The Future of the Education Sector

We’ve spent the last six months or so at the Centre for the Edge looking into how the trends we saw in the Australian Shift Index (i.e. the shift from knowing something, to being able to google it) might be changing the education sector.

Our hypothesis was that digital technology has changed our relationship with knowledge, and that this has, in turn, driven changes in business and society making the existing education sector (and the model behind it) increasingly irrelevant. This means that the problems confronting educational institutions don’t arise from a lack of technology or pedagogy (and MOOCs will not save the world), but from a mismatch between the perceived purpose and role of education, and the demands of the modern worker.

To help get the creative juices flowing we put some of our thoughts onto some slides which we then used to spark conversations with a wide range of folk within traditional education institutions, and elsewhere. Given that we’re in the process of pulling together a report the details our findings we thought that it would be worthwhile to share the slides, so you can find them embedded below as well as in SlideShare.

[slideshare id=44182463&doc=educationmodelv8-150202172107-conversion-gate02]

Image: Francisco Osorio