Leveraging the metaverse wasn’t the only topic on the agenda at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting — the future of education, as envisioned by the meeting’s participants, also prominently figured in the meetings last month in Davos, Switzerland.
The WEF held several sessions on education, including “Growing Up in the Pandemic” and “Restating the Economic Case for Education.”
The theme coming out of this year’s meeting, in relation to education, is the sense of urgency in “reimagining” education, whose future — as imagined by WEF stakeholders — includes a heavy dose of virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
While participants touted the purported economic benefits that would accompany the adoption of these technologies in the classroom, they had little to say about the need to protect children’s data or digital identities — or, for that matter, providing the types of early-life experiences children require as part of their socialization.
The initiative has already led to the launch of “accelerators” in 12 countries, and the mobilization of “a multistakeholder community of over 350 organizations.”
At this year’s WEF meeting, the Education 4.0 Alliance was added to this initiative, as part of the WEF’s broader New Economy and Social Platform, in an effort to “expand beyond adult reskilling and upskilling and integrate a focus on education for children and youth.”
Specifically, the three main objectives of this new alliance include:
- “Align on key skills for childhood education and co-create a public narrative around the importance of incorporating these skills in childhood learning.
- Surface and promote innovative, public-private-led approaches to developing Education 4.0 skills.
- Incentivize and reward the adoption of Education 4.0 skills within childhood learning.”
Saadia Zahidi, managing director of the WEF, described the new alliance:
“In an era of multiple disruptions to the labour market — the pandemic, supply chain changes, the green transition, technological transformation — the one ‘no regret’ investment all governments and business can make is in education, reskilling and upskilling.
“It is the best pathway to expanding opportunity, enhancing social mobility and accelerating future growth.”
Further emphasizing the projected economic benefits of such an educational transition, the launch of the Education 4.0 Alliance was accompanied by the release of a report: “Catalysing Education 4.0: Investing in the Future of Learning for a Human-Centric Recovery.”
The report “focuses on a broad range of skills to prepare learners for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and leverages technological and pedagogical innovation to put learners at the centre of learning.”
Arguing there is today “a unique window of opportunity to invest in Education 4.0,” the report claims that “preparing today’s generation of school-age children with better collaborative problem-solving … could add $2.54 trillion — more than $3,000 per school-age child — from this one skill alone.”
The report presents “three key investment areas” related to the Education 4.0 Alliance: 1) new assessment mechanisms; 2) adoption of new learning technologies; and 3) empowerment of the teaching workforce.
As a result, the WEF argued, “AI should be incorporated into school curricula to equip future generations with coding skills and provide them with adequate AI training.”
Indeed, technologies such as AI and VR are described as “the forces of change” that have made the present moment “the time to act.”
Justifying the sought-for expansion of such technologies in the classroom, the WEF argues that even before COVID-19 entered our lives, it was “particularly challenging for educational systems” to provide hands-on laboratories for students.
However, instead of investing in said laboratories, “Educators are starting to rely on VR simulations to develop learning experiences that would otherwise not be easily accessible to students.”
While praising the remote education technologies that became commonplace over the past two-plus years of COVID-19-related restrictions, and the UN’s role in providing these technologies to developing economies, the WEF said these technologies alone are insufficient, as “they mostly focused on transferring knowledge, not the practical and in-person experience students needed to grasp concepts.”
For the WEF, this does not result in an argument in favor of a return to the status quo, but instead, a “transformation” that will “disrupt education” and “revolutionize teaching and learning,” via “innovative pedagogies, augmented reality, virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality,” which “create a competitive advantage for all stakeholders involved.”
Reflecting the metaverse concept it is concurrently promoting, the WEF said this would be a “re-envisioned” learning environment, “using multiple physical and virtual spaces both in and outside of schools,” and where “there would be full individual personalization of content and pedagogy enabled by cutting-edge technology, using body information, facial expressions or neural signals.”
Indeed, the WEF said the use of “textbooks, notebooks and pencils as critical learning tools” is on the way out, due to “environmental pressures and COP26 goals (from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference),” which “will drive the digitalizing of education streams.”
Instead, this new technology can be “coupled with the metaverse” so that students may “immerse themselves in an interactive experience where they can visualize their actions’ outcomes first-hand” while benefiting from an accelerated learning curve “in a simulated environment, reproducing real-life conditions and situations without time or space limitations and much fewer risks than real environments.”
The WEF touted several “advantages” to learning using VR and similar technologies, including:
- “The advantage of providing students and teachers with a standardized, reproducible environment for repeated and optimized training.”
- Allowing “gamification, performance metrics, and collaborative features (using avatars)” to be “embedded in the software, enabling continuous peer interaction, active learning, enjoyment, and performance feedback.”
The WEF cited research showing “VR positively influences students’ learning outcomes,” and improves “student-teacher interactions through practical hybrid implementation, whether in or out of the classroom.”
Another study cited by the WEF, supported by the Korea World Bank Partnership Facility, claims VR learning “is more effective than traditional teaching at developing technical, practical and socio-emotional skills,” improving students’ confidence by 20% and their “efficiency” by 30%.
Other benefits of VR learning, the WEF said, include “global teleportation,” “the time machine effect,” “multi-sensory experiences,” “active autonomy,” “focused immersion,” an “empathy agent,” and “extraordinary abilities” that “break the laws of physics.”
Using more economic terminology, the WEF emphasized the need for “unlocking … maximum output” from these technologies.
Already, according to the WEF, these technologies are bringing about changes in educational systems across the world, as “schooling systems in many countries have already opened up to new stakeholders,” where “consultation is giving way to co-creation.”
In March 2019, the WEF presented a set of global standards “for digital literacy, skills and readiness across the education and technology sectors,” encompassing “the eight digital citizenship skills” every child will need, including “digital citizen identity,” “digital empathy,” and “cyber security management.”
What is particularly noteworthy is that the WEF emphasized the importance of preparing “our education systems for the future” in relation to the need to “achieve our vision” — a vision, however, that is not clearly specified or defined.
Indeed, “current spaces, people, time and technology in schooling” are called into question regarding the extent to which they are “helping or hindering” this unspecified vision.
Instead, the WEF tells us, “the COVID-19 pandemic shows us we cannot take the future of education for granted,” and that “by imagining alternative futures for education we can better think through the outcomes, develop agile and responsive systems and plan for future shocks.”
These “alternative futures” were outlined by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development as part of its “four scenarios for the future of schooling,” which were cited by the WEF and which include:
- The expansion of formal education.
- The outsourcing of education, as “traditional schooling systems break down, a process where digital technology will be “a key driver.”
- The transformation of schools into “learning hubs” where “diversity and experimentation have become the norm.”
- A “learn-as-you-go” model where “education takes place everywhere, anytime” and where “distinctions between formal and informal learning are no longer valid as society turns itself entirely to the power of the machine.”
According to the WEF, “schools could disappear altogether” on the back of “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality and the Internet of Things.”
