Education 4.0 – transforming the future of education (through advanced technology)

I remember the teacher talked and we listened. We had to memorise quite a lot too. A lot of time was spent giving out books and collecting them up again. We were sitting in rows in desks so we could see the board better because talk and chalk was the way. There must be an industrial revolution in education in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernise the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education. Sydney, El Prese, 1924. These young people are studying in a new way. A computing calculator designed for use in high school classrooms has created tremendous excitement among educators. The tool which has made this possible is the high-speed digital computer operating with electronic precision on great quantities of information. If we think about the third industrial revolution, that was PCs and the internet. And we've just about caught up with that. The fourth industrial revolution is what becomes possible from those technologies. Industry 4.0 is the next big shift in the way that manufacturing operates. Digital know-how is going to be hugely important and then people will need to be flexible because the world will change. The future workplace and future societies, we're still moulding them as we go. And technology is one of the main pillars in what is shaping what the future will look like. The pace of change is remarkable. With the introduction of these exponential technologies, creating a paradigm shift to create education 4.0. Lectures aren't fit for purpose anymore. Using textbooks and teaching in a Victorian sort of method with rows of students, you know, listening to the teacher, taking notes, it's obsolete. We need to use our time in lessons to actually have those meaningful mentoring one-to-ones that can never be replaced. The technology gives us that time if we use it correctly. Rather than being something that's scary, we can use technology to be something that's very liberating for people. So instead of having to go through the rigmarole of institutional learning as it's been in the past, we can actually use smart robotics, smart computers to make learning more accessible to more people and to actually tailor it to individual needs. This whole cluster of AI technologies will make learning for students more rewarding, teaching for academics more rewarding. We want it to be a win for everybody. We've shown already in clinical studies and trials that retention is up to 70% higher in virtual reality. That has a huge impact on learning and retention of facts. The challenge is for universities to really develop their students' digital skills so that they can actually make use of those skills in the workplace. It would be all too easy to say everyone must learn to code, but the truth is coding is just one digital skill. Creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, these skills that can never be automated, that can never be replaced, are what we need to focus on. Education 4.0 is a request to the education sector to rethink the educational paradigm, and it's an opportunity for us as this fourth industrial revolution kicks off to think about what modern education should look like. We now live in a hyper-connected world, and now the time, more than ever, the time is for us to say what do we want to do with that?