Features
Looking through the Crystal Ball Naaz Fatima Kirmani offers a glimpse of the changing educational landscape and the impact of new technologies The unprecedented digital transformation of recent years has ushered in an intense technology-driven world. We now live in an increasingly diverse, globalised, complex and media-saturated society. Technology and its effect is by far the most popular topic concerning 21st century learning and education. The rapid advancement in educational technology calls for radical changes in the way we think about intelligence, education and human resources, in order to meet the extraordinary challenges of living and working in the 21st century. While we may not be able to peer into the future to ascertain what skills will be important 10 years from now, it is possible to examine trends that have changed the demands of work and life in the recent past and continue to do so today. In both developed and developing nations, young people have become increasingly reliant on social networking technologies to connect, collaborate, learn and create – while employers have begun to seek out new skills to increase their competitiveness in a global marketplace. Education, meanwhile, has changed much less. Schools are faced with perhaps one of the greatest challenges – engaging students and creating excitement about learning. With few exceptions, school systems have yet to revise the way they operate in order to reflect current trends and technologies. The future growth and stability of our global economy depends on the ability of education systems around the world to prepare all students for career opportunities and help them to attain higher levels of achievement. However, despite numerous efforts to improve educational standards, school systems around the world are struggling to meet the demands of 21st century learners and employers. When we actually reflect on educational experiences, it’s difficult not to conclude that few schooling experiences teach job skills which are needed in the present world. Seldon (2018) describes the first education revolution as having focused on organised learning from others through family units, groups or tribes, while the second education revolution related to the coming of institutionalised education in the form of schools and universities. The third education revolution, which started in the 1950s, gave rise to issues related to inequity in access to educational opportunities, administrative workload for teachers, lack of training and pedagogical support. It continued to support a capitalist model of education, with the privatisation of education and in various contexts the limiting of access to a privileged class. These issues can be well managed, Winter
Summer |
| 2019
leveraging the technology positively to economise time and effort, and reaching out to the disadvantaged group of students in society. A recent report by the World Economic Forum (2018) states that, by 2022, today’s newly emerging occupations are set to grow from 16% to 27% of the employee base of large firms globally, while job roles currently affected by technological obsolescence are set to decrease from 31% to 21%. In purely quantitative terms, 75 million current job roles may be displaced by the shift in the division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms, while 133 million new job roles may emerge at the same time. All this indicates that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in education that requires us to explore a new and broad model which bridges the gap between formal education and vocational skills needed for a future world. It’s time to reimagine this educational model in order to create a fairer and broader system for young people which promotes a combination of skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication, problem-solving and resilience, along with the requisite knowledge of subject disciplines. Mobile and assistive technologies have brought in a fresh approach to creating learning opportunities and making it possible for learners to access digital content in a more personalised manner than ever before. Such technology can be a powerful partner for assisting changes
With few exceptions, school systems have yet to revise the way they operate in order to reflect current trends and technologies.
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