Digital disruption has led to an extensive workplace transformation and educational institutions are moving to prepare students with the skills needed by the future workforce. Technology comes into play as it complements the traditional teaching and meet the need for digital shift in education.
In this regard, four main features have been identified to establishing a future-ready labour pool.
- Engage students through the adoption of digital, interactive and personalised content. Students must be equipped with the highly sought after analytical and creative skills.
- Empower all higher education professionals with the skills needed to access and utilise the best tools inside and outside classroom settings to engage students.
- Reform institutions by investing in analytics to collect real-time intelligence.
- Change learning by modernising teaching styles with the help of prompt, highly-automated digital processes.
However, for these to occur, educational leaders will have to adopt a change in policy.
For instance, in the case of Bangladesh, physical limitations of degree variations have resulted in a barrier for expanding into the creation of future-relevant skills. The national have heavily invested in the physical presence of brick and mortar classrooms rather than in the area of digitalisation within classroom settings.
The only way students can be ready of the future is to place emphasis on emerging technologies and they include Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
AI provides the option of learning and executing tasks independently, often without the need of frequent human supervision; while IoT allows for a network of sensors to be included in devices for the purpose of data collection or be remotely controlled.
The future may look extremely promising, however, there are challenges. While most of the leaders in the Asia-Pacific education industry have agreed to the need for digital education to facilitate future advancement, only a mere 23 percent have a complete strategy to execute. This discrepancy is an important finding amongst others in the Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Survey, aiming to understand the extent to which educational leaders within the region are trying to develop a future ready workplace.
Source: The Daily Star
Join us in the upcoming QS-APPLE 2018 from 21-23 November 2018 in Seoul, South Korea, as we discuss the topic on “Future Universities in the Asia-Pacific: The Changing Face of Higher Education”.