Demystifying the future of learning

"Technology needs to be incorporated in the future of education to ensure students are equipped with the skills to cope in a world dependent on technology.”

The factory-inspired, 19th century model of education was focused on packaging, or ‘bundling’ as many forms of learning into applicable skills as possible. This method functioned while the availability of teaching resources was and has remained extremely limited since its inception. We now move into a new era of ‘unbundling’, as expressed by CMO of 5ire, Utkarsh Amitabh in an article for World Economic Forum. This “great unbundling” will manifest with courses offering specific training in focused skills such as “soft skills, core skills, critical thinking or an opportunity to network” where we previously saw students offered access to all four.

Initial developments already at play take the form of online courses, ‘open’ universities and fast-track bootcamps in areas such as digital design and coding. The COVID-19 pandemic also saw a globalisation of communication tools such as Zoom and Google Meets, previously confined to high-powered office environments. These platforms revolutionised the education sector, ensuring that students from primary age until post graduate would have access to the classes, courses, lectures and seminars wherever they were in relation to their school or university.

As we witness new course structures and intensive learning processes develop into the mainstream, the motivation is to engage students as quickly as possible, and for the shortest amount of time. In 2019, the Guardian reported that “the information age has changed the general attention span”, with reports in 2021 indicating that the average adult attention span was just 47 seconds (and decreasing). This is largely due to the influx of apps such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok taking over our previously highly-accessed online channels such as YouTube (longer form vid...