Education Futures

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Shane Mountjoy, Provost at York College. Shane is an innovative leader and provided great insights into the importance of identity, mission, and innovation for small liberal arts colleges and universities.

Catastrophic events like the COVID-19 virus are incredibly disruptive in education but they also provide the necessary constraints for positive, systemic change in the future.---Education is fairly insular and generally resists excessive innovation and disruption from the inside. Events such as the Coronavirus, however, can accelerate innovation and disruption.---Companies are constantly coming up with new products and manufacturing ideas to address changing markets. What might education learn from their corporate counterparts?

Seeing how Sherpa guides have begun disrupting the lucrative Mount Everest climbing business should make us wonder what would happen in education if others in the traditional supply chain decide to take on different roles, or the rules of the system change dramatically?---In spite of our good intentions, through our attempts to group students by performance level or skill, we may unwittingly create one more education scenario of separate by unequal.---TEL Learning joins the ranks of OER providers declaring that everyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, should have free access to high-quality learning materials.

In the coming decade, advancements in AI will make it difficult to know whether you are talking to a real person or an AI, in what language a video was originally recorded,  or who or what actually assembled and edited the information you’re reading. This, in turn, means big challenges for education.---Everybody loves a good list, especially when it comes to predictions about future trends. In this episode, Rob takes a look at five possible eventualities for higher education by the end of the decade.

What can education learn from online dating and e-commerce platforms? Simplicity and reduced friction. Making education easy to access and easy to use is an important key to success in the coming decade.---We’re seeing a good, three-pronged strategy for market disruption in the food industry. New methods of production, new methods of distribution, and new merchandising. How will existing education institutions respond and/or adapt?---A recent report on mobile web traffic by SimilarWeb reminds us of the modified user behavior influenced by mobile modalities. After all, even large smartphone devices still have that fits-in-one-hand form factor. It’s interesting to think about how education, with its big screen and big-stage mentality, will adapt to “smaller” in the next decade.

These days, any popular apparatus or device is a good candidate to become a content and services channel. We’ve seen it with computers, smartphones, and cars. Not surprisingly, we’re seeing the same trend evolve with high ed institutions, as their local infrastructure is being transformed into a powerful channel to reach new audiences across the globe.---Perceptual illusions occur everywhere, including nature, art, and education. As humans, we are susceptible to them because we generally insist on mapping what we perceive to what we are most familiar with, what we are experiencing right now.---Government-subsidized, free-tuition plans are popular with both politicians and higher ed institutions. After all, who doesn’t like a free lunch? The problem is that these programs remove incentives for institutions to compete, innovate, and work toward truly affordable and sustainable solutions.

Welcome to "Education and Technology Futures," a podcast that highlights interesting trends and connections in the worlds of education, technology, and culture. In this inaugural episode, Rob takes a look at five BIG challenges facing education in the coming decade.---It’s awfully easy these days to find yourself looking up and asking, "With all the changes, what has really changed?" In other words, “What’s really new in all the new stuff?” Is the coming decade one where we’ll see real innovation or just different wrapping on the same old packages?---If Elon Musk has his way, we’ll have people colonizing Mars by 2050. This means we may need to start thinking in bigger terms than the traditional moonshot. A ‘mindshot’ perhaps? Regardless of what we call it, what should our big goal for education be in the coming decade?

Many would argue that hands-on, experiential learning is the ideal way to help people acquire new knowledge and skills. It’s certainly how most of us have obtained much of the valuable knowledge we use daily. And, it seems particularly valuable as we look at teaching the skills and literacies required for the modern workforce.In this podcast, I explore the potential of experiential learning as well as the challenges it can present. I also discuss briefly a new initiative at TEL to provide openly licensed experiential learning curriculum for general education courses.

My early thinking about successful web and web-based game design and has definitely shaped my philosophy regarding successful learning environments. More specifically, I believe that successful learning spaces — virtual and physical — should be interactive, and community-building.But what do we/I mean by interactive? In this episode, I identify four key ingredients for interactivity in learning environments and discuss their significance with regards to the student experience.

In the 21st century, instruction, as a holistic activity to support learning (demonstrable mastery), has evolved into a complex, multi-layered activity that involves multiple specializations and functions. If individual instructors struggled in the past to excel at the various roles they were asked to fulfill in their teaching, they find it impossible to be everything students require in today’s digitally informed learning environments.At TEL, we’re rethinking and redesigning course instruction as a complementary, scaffolded set of functions and roles that work together to provide the best student learning experience. Our overarching goal is to implement a new instructional model, one designed for the 21st century. We believe this model this model will encourage higher levels of student understanding and promote greater levels of student engagement and agency.

There is a growing number of financial analysis saying that 2020 is looking better and better for a good old fashioned recession.Analysts at UBS say the risk of recession or at least major contraction in the economy has shot up to 73%.Last month, Business Insider asked dozens of Wall Street experts and analysts about the most important trends in markets right now.  One idea addressed multiple times from varying perspectives was the likelihood of a recession in 2020.But what would a recession in 2020 mean for higher education? In this episode, I take a look at the impact of the previous “Great” recession in 2008/2009 and look at possible futures for higher education in the context on a new economic downturn.

Full TranscriptFurther Reading on AI and AI in EducationThe World’s Largest 10 Economies in 2030Automation could hollow out the American workforceExpected Labor Cost Increases Continue To Drive Grocery Stores Toward AutomationAmericans Have Lost Faith In Their Ability To Move From Poverty To RichesGlobalization 4.0: The Human ExperienceTop 6 Trends in Higher Education

Full TranscriptFurther Reading on AI and AI in Education:What is machine learning?What Is Deep Learning?Beyond Machine Learning: Capturing Cause-and-Effect RelationshipsDeep Learning: The Confluence of Big Data, Big Models, Big ComputeFacial and emotional recognition; how one man is advancing artificial intelligenceDon’t overestimate AI’s understanding of human languageA neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we doHow Is AI Used In Education -- Real World Examples Of Today And A Peek Into The FutureAI breakthroughs in learning in 2018This 'less is more' AI technique saves time, money and helps increase retention...