Global Education FuturEs: aGEnda

206 Pages·2016·1.36 MB·English

G lo b a l
E d u cat i o n
F u t u rEs:
a G En d a

G lo b a l
E d u cat i o n
F u t u rEs:
aG En da
Partners of the project
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 introduction 7
1.1 The Era of Change 7
1.2 A Global Agenda Report: Why Now? 8
1.3 How We Understand Education 12
1.4 Necessary Preliminary Remarks 14
1.4.1 Whom this Report is for 14
1.4.2 How our Report is structured 15
1.4.3 This Report is not a prediction, but rather a call for action 16
2 PrErEQuisitEs : KEY Factors 19
2.1 Drivers of Change — Where New Education Comes From 19
2.1.1 Sources of change: the external environment and internal
revolutions 19
2.1.2 Three infrastructure spheres that have the greatest impact on the
transformation of education 21
2.1.3 Why we focus the most attention on technologies 22
2.2 New Technologies That We Have to Live With 25
2.2.1 The extensive development of the Internet 25
2.2.2 The digital environment as an agent 28
2.2.3 Virtualization 31
2.2.4 The cognitive revolution 33
2.2.5 Genetics: a zone of uncertainty 37
2.2.6 A list of education solutions based on new technologies 39
2.3 Macrofactors That Set the Context for the Transformation of Education 46
2.3.1 New technological structure 46
2.3.2 Changing the business and management organization models in
industries 49
2.3.3 Changing the employment and lifestyle structure 52
2.3.4 The new financial architecture and ‘reputational capital’ 57
2.3.5 The new family and a shift in the childhood model 60
2.4 Factors of Uncertainty 67
2.4.1 Factors of uncertainty: the fate of globalization 67
2.4.2 Factor of uncertainty: Asia’s new role 70
2.4.3 The place of religions and spiritual traditions in society of the future 73
2.4.4 Factor of uncertainty: the future of states 75
GLOBAL EDUCATION FUTURES: AGENDA TABLE OF CONTENTS | 5
3 tHE HistorY oF nEW Education 78
3.1 Globalization 79
3.1.1 Prerequisites: the ‘normal’ globalization of education 79
3.1.2 Enter the MOOCs 81
3.1.3 The future of education globalization: the goal of creating a global
7 education architecture 88
7 3.2 Individualization 90
8 3.2.1 Prerequisites: yearning for individualization 90
12 3.2.2 Individualization as the order of employers 91
14 3.2.3 Objectivizing human capital: personalized investments 93
14 3.2.4 Demand for manageability 94
15 3.2.5 Restoring the meaningfulness of self-development 97
16 3.3 Collective Education Practices 99
3.3.1 The public demand for teams 99
3.3.2 Communities as spaces of cooperative learning 102
19 3.3.3 New cooperative education tools 106
19 3.3.4 ‘Live’ education: the time of horizontal structures 108
3.4 Game Totality 111
19 3.4.1 Returning games to education 111
3.4.2 Game pragmatics: resolving ‘serious’ tasks in game form 116
21 3.4.3 Game totality 120
22 3.5 The New Science Model 124
25 3.5.1 The Evolution of Science: Where Are We Now? 124
25 3.5.2 Fighting for effectiveness: the transition to digital 128
28 3.5.3 Surmounting the ‘curse of the Tower of Babel?’ 131
31 3.6 Enclosing Technology: NeuroWeb 135
33 3.6.1 The cognitive revolution: the future starts now 135
37 3.6.2 Cognitive technologies: the potential for education 138
39 3.6.3 The emergence of NeuroWeb: the ‘psycho-explosion,’ psychosis, and the
46 ‘end of pedagogy’ 142
46 3.7 The Image of the Future: ‘the Student’s Path,’ the Educational Techoenvironment,
Financial Tools, and New Positions in Education-2030 150
49 3.7.1 The place of education in human life cycles 150
52 3.7.2 ‘The student’s path’ in the new education model 152
57 3.7.3 The technological platform for supporting new education 157
60 3.7.4 New financial tools 160
67 3.7.5 Education’s technical environment and employees: competitors or
67 partners? 163
70
73 4 rEcoMMEndations For KEY PlaYErs 166
75 4.1 Conclusions for Venture Business: The Education Startup Sphere 166
4.2 Conclusions for Education Institution Administrators:
Looking for the New Niche 171
4.2.1 Industrial education: ensuring the ‘basic capacity’ 171
6 | GLOBAL EDUCATION FUTURES: AGENDA TABLE OF CONTENTS
4.2.2 Segmenting the education system and probable strategies within
segments 174
4.2.3 New education architecture and education’s place in the urban space 178
4.3 Repercussions for Regulators 181
5 conclusion 189
6 Bibliography 193
6.1 List of sources used
6.2 Some research from the past decade on the future of education systems
and future highly sought after skills 199
Attachments 204
Nothing ages as fast as the future.
Stanisław Lem — Summa Technologiae
174
178
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189
193
199
204
1. introduction
1.1 THE ERA OF TRANSFORMATION
The education is witnessing an era of radical transformation. This domain for a long time
could stay unsusceptible to changes experienced by the society, so that it secured its repu-
tation as one of the most conservative areas of human activities. However, we are at the
point when this situation can no longer hold. The coming decades will see an era of the
most radical changes in education since the appearance of national education systems.
Education-related industries such as digital technologies, medicine, and finance — and not
the education system itself — will be the chief source of these changes.
Our work is an attempt to systematically describe these industries’ impact on the various
stages of education, primarily in the economically, technologically, and socially developed
countries. Obviously, this is the first such attempt ever made (more than fifty examples
of similar studies are provided at the end of the book), but it is probably one of the most
systemic ones. This work is the result of more than five years of dialogues between leading
experts and practitioners in education & training, high technologies, human resource
management, and other related fields. It has absorbed the experience of a host of educa-
tional experiments that we were able to observe and that we either took part in or orga-
nized ourselves. Many of these experiments changed personnel training systems, reshaped
practices of schools and universities, and engendered new educational startups.
Our work, however, is not intended to designate the position of a specific developers’
group. We realize that ‘nothing ages as fast as the future’ and that our goal is not to predict
how events will unfold, but rather to encourage joint action to change things. The time has
come to determine what direction the global education system is moving in. This includes * Our group organizes
creating a road map to coordinate and balance the efforts of various players’ who establish a series participatory
processes dedicated
new rules of the game openly and honestly. Our work is an invitation to those willing, such
to this task as part of
as us, to join forces and take part in creating a new architecture, conventions, and specific
the Global Education
solutions for the 21st century education system. It is imperative to forge an open code Futures in 2015 (see
www.edu2035.org).
platform, a platform that we must forge together*. We believe that education for a new,
8 | GLOBAL EDUCATION FUTURES: AGENDA INTRODUCTION
network-based, and post-information society can be created only upon the principles that
a new society observes: open dialog, equality of standpoints, cooperation, and co-creation.
1.2 A GLOBAL AGENDA REPORT: WHy NOW ?
The more traditional genre of reports written from global standpoints on education devel-
opment (e.g., the United Nations or World Bank reports) often uses a set of assumptions
such as:
There are ‘best practices’ for organizing education systems that have been imple-
mented in some of (and sometimes in the majority of) OECD countries;
Further gradual fostering of these education systems in the future should address, first
and foremost, internationalization and harmonization of education approaches, by
means of institutional rankings (e.g. QS World University Rankings, The Times Higher
Education World University Rankings, Webometrics Ranking, and Academic Ranking
of World Universities), comparative international tests (e.g. PISA, TIMSS, Teaching And
Learning International Survey (TALIS) etc.), and supranational harmonization proce-
dures (the Bologna Process, European Higher Education Area, etc.);
The main challenge for education systems in developing countries is to ensure the full
access to primary and further to secondary education (cf. United Nations ‘Millennium
* http://www.un.org/ goals’*) and to subsequently create full-fledged systems of industrial education that
millenniumgoals/ follow the example of practices in the developed nations.
education.shtml
Without calling into question the great significance of the work that international devel-
opment institutions and harmonization tools do, we would like to point out that the coun-
tries which serve as sources of ‘exemplary practices’ today also find themselves at a critical
juncture, a turning point. Leading OECD countries such as the United States, Great Britain,
Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc., currently claim that they need to ‘re-assemble’ their educa-
** In the US, it is often tion models**. There multiple common challenges that countries’ education systems face:
discussed that the
education is ‘broken’.
1. The development of digital technologies and telecommunications systems is changing
the ways in which the knowledge is created, transferred, and stored, and in which skills are
developed. Furthermore, digital technologies change the way to manage one’s own devel-
opment trajectory, to assess and record achievements, to administrate educational institu-
tions, etc. These technologies are fundamentally transnational and transcultural, and can
be used in any organization or family, all virtually in spite of political, ethnic, religious, and
other differences. The most fundamental limitation in technology adoption rate is its cost to
end user, and the Internet and digital technologies are very cheap and are affordable even
for the least well-off social classes.
GLOBAL EDUCATION FUTURES: AGENDA INTRODUCTION | 9
2. Many of the new solutions in education today come in the form of technological
startups that combine digital technologies and social innovations. In the education field,
new players are emerging quickly, actively taking command of new educational practices,
reacting to user demands faster and with greater flexibility, all while (often) not being regu-
lated by national educational legislation. Their position is enhanced by the fact that educa-
tion in traditional school and university institutions continuously becomes more expensive
(Altbach, Reisberg & Rumbley 2009), which causes governments and consumers to call for
sustainable alternatives to existing education formats*. Outside the education system, a * http://www.
new transnational market emerges, which within a couple of decades (or even sooner) could timeshighered-
ucation.co.uk/
take over the traditional educational system and introduce new standards of learning and
features/a-differ-
talent management (just like Facebook sets new standards for socializing online). At the
ent-world/2001128.
next stage, mature companies that will emerge from educational startups (and we believe article
that some of them may cross the bar of $100 billion capitalization within the next decade
and become the new Googles or Apples of tech companies stock market) will begin to
encroach on the education agenda of national governments.
3. Economic progress in industrially developed countries stemming from continuing
pressure of international competition, the fast shift in technologies, and increasing economic
uncertainty sets the demand for new types of skills and new forms of professional education
& training. On one hand, demand is on the rise for highly creative workers with as much
flexibility as possible who are ready to work alone or as part of a team, and who are capable
of working in various cultures and with various technological environments — implying
changing requirements for basic education curriculum (so-called ‘21st century skills’). On
the other hand, shorter preparation cycles are required for highly-focused professional
skills critically needed within industries. In addition to that, the need for nonstop life-long
learning models, which allow professionals to continuously refine their skills in line with
the changing tasks at hand, is on the rise. These requirements necessitate the significant
reorganization of professional training systems and the establishment of new requirements
for school education and primary higher education. Furthermore, people are increasingly
dissatisfied with existing educational institutions that are not willing to follow the altered
demands of business, the public, and state, and that are focused on reproducing their prac-
tices of old.
4. Education is now literally seen as an intangible investment asset, to which all criteria
of investment markets should be applied. The way this asset is created and capitalized
should become transparent and easily manageable (incl. the partial ‘detachment’ of talent
benefits from talent owners, as in stock and credit markets). There is already a multitude of
financial tools for investing in one’s own education or in another person’s education. It is
clear that a boom awaits this field in the coming years (we will discuss this issue in more
detail further in this book).
5. Finally, the shifting values and preferences in industrially developed countries related
to ‘addressing basic needs’ in the consumer society, imply that the educational system
obtains a new type of ‘human resource’ to work with.
10 | GLOBAL EDUCATION FUTURES: AGENDA INTRODUCTION
On the one hand, the share of students who see no significant value in education and
have no special interest in learning is on the rise. The main challenge for the educa-
tion system, which acts as a space for reproducing society’s activities and values, is
to create motivation for such people to study. In fulfilling its objective, education is
pushed into competition with mass media and new media for such students’ interest
and attention, which in turn forces educational programs to become more enticing and
interactive (hence, in particular, the trend toward the massive gamification of educa-
tion).
On the other hand, the number of ‘conscientious’ students who are looking for ‘their
own path’, understand the meaning of self-development, are willing to set their own
goals to do this, and are not willing to take ‘package deals’ that schools and universi-
ties offer them. These are the people becoming the main users of individual education
trajectories that both ‘penetrate’ the borders of educational institutions and combine
domains of study, work, and personal development together. At the moment, no country
anywhere in the world is able to provide education to such people on a mass scale.
If these challenges (and the scale of their impact) are acknowledged, they call for a
new education models, the one that will efficiently use modern technological environments
and that will be able to productively respond to the demands of the economy and society.
Failures in education are nowadays recognized as one of the key sources of the problems
in politics, society, and the economy — among them ethnic and religious conflicts, environ-
mental over-exploitation, and corruption. Therefore, education rises to the top of agenda
of leading global institutions and becomes one of the ‘hottest’ topics at many national and
global forums.
Apart from advanced countries that face these challenges, new and strong players —
namely countries with emerging economies such as BRICS countries, the Arab world, and
South-East Asia — intensively participate in the global division of labor and the global
political ‘big game’. In order to be able to compete with other nations for markets and
political agenda, these countries started to create their own education systems, often ‘from
scratch’, by copying the models of industrialized countries. However, given the fact that the
advanced countries’ education systems are now themselves transforming, there is a risk
that emerging nations may actually buy a ‘stale good’ (recipes for industrial-age educational
systems) that may become obsolete in just 10 to 15 years. It would be worthwhile to spend
(at least a portion of) emerging economies’ billions invested into the education system in
order to design the elements of their own new systems — rather than to buy again a ‘new,
refashioned’ education system recipe in 10 years from now.