Our world has always been in a race between technological advancements and skills gap, and when education lags behind, it leads to massive social pain and it must adjust in order for these societies to meet prosperity. The 21st century presents the most profound invention of humanity, artificial intelligence.
Up to half of today’s jobs, around 2 billion are at high risk of disappearing due to automation and other factors driving obsolescence by 2030, according to The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. As a result, the World Economic Forum predicts over 50% of the one billion global knowledge workers are projected to need upskilling or retraining to avoid being pushed into under- or unemployment.
Our learning practice underpins a holistic approach to nurturing futurists, informed by a deep research on the science of active learning presented in the book Active learning online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive as well as literature from the evolving global workforce and the voices of the Gen Xers.
Our world has never had a greater urgency in ensuring that students are equipped to
tackle challenges that lay before them. The world, to a teenager, is a place rife with serious issues—When polled, dropouts report that they leave school because it has no relevance in their lives.
In the eyes of the emerging student, the world is a place composed of serious issues-- a global financial meltdown, planetary warming, dependence on fossil fuels, political unrest and civil wars. Yet the student has to find a position in such a complex world. The traditional schooling system isn’t prepared for the massive waves of changes driven by rapid technological innovations that when polled, learners are totally disengaged in their path to intellectual growth.
What if our schools focused energy not on test scores and rankings but on engaging students in their learning process? What if education was more than facts and formulas as presented in books, but relevant to the world they see? What if rather than trying to teach students problem-solving, we actually encouraged them to take on problems that needed solving? Rather than teaching them a science curriculum, what if we opened the door for them to do science?