Teaching and learning will look very differently in 2050. We can imagine a single teacher giving a course to more than 100,000 students at the same time, online. We can imagine a robot teaching a small group of students. We can imagine students learning from each other without any teacher involvement. Or we can imagine a student learning on her/his own, guided by an educational software using artificial intelligence…
Are these images outlandish dreams? Actually, they are real-life examples of the radical transformation that tertiary education is undergoing today in a few institutions at the vanguard of innovative practices. While teaching approaches and modalities have seen very little improvement in the past decades—unlike the rapid transformation that medicine has gone through—, we are likely to witness drastic changes in the near future under the combined influence of two key factors. First, progress in education technology (online learning, simulation robots, gaming-like software, etc.) is opening new avenues for interactive and problem-based learning. Second, tertiary education institutions are faced with the challenge of preparing young people for jobs that do not exist yet. The traditional approach where teachers impart their knowledge to students in the classroom must imperatively be replaced by a dynamic learning model where students acquire generic competencies that prepare them to identify their own learning needs and advance their skills throughout their working life.
First published in Handshake Issue No. 8, January 2013.
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