Knowledge is power and it all stems from our education. We begin as toddlers and many of us continue receiving our education until well into our twenties and beyond. We never really stop learning new things throughout our lives to enrich our minds, skills and knowledge. Technology has brought along an abundance of opportunities for how education is delivered and taught around the world.
We’ve rounded up eight education experts and asked them how technology is going to change the future of education. Here’s what they had to say:
Ryan Craig @ryancraiguv
Like enterprise software companies, colleges and universities will have to transition from selling degrees to unbundling or providing “Education-as-a-Service” (EaaS)
Many of the Silicon Valley startups that have become “Unicorns” (i.e., valued at $1 billion or more) are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. If you’re not intimate with SaaS, the exemplar is Salesforce.com. A decade ago, customer relationship management (CRM) required buying, customizing and implementing bulky enterprise software. It was a big ticket item for most companies and then every couple of years you’d need to upgrade to the new version. Salesforce.com changed all that. Companies could now “rent” CRM software per user per month. The software (and all the data input by customers) was hosted by Salesforce.com (and now in the cloud). Customers configured the software rather than hiring consultants to customize it to fit their business processes.
Since Salesforce paved the way, hundreds of SaaS startups have bloomed to serve enterprises in every industry at every link of the value chain. But SaaS is also causing incumbent technology providers to change direction. Adobe’s primary product used to be the Creative Suite design package, the standard for magazine design and other graphic arts professions. Despite surging global demand for digital graphic design, sales of the $2,600 product were flat. So Adobe launched a SaaS product: Creative Cloud, available for $75 for a single month, or an annual subscription of $50 per month. In the spring of 2013 Adobe announced more than 1.8M users had signed up for Creative Cloud, growth of more than 400k over the prior quarter. Adobe is no longer selling Creative Suite; customers must buy the Cloud.
SaaS companies are growing like topsy and sporting eye-watering multiples. Gartner projects the market for cloud-delivered software and infrastructure will reach $43B next year. But this growth isn’t being driven by the convenience of paying monthly for access to the same enterprise software you used to install on your servers. Instead, SaaS companies are creating real value for customers by unbundling enterprise software into component parts, each of which addresses a discrete customer need. So customers can pay for what they need and no more. One popular new Adobe SaaS product is a $10 per month package aimed at photographers that combines Adobe’s design software with an online community to sell photos. No more paying for bloated software, 95 percent of which is never used.
In many respects, colleges and universities are providing the educational equivalent of enterprise software. Current degree offerings are big ticket items: bulky, requiring several years to complete, and customers pay for the whole thing regardless of what they really need.
Like enterprise software companies, colleges and universities will have to transition from selling degrees to unbundling or providing “Education-as-a-Service” (EaaS). So let’s look at what higher education institutions can learn from market leader Salesforce.com.
Decide on your business model(s) before doing anything else.
Decide whom you’re serving, what value you’re trying to provide, and who’s paying the bill. Certainly not only traditional-age students (and their parents, and the federal government), but also the adult learners who constitute 43 percent of all higher education enrollments. Some employers might want to pay the bill. Keep in mind most leading technology companies already support 5+ discrete business models.
Build the product from day one with a focus on customer experience and value.
Putting a course or degree program online is all well and good, but that’s the easy part. EaaS will be about taking advantage of the medium to rethink education. It can’t be the same for everyone. Every student has different needs (e.g., motivation, aptitude, preparation, career interest, time-to-job). Follow Adobe’s lead and unbundle the degree into component parts to better serve distinct customer profiles and you won’t just have a one-time purchase, you’ll have a customer for life.
Instill “customer for life” mindset in sales and support, starting with first sales call; sales needs to be focused on delivering value to the customer vs. generating as much revenue as possible upfront. Salesforce.com’s service and support organization is called “Customers for Life” (CFL).
As it was with Adobe, this is scary for colleges and universities. The payoff of EaaS is you really can have Customers for Life. Winning institutions will provide for the ongoing educational needs of its customers. The current distinction between students and alumni slowly will become an anachronism.
Product development must be agile. Salesforce.com issues approximately 500 product releases each year. Such continuous enhancing requires an operations organization (responsible for ensuring the service remains bulletproof) that is separate and distinct from product development.
Faculty will no longer develop a course and teach it the same way for a decade. EaaS will require that learning experiences be kept up-to-date, often with examples pulled or curated from the day’s headlines. Also, while colleges and universities are long on “product development” resources (i.e., faculty), they are short on operations. Traditional institutions going online have filled the operations gap through partnerships with service providers. Service providers are likely to play an even more prominent role as operations becomes more central to the core value proposition.
Customer service isn’t about answering technical queries; the product allows customers to provide self-service. Rather, customer service is about using Salesforce.com to improve the efficiency of the customer’s business.
For colleges and universities, customer service will mean helping students optimize the return on their tuition investment. This means better understanding how the institution’s offerings prepare students for the specific skills in demand by employers, and then helping students better connect with those employers by making the skills visible to employers or via direct connection to employers.
Rethink governance and leadership structures to make better, faster decisions.
For software companies, the enormity of the challenge in moving to a SaaS model has been huge. For universities – many of which are struggling with the notion of digital delivery of existing programs – moving to EaaS will be even harder. Perhaps the biggest challenge for most higher education institutions is that current governance structures barely allow them to drive effectively. And when the vehicle heads towards the cliff, the steering mechanism will prove quite inadequate. Winning institutions will be those that streamline governance today for quicker, more effective decision making tomorrow.
About: Ryan is a founding Managing Director at University Ventures. Ryan previously headed the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus from 2001 – 2004 where he was the founding Director of Bridgepoint Education and has advised the U.S. Department of Education and served as VP Strategic Development for Fathom, the Columbia University online education company, from 1999 – 2001.
Tony Bates @drtonybates
I think ‘business as usual’ is increasingly unlikely. Educational institutions will need to change or die.
I see three distinct possible futures for education as a result of developments in technology.
The increased automation and commercialization of education. Developments in learning analytics, artificial intelligence, data visualization, and augmented reality will result in the end of public education, with very large technology companies providing extremely low-cost but relatively advanced, personalized and automated learning strongly linked to the immediate demands of employers, and with a strong focus in pre-defined learning outcomes and a behaviourist approach to learning. In the long run, though, this will lead to even more unemployment and low wage jobs, and will widen the gap between rich and poor, and will not in the end produce enough highly skilled, critical thinkers to drive large knowledge-based economies
Technology is used to empower teachers and learners. Learners will be able to access learning as and when they need, but within a strong social and educational support system that includes not only teachers and instructors, but close links to learners with similar learning needs, perhaps on a global basis. The emphasis will be on the development of high level thinking and practical skills, such as knowledge management, IT skills embedded in professional development, independent learning, and critical thinking. Technology will be an integral part of all students’ learning, as they surf the Internet to collect data, access open educational resources, and communicate with other learners. University teaching in particular will shift from a focus on the transmission of knowledge to supporting learners through guidance in learning goals, providing criteria for the evaluation of sources of knowledge, personal feedback and assessment, and collaboration with students in research. This will result in large numbers of highly qualified knowledge workers that will create new jobs and a healthy, shared, knowledge-based economy
Same old, same old. Educational institutions will continue to half-heartedly bolt on new technology to existing forms of education, such as video recordings of lectures, the use of LMSs to recreate traditional classes online, and technology for the large-scale proctoring of exams. Although online learning will continue to grow, it does not effectively result in the new kinds of skills and knowledge needed, because the teaching methods remain the same online as in class. This too will result in increasingly disenchanted learners, poor educational outcomes and as a result a slowing down of the economy in general.
I have listed these in terms of probability, with the most probable first. The political pressure to commercialize education, particularly but not exclusively in the USA, and the increased power and dominance of major technology companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and the potentially large commercial returns from this first vision makes this vision if not inevitable at least strongly possible.
For somewhat similar reasons, I think ‘business as usual’ is increasingly unlikely. Educational institutions will need to change or die.
Of course, I would prefer to see the second vision dominate. This is a more humanistic and socially just development for technology in education. However, it will need strong political support and a willingness to change within institutions and within the professoriate, and I am not convinced that there is sufficient will or awareness of the risks of not changing to ensure that this will happen.
About: Tony is President and CEO of Tony Bates Associates Ltd., a private company specializing in consultancy and training in the planning and management of e-learning and distance education. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor in the G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, Toronto.
Kathy Brodie @kathybrodie
The biggest area of advance in technology is the use of iPads and tablets with very young children, often alongside books and printed material.
My expertise is in the Early Years sector (0 to 5 year olds), so my answer is specific to that sector.
The biggest area of advance in technology is the use of iPads and tablets with very young children, often alongside books and printed material. This means that they can be truly interactive, with video clips and character development. Although this will never replace books, it does add a whole new dimension for children’s learning.
For practitioners, advanced technology means that observations, assessment and planning can be done on handheld tablets and iPads and then shared with parents very easily (for example, iConnect Childcare, whom I have worked with on their system). This improves communication between parents and practitioners, which means a better experience for children.
About: Kathy is an Early Years Professional and Trainer based in East Cheshire, specializing in the Early Years Foundation Stage and Special Educational Needs. Learn more from Kathy on her kathybrodie.com.
Dr. Paul Browning @PaulDBrowning
What will become of our humanity if a child spends their formative years interacting with a machine? How will they learn empathy? How will be develop the emotional intelligence to sustain real and authentic relationships?
Will Schools Go the Way of Kodak?
On 19 January 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy after consumers moved away from film and embraced digital cameras. Kodak was a company stuck in time. Their history was so important to them that it ultimately became a liability. Ironically, not only did Kodak not see the disruption technology was bringing to their industry, they were the ones who invented the digital camera but failed to commercialize it!
Al Gore, in his 2013 seminal The Future, suggests that, “there is no prior period of change that remotely resembles what humanity is about to experience. We have gone through revolutionary periods before, but none as powerful as the period beginning to unfold now.”
Gore’s predictions are supported by Ray Kurzweil, Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer, now Google’s director of engineering, who believes that by 2045 humans will be able to multiply their intelligence a billion-fold by linking wirelessly from their neocortex to a synthetic cortex in the cloud.
Technology is disrupting almost every facet of modern life. Just this last weekend The Australian (6 August 2016), the country’s national newspaper, carried stories of AI and robotics that are replacing a multitude of jobs: Hadrian X, is a robot that can lay 1000 bricks an hour, 24 hours a day (compared with a human who can only lay 300-500 a day); driverless cars that by 2030 will have totally disrupted the transport and insurance industries; and, a robot that can manage a farm.
It is predicted that 50% of the jobs we know of today will be replaced by technology within the next decade. This includes professions like journalism, accountancy and even law. Education will not be immune.
Pearson, a multi-national education company, is currently working with UCL Knowledge Lab, to find ways of harnessing AI to create learning tools that are more efficient, flexible and inclusive than those currently available, and that can be delivered without a teacher. And make no mistake, Pearson, and other companies like them, don’t exist for altruistic reasons, they exist solely to make money.
Schools and educators, like Kodak and many other industries, are sleep walking into irrelevance. Believe it or not, education is on the precipice of a major disruption. Very soon the question will be asked by governments who are under increasing fiscal pressure: “Can we more efficiently and effectively educate our children?” The way technology is advancing the answer will be a resounding “yes”.
The pressure brought to bear by multinationals with no scruples or altruistic intent, and governments seeking to find efficiencies and improve the educational standard of their populations, will be enormous. The redundancy of teachers in the educational process will be justified as a significant cost saving as well as a dramatic improvement in academic outcomes.
Facing this precipice, we have to avoid the temptation to unilaterally adopt all the AI promises, all that glitters and shines, and ask the very really question, “should we allow technology to overpower education (and life) as we know it?” Just because something is cheaper and achieves better outcomes doesn’t make it right.
What will become of our humanity if a child spends their formative years interacting with a machine? How will they learn empathy? How will be develop the emotional intelligence to sustain real and authentic relationships? How will they grow a heart for service, seeking ways to make a positive difference to the communities they eventually will live and work?
We won’t be able to stop the pace of change. Technology will continue to disrupt every facet of our lives at an ever increasing rate, perhaps extending the definition of Moore’s Law. So in this ever changing world what is an education worth having? How do schools and teachers avoid becoming the next Kodak? Rather than ignoring what is coming, schools and educators should begin to embrace the developments and start a process of transformation for the betterment of humanity.
About: Dr. Browning has been a Headmaster for 17 years and is currently the Headmaster of St Paul’s School in Brisbane, Australia. Paul is passionate about creativity and innovation in learning and is the author of “Compelling Leadership: The importance of trust and how to get it”.
Corey Murray @CorMur21
The next wave of education technology will focus on community engagement, on bringing parents and teachers and students together to solve the problems and challenges that none of these groups could hope to solve on their own.
If you spent any amount of time at one of the half-dozen ed-tech shows this summer, you no doubt saw your share of classroom wizardry–wearables that help students keep track of homework, virtual reality headsets that extend learning beyond the classroom to the lab, the operating room, or on some exotic safari. Technology continues to transform teaching and learning. But the classroom is far from the last bastion of innovation in schools.
An even deeper, potentially more transformative evolution, is taking place outside the classroom–in a broader dimension that parents and teachers and students call ‘the school experience.’ As competition between K-12 public and charter schools intensifies, the need for parent and community engagement does too. Parents and students want a louder voice in school decision-making.
The next wave of education technology will focus on community engagement, on bringing parents and teachers and students together to solve the problems and challenges that none of these groups could hope to solve on their own.
These solutions will improve communication and customer service, leverage human capital to close persistent resource gaps, and drive community support and buy-in for critical school and district decisions at every level, from the front office to the classroom to the home.
About: Corey is the Senior Director of Strategy and Engagement at K12 Insight, a rising ed-tech startup that provides SaaS-based communications and customer service solutions for schools.
Dr. Stephen Taylor @stephengstaylor
In brief, I think that technology changes will enable private innovation in support of learning, over and above what is offered in mainstream schooling. I think the biggest contribution government can make is to create an enabling environment through infrastructure (connectivity). I’m not yet convinced that we’re ready for “paperless classrooms” etc.
About: Dr. Taylor is an Economist and Education Researcher at the Department of Basic Education in South Africa. He has worked extensively in the Economics of Education field, working on topics including impact evaluation of education interventions, the effect of language on educational outcomes, the effect of socio-economic status on education in South Africa, and the relationship between access to education and school quality in African countries.
Dr. Ivory A. Toldson @toldson
Avatar teachers with artificial intelligence will be able to process centuries of research, imitate geniuses, and give every student the experience of being taught by the likes of Einstein or W.E.B. DuBois.
When asked to critique the state of education, a high school student serving on a panel in Houston, TX said, “teachers, not computers, should teach students.” On the surface, he was stating the obvious; human teachers are better than computers. However, in the future, the best teachers might have numbers behind their names, like Watson 5.0, rather than letters, like Ivory A. Toldson Ph.D.
Virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnologies will profoundly change the human learning experience. The law of accelerated returns and the exponential growth of technology will lead to rapid and drastic changes in education that are difficult to predict with logic or linear thinking.
In the foreseeable future, technology will extend the boundaries of the classroom. Augmented reality will allow students to instantly identify landmarks, topography and organisms in their environment, making learning less static and compartmentalized. Instead of being taught by one teacher each year, virtual reality will allow students to learn from many different avatars in many different learning environments. When computers pass the Turing test, avatar teachers with artificial intelligence will be able to process centuries of research, imitate geniuses, and give every student the experience of being taught by the likes of Einstein or W.E.B. DuBois.
The nature of learning will also change. Technology will continue to transmute into different shapes and sizes, augmenting human abilities, as they go from our phones, to our watches, glasses, clothing, assisting devices and even within our bodies. Human intelligence will no longer be based on who has the best memory, but on who can use technology most effectively. Human behaviors that lead to labels like ADHD and Autistic spectrums today could become workable components of mid-21st century intelligence.
Many of our present-day challenges with education stem from our lack of awareness or acceptance of how technology will facilitate human evolution. For example, using a paper and pencil standardized tests to determine industrial potential, is like using a horse and buggy to determine driving abilities.
When movies portrayed video phones in the 1980s, it looked like a hybrid between box-shaped analogue TV and a landline; not like the smartphone that it would actually become. Now that we have smartphones, it’s difficult to imagine that they will certainly become obsolete in only small fraction of the time that it took for landlines to become obsolete.
When envisioning how technology will advance education in the future, you have to avoid myopic reasoning. The revolution in education will be born in our wildest dreams, not our tacit acceptance of the status quo.
About: Dr. Toldson is an associate professor at Howard University, senior research analyst for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and editor-in-chief of “The Journal of Negro Education.” Dr. Toldson has more than 60 publications and research presentations in 32 US states, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Scotland, South Africa, Paris, and Barcelona.
Dr. Carole Eldridge @Nerdnurse
Remember the holodeck on the Starship Enterprise? Educational holodecks are in our not-too-distant future, courtesy of virtual reality technology that exists today and will continue to improve. Healthcare education for nurses and others will become more accessible in simulations the students can enact in their living rooms. A nursing student in Alaska can work with fellow students from Hawaii and Kansas to save the life of a simulated patient in cardiac arrest. Their teacher can guide them from her home in Michigan, while a Texas administrator is managing the technology. Students can engage in scenarios they might never have a chance to see in their physical world, so they will be prepared to a new depth of learning.
About: Dr. Eldridge is the VP of Post-Licensure & Graduate Programs at Chamberlain College of Nursing as well as a Partner at CareTrack Resources. She is a nationally-known long-term care educator and author. She is a board certified nurse administrator, advanced, with extensive experience in starting and managing long-term care companies.
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