Higher education plays an important, multi-faceted role in the new global development agenda, which strives to eradicate poverty while addressing social needs such as education, health, social protection, job opportunities, climate change and environmental protection. All these areas, and more, are reflected in the 17 IIEP UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Campuses worldwide are slated to play a crucial role in driving this ambitious agenda towards success. They can provide the advanced human resources and knowledge needed to address the complex challenges related to sustainable development. The strength of higher education institutions lies in their interdisciplinary teaching and research, and in their capacity to develop innovative solutions to global and local problems. Overall, higher education is a pillar to the whole education system through its teacher training and educational research functions.
Education 2030 is much broader than the earlier Millennium Development Goals, which focused on primary education and gender equality. SDG 4, the overarching goal of Education 2030, aims at ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Looking beyond the pandemic, some leaders are evaluating what, if anything, will need to change in their higher education institution’s operating model–including their organizational structure, decision-making processes, and uses of capital–to help ensure long-term financial sustainability and achieve their institutional mission.
Leaders, more than ever before are evaluating potential changes to their operating models which may need to:
- Address clearly and identify the student population(s) and stakeholders they seek to serve, implement changes to their program portfolio and operations to reflect their refined focus
- Deploy agile decision-making processes that enable flexibility in response to an ever-changing environment
- Redeploy human, financial, physical, and reputational capital in alignment with their new operating models
The famous buzzword among educationists today is Education 4.0. What is Education 4.0? Do educators really understand it or they simply follow what others are doing. To understand Education 4.0, it is important to understand the Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0
Nine Trends related to Education 4.0 which will shape the Higher Education Teaching and Learning over the next 5 to 7 years.
First, learning can be taken place anytime anywhere. e-Learning tools shall be co-created to promote opportunities for remote, self-paced learning. Flipped classroom approach shall remain pivotal as it allows interactive learning to be done in class, while the theoretical parts to be learned outside the class time.
Second, learning will become personalized to individual students. They will be introduced to harder tasks only after a certain level of competence is achieved. More practices will be provided if the instructors see a need in it. Positive reinforcements shall be used to promote positive learning experience and enhace students’ confidence about their own academic abilities.
Third, students will have a choice in determining how they want to learn. Although the learning outcomes of a course are preset by the institutions/bodies in charge of the curriculum, students are still free to choose the learning tools or techniques that they prefer. Among the options that lecturers can adopt shall be to equip & enable students be creative in their learning are blended learning, flipped classroom and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach.
Fourth, students will be exposed to more project-based learning. Students shall be required to apply their knowledge and skills in completing a couple of short-term projects. By involving in the projects, students shall practice their organizational, collaborative and time management skills which are useful in their future academic careers.
Fifth, students will be exposed to more hands-on learning through field experience such as internships, mentoring projects and collaborative projects. The advancement of technologies enables the learning of certain domains effectively, thus making more room for acquiring skills that involve human knowledge and face-to-face interaction.
Sixth, students will be exposed to data interpretation in which they are required to apply their theoretical knowledge to numbers and use their reasoning skills to make inferences based on logic and trends from given sets of data. The manual part of mathematical literacy will become irrelevant as computers will perform the statistical analysis and predict the future trends.
Seventh, students will be assessed differently and the conventional platforms to assess students may become irrelevant or insufficient. Students’ factual knowledge can be assessed during the learning process, while the application of the knowledge can be tested when they are working on their projects in the field.
Eighth, students’ opinion will be considered in designing and updating the curriculum. Their inputs would help reshape curriculum designs to maintain curriculum contemporariness and its usefulness. Lastly, students will become more independent in their own learning, thus forcing Instructors/Faculties to assume a new role as facilitators who will guide the students through their learning process.
These nine trends of Education 4.0 shall shift the major learning responsibilities from the instructors to the learners. Instructors / Faculties should play their roles effectively to support the transition and should never consider the loss of conventional teaching approaches as a threat perspective.
