Future of Learning Top Reads for week of Oct 15 2018
Photo by Amir Geshani on Unsplash
“Children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. Here's why,” by Johnny Wood, on World Economic Forum
“Shifting the focus away from exam perfection towards creating more rounded individuals represents a serious change of direction for Singapore. Alongside academic performance the new policies aim to foster social development among pupils to raise self awareness and build decision-making skills.
“Human-focused or soft skills like critical thinking, leadership and complex problem-solving will become increasingly important. The report warns that to keep up we'll all have to become lifelong learners - with employees needing 101 days training or upskilling by 2022.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
What do you do when you're in “first place” and realize that the measures that got you into first place don’t matter?
You do what Singapore does: you disrupt yourself.
Of note: Singapore’s Deputy Secretary of the Minister of Education visited Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia last week to see an inquiry- and project-based learning curriculum in action.
Look for the Question of the Week below…
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“WeWork Spurs Online Learning's Next Step Forward,” by Michael Horn, in Forbes
“The future of online learning in higher education is in bricks, not just clicks. But these bricks won’t look like the gorgeous and overgrown college campuses we have today.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
Schools may be slower to evolve than for-profit organizations, most of which have already experienced disruptive innovation due to our networked world. But schools are not immune.
WeWork’s partnership with 2U offers a glimpse of what a “bricks and clicks” approach to learning could look like:
“WeWork offers 2U students a place to learn and a community with whom to learn and interact more broadly. Although many of 2U’s students were independently finding and connecting offline with others in their area before, 2U has now embedded that option as a feature, not an inconvenient arrangement that students had to construct on their own.”
What if there were co-learning spaces for K12 too?
In other news about innovative learning partnerships…
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“College and Coding Boot Camp Find a Way to Team Up,” by Melissa Korn, in the Wall Street Journal
“Coding boot camps pitch themselves as a sure path to a lucrative job. Colleges say a liberal arts grounding is crucial to career success.
“Now, the two have come to a sort of truce, marrying a healthy dose of technical skills with a more traditional college course load in an effort to round out students’ experiences and boost enrollment.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
The partnership between liberal arts “Dominican University of California and "San Francisco-based coding program Make School” harmonizes diverse modes of thinking and doing. The two institutions are “teaming up to offer computer science courses at Dominican, taught by Make School instructors, and general-education courses at Make School, taught by Dominican professors.”
Multidisciplinary thinkers and doers will thrive in our Age of Accelerations.
In addition, for the vast majority of schools that cannot afford to build their own programs in house, partnerships like these make a lot of sense. That feels as true for K12 as it does for higher ed.
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Question of the week:
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