Smarter Eduction - Higher Education Summit 2011 - D Watt

© 2011 IBM Corporation

Education for a Smarter NationSignposts for the Future

Dougal Watt, IBM New Zealand Chief Technologist March 2011


Introduction

Smarter Nation

Smarter Education

Five Educational Trends

The Educational Continuum

Education System Implications

ICT Challenges

Agenda


Introduction

Education will become the most critical success factor in the 21st century as society transitions from agrarian to industrial to information economies.

Five trends for the future are already visible – technology immersion, personalized learning paths, knowledge skills, global integration, and economic alignment.

These trends form an Educational Continuum, or single view of learning, skills development, and workforce training.

This Educational Continuum is part of a shift towards a “Smarter Nation”, with implications for the traditional boundaries between academic segments, education providers, and economic development initiatives, to deliver whole-of-nation benefit.


Smarter Nation

The IBM vision for a Smarter Nation is a nation that:

Uses science and education to understand and improve the ecosystem of opportunities, problems, solutions and skills facing our nation.

Societal systems are treated as an ecosystem. Previously isolated systems like health, education, environment, labour etc are integrated so that we understand them as a contiguous and interdependent ecosystem.

Each part of the ecosystem influences the others, with all parts underpinned by intelligence to identify linkages and influences between seemingly unrelated systems, and optimise each part of the system for the best national outcomes.

Education is a key underpinning of a Smarter Nation.


Smarter Education

IBM research into education has highlighted a range of issues driving changes in education, which in turn influence the Smarter Nation.

Service-based economies increasingly require meta-skills of critical thought, information literacy, collaboration and creativity to solve national problems.

Education must begin today to build a student-centered industry that develops in each citizen the skills necessary to prosper and thrive in this world.

Governments and educational institutions must begin to see themselves as part of a holistic system that anticipates the needs of its citizens by directing investments and resources to embrace the future.

But how do educational systems respond when they are facing the challenges of limited resources, inflexible infrastructures, entrenched processes, increasingly incoherent and incompatible data, and rising consumer demands?



IBM has identified five educational trends driving the shift to Smarter Education.

These represent opportunities for meaningful and long-lasting systemic transformation to education systems.

How our educational system responds to these trends will determine its value to students and long- term value to society.

Understanding each of these areas is useful for understanding the strategies and solutions for education policy, investments and programs.



Technology Immersion has become a reality for students.

Students are increasingly dependent on digital resources for communications, learning and entertainment activities at home, school or workplace.

This revolution in mobile technology is being driven by innovations in the consumer marketplace, and spreading across the world.



Increasingly, students value programs and services tailored to their abilities, lifestyle, needs and preferences - this preference is reflected in the rate of increase in online course enrollments, and through surveys.

The Internet generation students are much more likely to embrace online learning. Recent studies in the US have indicated online course enrollments grew at a compound rate of 73% for K-12 from 2000 – 20061.

E.g. a survey2 of secondary school students indicated strong preference for online courses to face-to-face classes, for a variety of reasons:

– To learn at my own pace (37%)– To get extra help (29%)– To accommodate my schedule (28%)– To take a class not offered at school (38%)– To earn college credit (43%)– To learn about a subject (28%)

1 Outsell Reports on Online K-12 Education Market, Fall, 2008 2 “Learning in the 21st Century: A National Report of Online Learning”, Project Tomorrow Report.



As demand for agricultural and industrial workers continues to decline, students need to acquire skills that prepare them for knowledge-based professions.

Over the past 25 years in developed and developing countries, service-based jobs have increased over 11% while positions in the industrial and agricultural sectors have decreased.

Educational providers are responding by integrating 21st century teaching methods into their curricula, to deliver traditional courseware in a more interactive mode in order to increase what a student learns, and second, to develop lifelong, 21st century skills in how a student learns and works.

The worker of tomorrow will be expected to solve problems that have not been encountered before, assimilate data from disparate sources, derive insights to make decisions and communicate effectively across language, country and societal boundaries.



A globally integrated world creates opportunities for institutions to reach new learners, for learners to access new resources, and creates a more integrated web of collaborators and resources.

This trend has many implications for institutions:– increased competition– greater need for collaboration skills– greater need to access and manage information– need for greater cultural awareness– opportunities to remove barriers and broaden their reach– institutions that provide compelling, sophisticated and effective learning will

continue to remain vital and valued– costs for building and operating state-of- the-art systems and infrastructure

will become a significant financial challenge



Education is now recognised as a key differentiator in economic prosperity, especially for service-based economies, with calls for closer alignment between educational systems and national economic development initiatives and goals, and investment plans.

Education systems that adapt and respond accordingly are critical to a successful return on those investments. Educational systems that best demonstrate responsiveness and adaptability will be the winners in receiving favorable government treatment and funding.

Measurement of the contribution by education remains a challenge – outcome focused frameworks are inadequate to assess whether the students are being prepared for the skills they will need to succeed outside that education system.

Aligning educational outcomes to workforce demands will dominate the accountability discussion at the local level; on a public policy level, concerns about global competitiveness will compel policymakers to intensify educational accountability across the full spectrum of educational services.


The Educational Continuum

The Educational Continuum will provide a more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent educational system:

– Learning services and resources will become more interconnected and seamless.

– Information about student needs and skill gaps will become more instrumented and non-intrusive to the teaching process.

– Decision-making will be informed by intelligent insights based on an integrated view of learning.


Education System Implications

The shift towards Smarter Education has many implications for existing education systems:

Any device learning - information, entertainment, and learning across any device; cloud provisioning; technology enabling lifelong learning; merging of learning with consumer devices.

Student centred capability - educational providers must work together and share information, processes, resources etc seamlessly and transparently; cross-institution collaboration; shared repositories of student information; institutions shift to information-centric.

Learning communities – ongoing professional development of educators: new education delivery tools; curriculum and courseware designed for 21st century; real-time global collaboration and social communities.

Services specialisation – specialisation by institutions in core competencies; institutional sharing to combine resources for full learning programmes, increased efficiencies and reduced costs; standards for open architectures, platforms and applications and for securing data and privacy across institutions.

Systemic view of education – government view of education as integral to functioning of the nation; shift from outcome metrics to whole-of-system efficacy; develop broad range of skills for economic growth; coordination across all levels of education system; require new tools and 'ecosystem management frameworks' to make informed investment decisions.


Technology Challenges

Open technologies– The shift to open technologies has enabled broad, underlying collaboration

and delivery of products and services based on common standards, reduced cost, increased flexibility and more rapid innovation.

– Common information and processes will allow better management of outcomes, more personalized learning pathways, and lower costs of operation of educational systems.

Cloud technology– Computing services, storage and networking bandwidth are approaching

prices that shift the balance from scarcity to abundance, with changing economics shifting focus from distributed computing to public and private clouds.

– Cloud offers lower operational costs, common user services, and a utility based anywhere delivery model based on shared services.

Consumer IT– Growth will continue in mobile technology and devices, with the risk that

institutions will chase the latest consumer craze and not develop coherent enterprise strategies and architectures, instead of pursuing open environments for their enterprise to leverage the consumer market.

Smarter Eduction - Higher Education Summit 2011 - D Watt

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