The disruption of education and learning

The sped up tech progression is bring disruption to many areas. Life as we know it will be changing, even faster. One major area is education and lifelong learning.

Some stalwarts of the establishment may not like the sound of it, which is understandable. But it simply can’t be ignored. Let’s take a look at a couple of what’s going on.

Khan academy

In 2004, Salman Khan was just making 10 minutes youtube videos to tutor his cousin Nadir. Fast forward that, Bill Gates, Google, Carlos Slim and others have backed this effort. This project very much started the disruption in education.

Edx

To save myself some writing. Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University created edX in May 2012. More than 70 schools, nonprofit organizations, and corporations offer or plan to offer courses on the edX website.[6] As of 24 March 2016, edX has more than 7 million students taking more than 700 courses online

2016 and beyond

There are many online education establishments such as udacity and coursera to name just a few.

Let’s extrapolate this and I wonder how this will change the education and lifelong learning landscape in a first world country such as Singapore.

It is pretty obvious that this is disrupting the established methods of instructions. It is also exciting to know that people do indeed have much more options for learning right now and it will keep getting better.

There’re more opportunities for late bloomers who might not have fitted in well in a more rigid system of the past. And this is just an understatement. Now a whole new generation of mid-lifers have the accessibility for retraining and benefit from a new world of agility that’s required for survival and to thrive in this new economy.

The future belongs to those who have the ears to listen and the heart to act - and it has absolutely nothing to do with age.