Transcriber: Fardinuzzaman Tazim Reviewer: Soumya Singh
Thank you very much. Come on, Erica.
Wow. What an entrance. Right? Okay.
My name is Erica, and I'm a digital learning geek.
And I'm here to tell you a story about a racehorse and a donkey.
But before that, I’d like you to meet someone. This is Isla.
Isla’s six years old, and she goes to a great school.
Her teachers use a blend of experiential learning and education technology.
So her and her fellow students really feel the impact of
the curriculum that they're studying.
Homework is adaptable, which means it changes based on how Isla gets
on at school that day. It's digital,
so they can play around in the background to make sure that works
for her.
Isla gets excited when she talks to her mum about all the different programs
on her computer that she uses on a day to day basis
because this helps her make sense of the world and
the education that she's studying.
She particularly likes it when she puts on her virtual reality headset
and she's whisked away to other places in the universe. How amazing is that?
Unsurprisingly, this immersive nature of learning technology is super,
super interesting with all of the students in the school, and it's very,
very popular.
Now.
Unfortunately that isn’t actually Isla’s experience.
Instead of putting on a virtual headset
and being whisked off to meet different people and different animals,
she's given a dusty textbook with crinkled pages and doodles all over
the inside. Homework is paper based
and it gets ripped in school in school bags.
Isla’s in a class with 35 other students
and only one teacher who does their best to keep up and get through
the curriculum in the work.
So you can tell there’s a difference in the first version of Isla’s experience
and the reality that she holds today. But why is this so important?
And why am I bringing this idea worth sharing to you?
Well, according to the World Economic Forum.
65% of schoolkids aged between 5 and 11 in school right now will go into
a job that doesn't even exist yet. Just wrap your head around that.
Two out of three children will go into a vocation or study
or job that we don't know about.
So we need to raise the bar on skills to make sure we're readying
the workforce of the future.
And one of the best ways to do that is interactive learning technology.
But we've gone through the pandemic
and we've looked to our educators to make sure they can keep our children in
school where possible. Home schoolings happened.
And actually there's a real place to understand
and empathize with our teachers, our lecturers and our tutors,
because if you polled them,
they'll say that many didn't get a lot of support in coaching and teaching
and training to be able to use educational technology during this period.
And historically, we've paid lip service to digital learning and technology,
but there is some grassroots coming through.
The UK's Digital Learning and Technology Report is telling us that there's
a growing evidence of technology being used both nationally
and internationally in the education space which is really, really exciting.
They say that having online access to a computer or a tablet at home
for children to use in a hybrid environment has massive benefits.
One of those is a 14 GCSE point increase.
That's two uplifts in terms of GCSE grades.
And when studied, a sample of 52,000
students went from a D to a C at GCSE science just
because they accessed online learning. And a reduction of 5.8% on truancy.
Age 16. So we know that there's benefits when it comes to digitizing our learning
and supporting our educators. And also we look at it on a global scale
So the World Economic Forum’s Global Impact Report,
and they've done a huge amount of study tells us that not only does digital
skills help us become well-rounded and successful adults,
it also has a global impact of 2.4,
$2.54 trillion around the world.
That's a lot of zeros, right? That's a lot going on there.
So we need to support our educators and our trainers and our tutors
and working with our young people throughout
the world to be able to do this. But again, what does that mean?
Well, we saw after the pandemic,
this played through only last year when we saw an impact of British universities,
unfortunately receiving complaints with an increase of 31% .
And when probed, the students said that was down to
the poor quality of online teaching and learning.
That was a response rate of 92% .
We know that digital comes with a new set of skills. We all know that.
We've all been through it.
But what I think is important here is what we call the digital first mindset.
And I'm going to take you through a couple of everyday examples.
You don't need to be an educator to get into this space. So here you go.
You might want to close your eyes on this, but you don't have to.
It's entirely up to you. So.
You drive into a car park for the first time, you've never parked here before.
You realize you don't have any change on you,
and the only way to pay is through an app.
Okay.
Or you've gone to use the washing machine.
We do that regularly and there's an error code flashing on the panel
and you think, Oh God, I've got no idea what that means.
Or you've ordered some really complex flatpack furniture
and it doesn't come with instructions. So what do you do?
Well, some people would say,
I'll hang around in the car park in case somebody else turns up and
I might ask them to borrow some change.
Or I might call a washing machine engineer to come and fix
the washing machine. Oh, it's okay.
I'll drive down to the Flatpack furniture shop and ask for a copy of
the missing instructions. But if you've got a digital first mindset,
what you might do in the car park is take a photo of the code,
load that into the app as soon as you get onto the wi fi.
Or you might Google the error code on the washing machine
and fix it yourself. Or you might go on YouTube for a copy of
the missing flatpack instructions. It's not too overwhelming really. Right.
This is the day to day digital first mindset,
so we can take this into our learning and development
and educational principles. And I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
What I am asking is that we start from any curriculum and learning built from
a digital default mindset,
which means asking ourselves questions like
What is the art of the possible here?
And how can we transform the student experience?
So we've learned a lot over the last couple of years.
And what we do know now is teaching and training fails.
If we pick up what we've done in the classroom and just plonk it online.
It's a different pedagogy.
It's a different way of thinking about how you teach and learn.
It's a continuous improvement process.
So what we're thinking about here and I thought I floated the idea of
a story of a racehorse and a donkey at
the beginning is comparing immersive learning technology to
sitting in a classroom all day, every day in an in-person space.
So let's look at the racehorse and the donkey analogy.
They've both got four legs. They come from the same origin species.
You can ride both of them,
but I'm not sure what would happen if you enrolled Eeyore into
the Cheltenham Gold Cup. What would happen ? I don't think he'd get very far.
So we think about things in a different way.
It's important to recognize that curriculum is no longer king.
Slightly controversial for me to say that.
But if you think about it,
engagement is the new kid on the block and it's here to stay.
If you're not engaging your learners in every single part of their educational
journey, you might as well not have any contact and you might
as well not have any content.
And the best way to interact
and engage with people when they're learning is through immersive,
interactive digital technology and great teaching and facilitation.
Post-Pandemic learners are expecting personalization.
They're expecting to be able to pick what works for them and curate that
for their own careers. No longer can we sheep dip students into all of
the same stuff because it just doesn't work and it's a waste of time.
It's like throwing paint against a wall and expecting to try
and get something like a Jackson Pollock.
You might get something potentially that looks something similar,
but actually you might just get a load of paint and patterns on the wall.
So what does all this mean?
Well, we know that employers are already looking for skills in the blockchain,
robotics, automation, machine learning. We are already here.
So let's remind ourselves of what the World Economic Forum says.
Two thirds of children at 5 to 11 at school will go into
a job that doesn't exist yet.
So we're already having to leapfrog where we are right now.
And if you're a teacher or a head or a governor of a school,
you were probably involved in conversations around digital learning
during the pandemic. And I'm sure as a parent, you could have been as well.
But this isn't a message for teachers or governors.
This is a message for everybody.
This is a message for anyone who's even slightly engaged in
the future of our workforce or the future of skills or
the future of learning. Now is the time for us to step up
and digitise what we do on a global scale.
And we start with our digital first mindset that we talked you through
earlier. So my ask today is that we step up to the virtual plate
and we support the workforce of the future.
Thank you.