Reinventing Education:
The Future of Learning
Every survey I have conducted for over ten years points to one crucial fact about education: we are not preparing our children for the future. This fact is confirmed by students who know they are unprepared for the workforce, by organizations that cannot find the educated talent they need to grow their business, and by every out-of-work person who wonders whether she has the right education to get a job. We need to do better to prepare everyone for the New Future that is emerging one minute from now. If we do not transform the planetary education system, we will not meet the challenges of the future.
How Google hires employees is a good example. They hire based on problem-solving skills, determination, and perseverance—grit—as well as curiosity and the ability to communicate persuasively to influence others. They don’t care whether you went to a top university; they want to know you can think, gather ideas, make your case, and solve problems that have nothing to do with the memorization of facts and information or, most interestingly, what college you went to. Most high-tech companies in the New Economy retrain and educate new talent, sending a clear signal that there is a disconnect between education and business: kids are not being educated to be Future Ready for the workforce.
In Shanghai they are teaching kids in third grade how to speak a foreign language—English. How many grade schools in the United States and Europe are teaching Mandarin Chinese? Too few care about the largest nation in the world to make sure that their students can learn the language. What does this tell us about the future? Plenty, and it is not a productive forecast.
In the United States only in a few select schools are they teaching robotics. In five nations in Asia they are using US-made robots to teach in thousands of high schools.
How many of our schools function like Hack-a-thons, like they run in Silicon Valley, to collaborate and invent new products or find solutions?
How many of our schools teach the skills about globalization and diverse cultures?
How many of our schools teach our kids how to be entrepreneurs?
How many schools at any level of education teach students to embrace new technologies or even to create new technologies?
How many of our schools prepare our kids for being creative and inventive, to become tinkers, makers, and innovation leaders?
The answer is not enough. We need to Reinvent Education before it is too late.
We need to get our kids Future Smart—ready for the future so they can be globally competitive and find the careers they want. If we are to make more democratic nations in the future, then education must be reinvented to accelerate skills that will shape the future—globalization, entrepreneurship, technology, and how work itself, as an endeavor, is changing.
Now, the good news is that there are innovators who are pioneering the way forward to Reinvent the Future of Learning, but it’s going to take everyone to make this revolution happen: it takes a global village—the parents, teachers, and kids. We will all need to take up the challenge of reinventing education. We must all become Game Changers of the Future when it comes to education, as it is so pervasive and touches every generation, demographic, and economic level and will shape the future progress of the planet in every way.
The disconnect is that we are not teaching for what organizations need. The talent pool, our kids, feel out of sync with the needs of work, and organizations need to do the educating to get kids ready to be useful hires. This tells you something about education.
Kids are not entering the workforce with writing, thinking, tinkering, logic, and technology skills that companies need. And the Learning Gap starts much earlier than high school or college; it is a systemic problem that starts in the beginning of the mass education process.
The world of commerce and business has changed, but education as a learning process has not. We need a revolution in learning that gets our kids ready for the future. There is no issue more important for a society than the education of the next generation of leaders, scientists, journalists, engineers, doctors, and parents. We must not fail in transforming education or else we will fail in preparing the next generation for the future.
Huge global trends affecting work, economics, society, and power lie at the core of why education must change. It is felt by those looking for jobs wherever they are in the world, companies recruiting employees, entrepreneurs trying to raise capital, and leaders in business and government trying to figure out how to educate tomorrow’s workforce. There is one central fact that is not being embraced that will limit our future prosperity or launch it.
Education is out of date, irrelevant, rigid, and crafted from assembly-line industrial-era thinking. It is backward, the curriculum is outmoded, and it is long on history and out of step with what we need for the future. Most important, education is not looking forward; it is not preparing us for the future. Education is not Future Smart. I have written about this before, but now I am going further in exploring my ideas about how to change education and why.
The good news is that there is progress and new innovations emerging, from new collaborative online schools to games to interactive curriculum. First, let us look at what’s off about education before we head into the future.
Education is not preparing us for the future. It has not kept pace with inventing, innovating, collaborating, and, perhaps most of all, real-world ideas students will need to understand the world, such as globalization, foreign cultures, technology, and business. We are not enabling our kids to be Future Ready for the changing world.
This pertains to all levels of education, from kindergarten to graduate school. There are revolutions going on in business, science, and technology, yet schools are resisting these changes and running from them, not embracing them. In the United States we are below the top twenty nations in excellence in math and science scores. Over one-third of males don’t graduate from high school. Teachers, for the most, are preparing people for the last century, not this one. Assembly-line, industrial thinking dominates education.
This is also a global issue. Most nations have similar challenges: How are we going to prepare the next generation if we do not transform learning? We need a global transformation in education at every level in every nation to support the New Future economy that is emerging. Collaboration, globalization, sustainability, technology, innovation, gamification—we need a new education model, from kindergarten to graduate schools, to empower our children to compete and thrive in the twenty-first century. Let’s start with this as a goal.
Learning is at the core of what we need as individuals and as societies to progress, advance, grow, create, and compete in the global economy. Though this is true, and no one would argue that education is key to progress, what we have today, what we call education, is simply not Future Smart. It does not teach the capacity to envision, solve, or reason the way ahead. It does not enable innovation as much as it could.
Education models, courses, content, and curricula need an overhaul, a reset to become relevant for students and society. We need to Reinvent Education. Education is not adaptive, agile, innovative, forward thinking, or visionary. We are not preparing students for a dynamic, uncertain, complex future of disruptive technologies, new business models, radical economics, and diverse cultures. Teachers not taught for the future or in sync with the marketplace or even current jobs teach based on the past, what worked before.
Teachers and administrators, though well meaning, resist change, hold fast to traditional ideas about education theory, and practice what worked generations ago but not today.
For one hundred years formal education has adopted a mindset that schools and colleges have usually been based on what educators think learners need, not what learners think they need or even what employers need. This is not to say we should throw out education or teachers; we need a complete reconceptualization, a rethinking, and a reinvention of education. Times have changed, but education has not. So let’s get this right.
The Top Ten Future Smart Skills Everyone Needs to Know
1. Speaking a foreign language
2. Solving problems and logical thinking
3. Managing complex information, knowledge, and data
4. Communicating effectively in written, verbal, and digital formats
5. Devising digital business strategy
6. Understanding globalization
7. Becoming high-tech savvy
8. Dealing with diverse cultural teams
9. Learning how to code
10. Understanding how to be a an entrepreneur
Ending Rearview Thinking
You can’t get there, into the future, from here with the way of thinking that is focused on what I call Rearview Thinking—what happened before, what we know to be accurate about the past. The assumption is that the same reality frameworks, rules, behaviors, experiences, models, and theories are going to be the same in the future. This is not an accurate way to forecast education or anything else.
Rapid change, accelerated trends, fantastic technologies, new paradigms, disruptive business models, high-velocity innovations—look around you: if you don’t think we live in a time of dynamic and explosive changes, in a time of Game-Changing thinking, then you’re just going to have to think differently about the reality we all share.
The Game-Changing Trends Shaping the Future of Learning
• Education must prepare students to compete in the complex and competitive Global Innovation Economy.
• The Future Skills Gap, between what education offers and what business, the marketplace, and jobs demand, must be closed.
• Every individual must be taught how to be an entrepreneur.
• Teachers need to become Game Changers of the Future, radically reeducated to keep pace with the future of education, and students needs to adapt for tomorrow.
• Innovations in learning, such as digital tools, games, simulations, virtual worlds, and project-based collaboration, point to the future of education.
• Knowledge Science, a new discipline of education, will prepare everyone for thriving in the future economy and society.
• More jobs will go unfilled, especially in Knowledge Careers around the world, unless there is radical education change that provides more Knowledge Talent.
• Augmented reality, wearable computer devices that engage you in real-time online learning, will transform education in the future.
• Self-Directed Learning, education developed by the learner, will create new education choices for individuals.
• Smart Cloud Networks, which will broadcast education to mobile, tablets, and surfaces, will both enhance and replace physical schools, textbooks, and teachers.
Future Smart Companies Today
Each of these companies holds a piece of the Reinventing Education model that must emerge to help our students become ready for the New Future.
Alvaedu
An exciting client I work with is reinventing education. Alvaedu (http://alvaedu.com) is reinventing education using cloud computing and interactive online program development for colleges. They are the leader in transforming and thinking about how courses can be dynamically created by teachers and used by students. Their courses, due to an innovative software technology called CourseFlow, is a highly innovative online course development application that can create, store, and distribute to millions of students in real time anywhere on the planet—education on demand.
The innovator and founder of the company is an education visionary, Tim Loudermilk. He is a Game Changer of the Future. As CEO, he is constantly challenging his team and their schools to invent the future faster, to prepare students for a future that’s coming sooner and will be more complex and challenging.
Learn Zillion
LearnZillion (https://learnzillion.com) prepares students and teachers to get ready for success with an online set of courses that empowers all. Their platform, ideally for grades two to twelve, can be accessed totally online. They focus on math and English courses and are all free.
Udacity
Udacity (www.udacity.com) is an online course program of cutting-edge tech programs that, as they say, “bridges the gap between academic and real-world skills.” Working professionals from leading high-tech companies teach the courses.
Skillshare
Skillshare (www.skillshare.com), for an inexpensive monthly charge, will teach you courses taught by industry leaders around the world, focusing not on degrees but on learning real-world knowledge.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy’s (www.khanacademy.org) mission is to offer “a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere,” and they do. Founded in 2006, it is one of the oldest and still most vital companies founded by Salman Khan. The courses cover every subject, mainly focusing on mathematics and the sciences, and are all available online.
ShowMe
ShowMe (www.showme.com/learn) is perhaps one of the most innovative skill-sharing communities, as it offers hundreds of lessons in every subject that have been developed by their community of teachers who use the online visual maker platform, known as ShowMes, to design courses from an easy-to-use downloadable app.
Singularity University http://singularityu.org, an inspiring experiment in learning, is a university that I contributed to starting with a group of futurists and technologists. It is housed at NASA Ames in California. I served on the founding advisory board and was co-chairman of the Futures and Forecasting Track. Singularity U has consistently filled a gap with graduate students and working professionals to teach about the trends that science and technology will offer humanity. Its curriculum should be taught staring in kindergarten, where I envision our kids would be making robots and designing virtual games and worlds someday.
Investing in the Future
Another courageous client of my Institute for Global Futures, the Southwest Louisiana Economic Development Agency and Chamber of Commerce, is one of the regions of the world economy that most would not hear about, but over the next decade over $62 billion is being invested into an area in the United States where about three hundred thousand people live today. That is a huge amount of investment capital coming into a region that is mostly rural and has a sparse amount of people. So there is going to be an incredible rate of growth in this region, from health care to jobs to infrastructure.
There is no focus that is more important than educating the next generation of the workforce that must be Future Smart about how to exploit the opportunities of this large capital investment so they can properly plan for the future. Education, learning, getting our workforce ready to meet the challenges of the future is the top priority in Southwest Louisiana. Reinventing Education, not the capital, will make the difference—it’s what we do to make this a Sustainable Society. The leaders of this community are looking to the future and shaping that future today. This is where all communities should be thinking about.
Reinventing Education does not yet appear to be a top priority for leaders, parents, and students. There is no Future Smart vision that sets out to purposely reinvent education.
In his chapter I am going to suggest one. Without this understanding shared at every level of society, business, and government—that mass education, what we have today at every level doesn’t work, is broken—we are not going to be able to create a prosperous, sustainable, and productive future. In fact, the opposite is certain. We will fall out of step and become disrupted by change, accelerated innovations, and radical changes in the marketplace worldwide that escape educators’ daily reality. This is dangerous and risky.
An unproductive society, where growth and innovation slows, where the engine of the economy, its jobs, is out of sync with the skills required to get and keep those jobs, will not survive. We adapt or die. Reinventing education is about the future productivity of nations, communities, economies, and society, not just about jobs or quality of life. Reinventing education is about power. To remain powerful, enabled to be a leader and shape the future, either as a person, organization, or nation, you must be educating for tomorrow, preparing for the future.
It is a bigger challenge before us that will affect the next hundred years shaping societies, realigning power, and forging our society, one that adapts, learns, and evolves to meet the Grand Challenges of our time. Without reinventing education, we, as nations, organizations, and individuals, will not be prepared to face a future that will be complex, disruptive, and fraught with massive change and innovation. Let’s have a look at what’s missing in education and how to fix it.
Why Education Needs to Be Reinvented
• Education is mass education, for the masses, not the individual.
• Most science and technology is not integrated into curricula at all levels in schools today. We should be teaching physics to kindergartners, robotics, and computer programming in every school.
• Science and technology will alter science and technology in the future.
• Education should be more about authentic learning; critical thinking, reasoning, collaboration, problem solving, and logic.
• Education does not teach innovation as part of the process of learning that is at the core of reinventing education. We need to create a generation of innovators.
• Education is not self-paced, interactive, dynamic, and learner focused, so people become bored and not engaged. The dropout rate from high schools and college is unacceptable as a social trend.
• Education is perpetuated by a nineteenth-century industrial revolution mentality, which influences every course.
• We should not expect to turn learners out like assembly-line workers. This is not 1870.
• Teachers are not trained to teach about the future. They teach the past, not the future. They cannot teach what they don’t know.
• Courses are not flexible, agile, adaptive, and updated and are, therefore, irrelevant to meet many challenges even of the present.
• Much of the content is outdated and not in line with the real world.
• Curriculum taught today is out of sync with social issues and real-world scenarios.
• Education leaders are out of step with what learners need to learn to get ready for the future—or they would lead a revolution to create Future Smart schools.
• Schools are dominated by standardized testing that has nothing to do with learning.
• Colleges and high schools fail to teach what people need to be job worthy so they can attract good jobs.
• The Internet has transformed education by making available a huge amount of information that is more current than what schools teach.
• Textbooks today are outdated before they are published. The explosion of new information is out of pace with our educational institutions.
• The higher education value proposition is eroding and needs to become more entrepreneurial, tech savvy, knowledgeable, and innovative.
• We need to teach science earlier and with hands-on projects like making robots, designing websites, and making games.
• We need to teach kids about future challenges and trends so they can be part of the solution.
Too many organizations, even nations, have lost their way because they did not prepare their citizens effectively for the future. They did not develop a capacity to look forward, to consider future risks or opportunities. They never planned ahead and, therefore, had a tough time adapting to change when it came. Let’s learn from that.
Help Wanted: Future Smart Learning
In a world of massive social, economic, and technological change, we need to learn faster and change faster to keep up with the trends that are reshaping our world or else we will not survive in the future. Lifelong learning is essential to being Future Smart—you never finish with learning as a process of discovery. This is true of individuals, organizations, nations, and civilizations. This challenge to become Future Smart is relevant for all, but it is especially true for individuals. If you want to be sustainable as an individual, if you want to thrive and survive in the future, you must learn differently, with agility, and be able to actually Design Your Own Education. Now this may seem like a bold idea, but learners, at any age and in any school, must take responsibility for their education and self-direct—actually design their future.
Are you ready to Design the Future of Education? How would you do this? Where would you look to find clues to rethink courses, learning processes, and content? Maybe you should consider that the reinvention of education is something we all need to own and participate in if we are going to get ready for the future.
Anyone growing up today faces a future so extreme, so fraught with so much complex and accelerated change, that by the time they enter the workforce, looking for a job, their education experience will have been mostly irrelevant, even useless, and actually a burden when trying to get and keep a job. In fact, the parents taking them to school today don’t realize just how unprepared they will be for the future. Even the careers they were educated for and the basic education about the changing world will be outdated by the time they try to enter the workforce.
Their educational experience, from primary school through college, will not have prepared them in 2015 to compete in the global economy of 2020 and beyond. This is because the educational system they have been forced to embrace is largely dysfunctional. They are not going to be Future Smart, and that difference will drastically affect business, power, and society in foundational ways that scream out for change.
And change is coming. Getting ready for the future, becoming Future Smart about education, will be vitally important to the future of every individual on the planet. So let’s explore where we are and why Reinventing Education will be a Game-Changing Trend.
Three Big Questions
There are three big important questions every parent, teacher, leader, and student must ask about education today:
1. How can we prepare our students—our future leaders, inventors, judges, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs—better for the future?
2. How can we prepare our educational system, wherever you are in the world, to become relevant for the Global Knowledge Economy, producing future ready jobs and talent?
3. What can we do today to change our educational system to make it innovative, adaptive, agile, and future focused—to make it Future Smart?
My friend’s daughter, Sarah, attended a well-known university in the Northwest where she studied communications. There were many excellent courses beyond her core liberal arts courses that gave her a well-rounded education in the traditional sense of what we have, in the past, wanted education to do.
Her communications courses were theoretical, academic, but not real world. Though there were smatterings of real-world concepts related to social and political issues, for the most part her education in her major, communications, was not of much use, as she herself wondered what she was learning. In other words, there does not appear to be much that prepared her for the real world of a career or was even in step with how communications is changing given the business transformation of social media, technology, and new media communication models, of which every company, not just Google, Twitter, and Facebook, are shaping and facing.
There was no attention to globalization, how business and economies were being reshaped. She was not encouraged to take a language such as Mandarin, which 1.3 billion people speak. She was not prepared for the workforce or the global changes in the economy that are creating change as we speak.
Educating for the Future
Most companies are looking for talent to help them get ready for the future. Companies understand that education is not doing its job. Our kids and our adults are not ready for the future. And today the Future Gap, the gap between what people need to know and the fast trends and changes that are reshaping business and society, is getting larger and becoming a more dangerous risk factor.
This risk factor, the Future Smart Gap, could doom a nation, organization, or region. We must understand that the Game-Changing Trends that are reshaping our world must be understood and integrated into education, or else education will become irrelevant to a global knowledge economy.
Organizations hire people and create jobs to shape their competitive future advantages, to serve future customers, to make future products that shape the future of their company. Increasingly the future is coming faster than education is preparing people for, and business is struggling to find the talent to help them prepare for that future.
Headlines from the Future
Digital Avatars Teach 70 Percent of Students Worldwide
Avatars, digital teachers, that live in the network on the Internet will be in demand over human teachers in over 150 nations. Avatars look human but are really the front end of a massive cloud-based AI capability, with access to real-time knowledge over the Internet. They will speak over one hundred languages and can teach any subject with the expertise of a master. They also can customize the learning content around the learner’s skills and goals. By 2030 they are in demand.
Game-Changing Trends That Will Transform Education
• Game-changing technologies: computers, networks, biotech, neuroscience, nanotech, robotics, and quantum physics
• Knowledge careers: business analytics, data science, cloud networks, idea engineers, social media, predictive processing, online design, virtual media producers, game programmers
• GDP and wealth shifts
• Changing business models and workforce needs
• New work ethic, how people work and why
• Increased global competition
What Is a Future Smart Education?
Game Changers. We need to teach students what Game Changers do and how they think and give them examples of Game-Changing ideas, projects to work on and share, technologies, and collaborations. We need to enable our next generation of students to become Game Changers to create a New Future—an innovation-rich, productive, and purposeful future.
Big Science. We need to teach about the fundamental laws and concepts about science from kindergarten through graduate school. Information technology, life sciences, robotics, electronics, neuroscience—science changes our world daily, and we need our education to be in sync with this. You cannot be properly educated today without learning about science and technology, which are changing everything now and will continue to do so in the future.
Entrepreneurship. Every person should be taught about entrepreneurship—the concepts, skills, and competencies essential to developing, starting, and running a business: How to make form an enterprise; what capital, resources, sales, marketing, talent, and innovation is to the entrepreneur—this is a basic Future Smart Skills Set.
Managing Change. Every person should be taught about managing change. Because so much of our world is changing so quickly, dealing with complex and accelerated change in society, business, economics, population, technology, climate, and energy are vitally important. We need people to be competent managers of change so they are prepared for the future and can help shape that future.
Twenty-First-Century Leadership. We need to teach leadership so that, given the complex global changes that are coming, we are creating the next generation of leaders who understand about the future challenges and opportunities. What competencies do we need to teach students to have them become leaders? Consensus builders, conflict managers, global cultures, planners, great communicators, team builders, innovators—we need to teach people to become courageous and bold Future Smart Leaders who do not fear the future but instead seek to shape it.
The Innovator’s Mindset. We need to teach about being innovative. Innovation can be taught. Humans are inventors, naturally innovative, but mass education often drives this innovation—this drive to be an inventor, to try something new—out of kids as well as adults. We need to celebrate the innovative process and teach everyone the process of creativity and making innovative things.
The world has many problems and Grand Challenges for which we desperately need Future Smart innovations: energy, education, business, and medicine. Humans are adaptive beings who are naturally innovative, but education must empower, enable, and teach innovation, which are experimentation, ideation, and celebrating the new to be relevant today and tomorrow.
Globalized Learning. We need to teach about globalization, the Global Connected Future. It is a big world, and it is getting increasingly connected. The Connected Economy, like the Knowledge Economy (see Chapter 3), connects the global opportunities for business, learning, culture, and economics. Our educational system must teach everyone about how the Global Connected Planet is emerging, what this means and why for our future.
This is an essential competency that every student, adult learner, or young person must be taught—how to understand and navigate the Global Connected Future. We need more leaders who are globally savvy. We need to adjust the curriculum and educational system to adapt to teaching these skills in real time.
Future Smart Core Curriculum. We need to reinvent the core curriculum in every school. We need to reject the backward thinking that dominates the core curriculum and think differently about it. We still need to teach history, language, math, and many of the specifics that every major college or high school demands, but we must rethink and reinvent the topics, relevance, context, and purpose of this information so it is relevant and Future Smart. Most of this legacy information we now call the curriculum is irrelevant and must be changed, updated, or thrown out as being useless.
Digital Design Skills treat learners as designers, innovators, and producers of services and things. We need to educate innovators to design the future worlds we will live and work in.
Self-Designed courses are produced by students and experts on subjects and then factored into the curricula to be taught.
Entrepreneurs Model is one in which courses have a commercial component and everyone, at every level of school, learns to start and operate a business.
The emergence of instant courses designed by students started to show up on the Internet at first as parodies of real classes. And it wasn’t just kids but also adults who invented the SnapCourse as a type of satire, like what you would find at a comedy club routine. SnapCourses would show up and then they were programmed, after sometimes minutes or days, to just disappear.
Versions of courses showed up—first hundreds and then thousands of times a day—making fun of the boredom found in most courses. But then something strange happened. The parodies started evolving into serious remakes of the courses, using creative graphics, video interviews, music, and film tracks.
Students were actually producing dynamic and interesting courses that other students and even teachers were downloading thousands of times a day and using in their classes. All of a sudden SnapCourses were part of the hacker education revolution, changing how people learn.
Hacking Education
Learners and teachers could collaborate to reinvent education now. No one needs to wait until 2020 for this to become a reality. A bit of courage and determination could bring this idea into the present. The Hacking of Education is about the reprogramming, changing course, knowledge, and, most important, the relationship between learners and teachers.
Learners as developers has not yet become a mainstream phenomena. Most kids and adults are stuck in the hierarchical education process in which schools and teachers create courses and push this onto students: Learn this!! This top-down system does not engage or empower students. And it could.
If education leveraged simulations, interactive problems, and real-life issues, in which there is give and take, experiments, collaboration, joint problem solving, and high engagement by learners, education would be vibrant and engaging. It could be.
The idea of learners as developers with teachers is almost an alien idea and too much work for schools. After all, they have already developed courses and have textbooks and, well, teach a certain way that works—or does it? Too many kids are bored. Too many teachers are bored. Too many learners at all ages are not learning but rather regurgitating facts, data, and information rather than becoming something more integral to the learning process. We need independent thinkers who can manage complexity, global trends, and conflict, not the business-as-usual education system.
We need to rethink learning as a process of discovery, in which learners and teachers collaborate to investigate, discover, invent, choose the process and content so the subject can be best learnt by the student and best taught by the teacher and the student. The roles of teacher and learner could also be exchanged.
Teachers could be more coaches and facilitators of the future, enablers of the learning process, with students becoming the dictators of information. And more collaboration between teachers and learners could lead to a new paradigm for learning that is engaging and exciting.
Ten Innovations That Will Reinvent Education
1. Real-world simulations
2. Gamification, the use of games to engage learners
3. Virtual worlds where learners experience to learn
4. Big Data applied to learning how to learn
5. Mobile platforms for learning anywhere
6. Cloud computing for distributed education
7. AI applied to learning bots, teacher avatars, digital coaches
8. Social media, crowdsourced learning
9. Augmented reality to enable interactive experiential learning
10. Project-based learning
Serious Games and the Future Learning
Gamification is a new type of learning that accomplishes something important that traditional education has not: it has conquered learners’ boredom by making the learning experience engaging, interactive, collaborative, and, most of all, fun. Yes—education can be fun.
Game-based simulations empower students to visualize their ideas and try out various scenarios. They can explore and understand complex ideas about history, finance, events, society, and conflict. Learners can explore from inside an experience a historical or future event or even a fictional event that they design.
Learning comes alive when interactive real-time crises emerge from the game engine that stimulates reactions and discussion. Playing games is immersive engagement. It is 3D learning rather than a lecture or textbook and is holistic in scope. Games keep learners engaged in problem solving and dealing in complex ideas that keeps them engaged.
Enhanced game-based learning gives students a fresh new way to reengage as well as to be producers and participants in the learning process. Subjects that learners are interested in, such as starting a high-tech company, can be modeled out in games and simulations in which real-life issues, challenges, and data can be used. Games that can pull content off the web and interact with other learners and networks of relevant content enhance the learning experience.
Also, the game intelligence engine, in the cloud and in real time, evaluates the gamer’s competency in playing the game and then automatically connects the gamer with both fresh games to play as well as other players to interact with over the Internet. This is the future of education.
Massive multiplayer online games depict a wide range of worlds, including those based on fantasy, science fiction, the real world, superheroes, sports, horror, and historical milieus. The most common form of such games is fantasy worlds, whereas those based on the real world are relatively rare.
Games and Education: Ten Future Smart Innovations
1. Future game engines that design immersive virtual worlds, encounters, and stories that automate learning for students
2. AI characters, mini-Smart Machines, that are used to tell the stories and design the learning worlds that are self-generating AIs with legends, histories, and personalities programmed to realize their learning objectives
3. Self-creating worlds that are dynamic and auto-generated with rich graphics
4. Crowdsourced stories that in real time capture sentiment and interest from the students and use this data to create learning programs
5. Team engagement in which teams work together to compete, design, and collaborate to learn together as a community
6. Student computer programming, in which students program the education
7. Dynamic real-time AI that personalizes the learning experience around the learner
8. Real-world simulations that engage the learner in newsworthy reality learning
9. Social media prediction analytics that are used to feed ideas back into the learning technologies and worlds to improve the learning experience but share new insights and ideas with the global community of learners
10. Innovation Learning Ecosystems that inspire, transact, and reward learners as developers for their ideas and programs by giving them access to a market and companies that license their intellectual property to enhance their learning
Virtual Rome is a free immersive online game world that is based on Evolutionary Networks. The game evolves with the learner’s interaction and creates new stories, characters, and landscapes as more learners interact. Virtual Rome self-organizes its content based on user inputs and the level of learning skills exhibited in real time.
World Designer uses immersive 3D technology for students to create virtual worlds and then design these to match lesson plans. The goal of World Designer is to provide resources for demonstrating the use of lesson-driven 3D virtual environments in the classroom or for training purposes, using any surfaces as the hardware platform for the “immersive touch” program that can download from the web. Any desk or mobile device can be instantly converted into a learning platform.
GeoEngineer is an online competition that encourages multiplayer teams to collaborate both online and in the classroom to address climate change and develop clean-tech solutions for creating a sustainable planet. Learners discover issues and technologies to better prevent climate crises and to restore the health of the planet. Through collaboration and competition, with teams, this networked simulation brings together real-world challenges with talented players who compete for prizes and a chance for employment with the sponsors.
Alternate Reality Games: New Ways to Educate
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) offer learners a parallel or customized universe that can include reality-simulated fictional websites and phone numbers and even artifacts hidden throughout the world that can be discovered through geo-caching or investigative online or offline activities.
Multiple players are involved with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players’ responses. Subsequently it is shaped by characters that the game’s designers actively control, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence, as occurs when playing a computer or console video game.
Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, e-mail, and mail, but rely on the Internet as the cohesion that brings everything together. The driving element is the story. A compelling story is what keeps the learners coming back and interacting.
• Gives learners real-time feedback on progress
• Teaches simulation technologies
• Teaches complex motor skills and multitasking
• Teaches leadership, team building, and conflict management
• Collaborates with other learners, both virtually and physically
• Engages interactive, rich graphics, and multimedia
• Enables learners to produce their own game narratives
• Provides realistic knowledge and events downloaded from news
• Provides dynamic gaming scenarios tailored to the learner’s goals
• Downloads learners Direct-to-Game (D2G) into avatar characters in the game; the merging of humans with Smart Machines to enhance learning and the game experience
Future Smart Learning and Gamification
DuoLingo
DuoLingo (www.duolingo.com) presents itself as a free language education site for the world. This is a massive online collaboration that combines a free language learning website with a paid crowdsourcing text translation service. So two students, from different parts of the world, interact, each learning each other’s language while they translate documents.
The World Peace Game
The World Peace Game (https://worldpeacegame.org) is a geopolitical simulation that engages young students to explore a multination world and learn about the politics, economics, environment, and crises that affect nations.
Goal Book
Goal Book (https://goalbookapp.com) empowers teachers to use research-based strategies by offering an online toolkit.
Ribbon Hero
Ribbon Hero (www.ribbonhero.com) is an epic free and fun game that teaches you how to use productivity software from Microsoft.
Class Dojo (www.classdojo.com) is a program for teachers that focuses on improving student behavior and engagement by rewarding the learner.
The Teacher of the Future
We cannot reinvent education without reinventing teachers. And teachers must be aware of how they need to be reinvented. Teachers can make or break a school, class, or student. The best teachers today inspire and engage, and they are evolving or are already Future Smart, and we all know who they are. They are not the majority of the teachers in the world, and that is the problem. Teachers need to prepare our students for the future, but they cannot if they don’t have the vision and learning themselves to make this happen.
Teachers are agents of learning, but this role should change in the future to keep pace with the world’s changes. The teacher’s role should change to be able to offer a more effective learning experience for students, adults, and kids. The teacher, as a facilitator, producer, and catalyst of innovation, is a more productive future role to reinvent education. In the connected classroom the teacher can direct and facilitate innovative learning courses that enable students to learn faster but also with more engagement and understanding.
The teacher of the future will be more curious and less the expert than the pathfinder to direct explorations of discovery into history, science, technology, math, and language. Developing new course materials and ideas to engage students in a collaborative learning method is the direction of the future. Ideally this teacher would have new skills—simulation, gamification, producer, to name a few.
The teacher of the future is not a command-and-control type of person, a my-way-or-the-highway type of teacher. He or she should be open to exploration and is collaborative—the teacher does not hold all the Learning Power; rather, the students share that Learning Power, and they have responsibility and accountability for not just learning but also creating the learning experiences. This ownership in their learning experience makes students and teachers allies in education.
Teacher as Game Changer of the Future Skills
• Coach of Creativity
• Enabler of Bold Ideas
• Global Change Catalyst
• Facilitator of Discovery
• Technology Pathfinder
• Explorer of Virtual Worlds
• Collaborator of Learning
• Whole-Systems Thinker
• Designer of Knowledge
Brain Science and the Future of Education: 2025
Neuroscience will transform the future of education. This change is emerging now but has not yet revealed the potential to develop into an applied science for education. In the near future every student—adult or child—will be tested to determine his or her Neuro-Learning Aptitude.
This test will be a wireless scan of their brains or a DNA test to determine what we can do, as a society, to enhance the learning effectiveness of their brain. Now, if this seems spooky to you today, it will not by 2025. In fact, parents, even adult learners, will want to know how their brain is evolving to become more Neuroplasticity Aware and be able to absorb more knowledge.
Techniques will emerge to enhance the learning capacity, or Neuro-Learn Aptitude, of individuals so they can enjoy the benefits of a career, art, or science to which they aspire. Certain careers will demand the shaping of IQ and skills from a specific learning program that is customized for your neuroplasticity analysis so you can be properly trained for the future job or position.
Neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can be altered by different types of learning experiences, is just part of what we know now.
The brain grows new neural pathways when exposed to complex problems and challenges. The learning methods that engage in sparking innovation and creativity, that encourage collaboration, game and role playing, all are catalysts for the brain.
New approaches to learning, using discoveries in neuroscience, will transform education to create smarter learners. Why do that?
We need to do this in order to compete in the global economy, to prosper, to have more choices in lifestyle and careers, and to make a difference, to address the Big Social Challenges that will determine the outcome of the future for us all on the planet. If we educate our children properly, smartly, the next generation of students just might meet the Grand Challenges of the future that threaten our existence.
The future Einsteins, Picassos, and Da Vincis lie waiting to be educated and will bring science, joy, beauty, and love into our world. Education plays the defining role to inspire the next generation of inventors of commerce, art, and philosophy that is vitally important to a world, as is capital and human resources. Education, when done right, prepares the entire civilization for the future.
Planetary Trends Shaping the Future of Education
• Smart Machines living in mobile cloud networks could broadcast education to over 5 billion students a year by 2025.
• Global businesses need high tech–savvy, educated workers who understand a diverse marketplace.
• Innovation is the key shaper of society, and we must integrate advanced technology into learning or else we will not be able to compete on the planet.
• The next middle class and the billions that are migrating to megacities are moving faster than schools are ready to accommodate.
• We need a way to create real-time education that nontechies can create.
• The future of business is an educated workforce that is Future Smart
• We need a cost-effective way to broadcast education to the planet, as currently education is too costly for the underdeveloped nations.
• We need to rethink what curricula, what subjects are best to prepare students for the future.
• We need to make every teacher on the planet a Game Changer for the Future.
• We need to make every school and college committed to becoming a Game Changer of the Future.
• Self-directed learning, in which the student directs self-pacing and personalized learning, is emerging.
• Wearable, mobile, and cloud computing will educate billions, bringing up the standard of living around the world.
• New nations’ high-growth GDP, such as in Asia and Africa, will require an educated talent pool of workers.
• New start-up companies embracing the Innovation Economy will support learning networks that replace traditional schools.
• Economic growth and strong GDP will support an Internet network that can deliver education quickly, inexpensively, and with modern standards.
• There will be global competition for talent.
Our Risky Future—Ready or Not?
This is the era when we will see the reinvention of education. Why, you may ask? It will become obvious, led not by educators or politicians but by business leaders, job demand, economics, wealth transfer, the demands of the Knowledge Economy, and, most of all, enlightened students and entrepreneurs who are waking up. Students allied with business and some enlightened education leaders recognize that we are not ready for the future, that we are not educating for future jobs, challenges, and opportunities.
They will create a viable, Future Smart alternative to education. If we don’t transform education, then an educational system that is broken and unable to change will perpetuate the dysfunctional culture. This will doom too many to low-paying jobs, unfulfilled careers, and an inability to compete in the global knowledge economy of the future.
The signposts of this future are here today. Unemployment in the United States and Europe is at record highs and is unsustainable for building a viable future society with a foundation of economic robustness. Productivity is low and not growing quickly enough. There are more jobs than there are skilled workers.
In the United States we spend more to incarcerate a person in jail—over $50,000 a year—than we do to educate individuals. It’s illogical as a society to spend more on prisons than education. This is a lopsided logic. We need to rethink education for the future or else we shall not have a future.
In Europe the productivity continues to slip, as does the quality of life—you cannot thrive as a society without robust jobs. In Asia, other than microeconomies such as Singapore and Korea, the big economies, such as China and India, have educational systems that are not as adaptive, modern, agile, and Future Smart as they need to be to educate the leaders of tomorrow. The elite schools are there, but quality education for the middle class, to sustain and grow middle-class prosperity, is not there, and it must be to build tomorrow’s societies.
This is not a blueprint for a viable and productive future. This is a blueprint for disaster. Reinventing education is a global security risk factor. If we want to build sustainable societies, we must transform the educational system to make it Future Smart, ready for the challenges of the future, looking ahead, not behind.
The future of education is about the rethinking and, ultimately, reinvention of education. We all need to get ready for the future, but especially our children and their schools. Are you Future Smart, ready for this future and the changes that are coming?
If we are going to educate 9 billion people by 2050, we better get moving on reinventing education. Education, a new and vibrant education, is not coming unless you invent this. The future you want is the future you will advocate for. Let’s get education right, as so much of our shared future will be dependent on our children and their children’s education.
Game Changers of the Future—perhaps some of you ready to take up this challenge—might gain a tremendous benefit from the transformation of education. We must educate for tomorrow to meet the challenges of the future.