Education 2022: A 360 Degree View

Ten predictions for Education in 2022 (abstracted from Education 2022:  A 360 Degree View)

1. Learner-Driven: Disruptive innovations will be designed with the individual learner at the center.  Learners, and their close agents (e.g. teachers, parents) will be the users, the choosers, and the drivers (not large institutions).   Learners, their agents, and the entrepreneurs who serve them, will play the leading roles in this story of positive disruption and transformation. 
2. Openly Accessible: Learners of all ages will have unprecedented access to open educational resources and configurable learning paths that match their individual needs, experience, and goals.
3. Personalized:  Advanced technology (machine learning, cloud, mobile, in-memory, sensors, big data analytics, behavioral neurobiology, cognitive sciences, and organizational behavior) will enable schools and other institutions, essentially experience providers, to cost effectively facilitate contextual, adaptive, personalized student-centered learning for today’s learners and an additional 3 billion new minds.    Learners will have access to the tools and awareness required to deeply understand their own individual needs, and to meet these needs.
4. Social:  Intentional learning will be social on a global level.   Social networks will make learning, assessment, and certification more efficient and more effective.   Learners, parents, and teachers, all nodes in the learning network will create, share, and discover on a massive scale as the cost of collaboration drops to zero .   Personal learning networks will ultimately redefine ‘class’ (in the context of who is in your class this year :)).  Geography, age, duration, and season become less relevant in the delivery of a learning experience.
5. Ubiquitous:   Intentional learning systems will be integrated into our physical environment, our clothes, and our bodies, available anytime, and everywhere, enabled by small, cheap, and fast computing technology.  Today’s sensors and mobile devices, which are exploding onto the educational scene, are only prototypes of what is to come.
6. Holistic: The emphasis, at least at the primary and secondary levels, will be on how to learn, and the development of 21st century sensibilities in critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, design, story, empathy, play, and meaning.  Physical learning environments will remain important to enabling delivery, and will be optimized.
7. Teaching Redefined:   Teachers will be free by 2022.  Almost everything they do will be focused on the delivering the best possible and relevant end to end student experience.  Their passion will be liberated to focus on delivering results, not on managing upward into the system.  Teaching becomes both hyper-local and global at the same time with teachers bifurcating into two primary categories:  1) The Agents who facilitate, coach, manage, mentor, produce, and connect (experts in identifying students personal intelligence types and learning styles for any given topic)  2) The Domain Experts who engage in instruction, and design, create, and share educational resources and assessments.  The Domain Expert may have millions of ‘customers’ around the globe.  Lastly, Siri’s children, will play a significant role in educating our children as machine intelligence comes of age.
8. Policy Redefined:   Intent and goals for education will become more distributed, flexible, individualized, and sometimes even crowdsourced.     Families will have many choices for delivery alternatives at least in the later primary, secondary, and higher education years.  Students and parents (many more involved) will have the freedom to choose the right education path for their children, and they will demand to allocate their tax dollars accordingly. 
9. Industry Engaged:   Industry, out of enlightened self-interest, will engage more deeply with learners, earlier in their lives (e.g. adolescence), and become active partners for institutions that serve learners.  Engagement will include shaping curriculum for learners, providing educational resources, and providing programs and environments to deliver learning experiences.  Learners will have a more clear vision of what skills, and competencies, are required for a specific job, and the nature of the prospective job.   
10. Achievement Redefined:   Hiring managers (anyone paying someone for a good or services rendered) will have a much more granular (and verifiable) understanding of the hiree’s accomplishments.    Assessment will be personalized, and will be based on real achievements, artifacts produced, demonstration of acquired skills, and mastery of concepts, and not so much on method of instruction or attendance at a specific institution.    Assessment will be leveraged as a service on granular level, woven into content, apps, games, our environment, and the hiring process.   Credentials will be granular, open, and portable.   An individual’s portfolio of achievements will follow them throughout their life, and individuals will determine to whom, and when, they will provide access to their history achievements and other credentials.