Future Trends in Education

The Accelerating Rate of Change and Skill Depreciation

As Robin Chase, former CEO and founder of ZipCar, puts it, “Our parents had one job, I will have seven jobs, and our children will do seven jobs at one time.”  As the expectations for employment and fulfillment change, continuous and lifelong learning becomes increasingly important. Individuals are looking for not just learning but guidance in navigating the changing world to find the best learning and career opportunities. 

Individuals are also challenged by an accelerating cycle of skill obsolescence in a period of unprecedented transition from skill set to skill set. The rapidly changing business landscape demands constant learning of new skills and domains, retraining, and applying existing capabilities in new contexts. It also demands a greater fluency in digital tools and comfort in virtual environments. It rewards those with greater capacity to seek and access resources and to build social capital through personal networks and participation in communities.

Moreover, by 2020, it is estimated that the work-related knowledge a college student acquires will have an expected shelf life of less than five years. Fabio Rosati, the CEO of Elance (which recently merged with oDesk),states, “The technologies that were relevant even two to three years ago are different than the technologies that are going to be relevant in the next two to three years, [and that’s moving] at increased speed.”

Social learning

One of the most profound effects of learning in a networked age is the importance of social learning. Social learning, according to the Educause Review, is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about the content rather than on the content itself. As such, learning institutions should focus less on what the individual is learning than on how the individual is learning.

Social communities, combined with online content and resources such as the Meetups, are a step forward in providing social context for lifelong learning in non-traditional settings. The drawback with social communities is that some lack content or structures to use the community effectively as a mechanism for collaboration. Te next step lies in creating communities of discovery where new content is created through collaboration.

Creation spaces

A real opportunity for learning institutions to amplify learning is to build deliberately constructed environments, “creation spaces,” that combine the advantages of tightly knit teams with the ability to involve an ever-increasing number of participants. This is where the “power of pull”—the ability to attract people and resources around a challenge or interest—comes in. Creation spaces are intended to bring learners together in the creation of new knowledge. Rather than focusing a discussion on content, learners within the creation space work together to create their own content and gain new insights, while the creation space connects individuals to a richer learning environment that encourages interactions.

Creation spaces require three key ingredients: a critical mass of participants, the co-evolution of interactions within the team and with a broader set of participants, and an environment that supports various layers of activities.

Lifelong learners seek coursework not just to learn but to improve their performance, and that type of learning comes from moving beyond hearing and reading to doing—alone and as a member of a group.

This expanding ecosystem of semi-structured learning fits the model of how learners—or at least a certain type of learner—want to proceed through their learning. The mobilizer serves as a spark or catalyst.

Learning Illiteracy

As psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy’s quote in Future Shock is commonly paraphrased, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”