven by the exponential rate of change in the social,work and cyber environments. Whole of life vocational learning will become both essential and natural as it is realised that secondary and tertiary learning is just the beginning of human cognitive challenges. This trend is already underway, facilitated by the web’s pervasive access to the world’s digitised knowledge storehouse.
Enterprise organisational boundaries and work practices will become increasingly fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisations; adding value to each enterprise and in turn continuously allowing workers to acquire new skills, linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.
Work and education patterns will therefore gradually adapt to a cycle of seamless knowledge generation and acquisition which in turn will trigger the need for more personalized education. This will be facilitated by the Web’s pervasive social reach, providing flexibility of learning options- mixing and matching with an individual’s lifestyle and experience.
By 2040 it is anticipated there will be a scramble within public teaching institutions to fill emerging educational and training gaps in courseware at all levels- primary, high school, undergraduate and post graduate studies. But the knowledge explosion will now be too fast for traditional course development and management methods, demanding support for constantly emerging cross-discipline training, combined with an emphasis on general problem-solving and creative skills.
Most institutions will be under enormous pressure to keep up with the demands of the medical, legal, science and engineering professions, incorporating the latest technologies; with capacity seriously lagging the accelerating knowledge advances.
It is realised that catch-up can only be achieved by facilitating the development of Web-generated courseware, combined with continuing global open content accessibility; largely driven by automated methods and delivered on demand.
This period will mark the beginning of the end for the traditional one-trak qualification pathway. Instead, performance assessment will be based on the quality, relevance and value of an individual’s skills and capabilities in relation to business, professional and social requirements; whether applied to medicine, astrophysics or cabinet-making.
Formal education will have reached a critical threshold as it is understood that ongoing personal learning is an essential driver for human survival and progress- and always has been. Education will be seen not as a sub-set of techniques that is applied only within a formal qualification factory. It is an essential component of each individual’s development regardless of age, position or ability within society.
Such an expanded view will also generate new modes of alternate education, nurturing creativity and encouraging learning for learning’s sake. For example the Free/Slow University of Warsaw- FSUW-offers an informal, non-profit centre for interdisciplinary studies; providing for student participation on the basis of the excitement of knowledge discovery and cultural experience for its own intrinsic sake, rather than for the pursuit of profits alone.
By 2050 the intelligent Web 4.0 will be capable of autonomously generating knowledge in synch with new work patterns and individual requirements, delivered directly, eventually through neural as well as sensory interfaces.
The Web will generate, host and deliver best practice training material autonomously, as it is beginning to do for information resources in a service economy. Over time this will be develop consistent quality outcomes competitive with most traditional options and encompass the complete spectrum of learning, distilling the best techniques from both human and artificial intelligence. This trend towards automatic algorithmic knowledge and pattern discovery is already evident in the sciences- biology, physics and astronomy.
By 2050 the abstraction of learning from its traditional infrastructure of classrooms and campuses will be complete in most advanced nations, with the major teaching institutions morphing into community support centres for research and services integration. The role of the Intelligent Web within the educational universe will have been transformed into that of a senior partner with humans, continuously forecasting new skill requirements and generating the required support programs; creating new courseware as a public resource, belonging to the global commons.
This will finally allow the developing world to achieve equal status with the developed world in terms of access to knowledge, training and the realisation of human potential.
