Sharing Good Practice
continued from page 11
3. The For-Profit Group invest in top
talent for key leadership roles:
GEMS has attracted top educationalists
from around the world to drive their
educational and IT learning strategies.
Looking into the Crystal Ball
– Five Prophecies for the
Future of Schooling
So, if we apply the principles of
Dubai’s For-Profit sector to the global
Learning-School
problem,
what
solutions might we see?
Schooling
1. Education For-Profit will become the
norm around the world. Not-for-Profit
education is not equipped to meet
the global demand for education, the
inevitable consequence is that the For-
Profit sector will fill the void.
Secondary Schooling
2. Being taught by a specialist teacher
in a classroom at Secondary level will
be a luxury. Technology won’t replace
teachers everywhere – but it will in
many places. In the future, it will only
be Premium Secondary Education that
will be delivered by specialist teachers
in classrooms, drawing on a range of
real and virtual resources. Budget
Secondary Education will not have
subject teachers, but will be delivered
totally through online courses on
learning platforms. However, for many
young people around the world this
will be better than the present situation
of receiving no education at all. Mid-
Range Secondary Education will be
delivered by “super-teachers” via
Virtual-Reality Conferencing. The For-
Profit will invest in new technologies
in order to maximise the impact of
teachers.
3. Virtual Reality Teaching will be the
disruptor of Secondary education. We
also already have ‘Virtual Teaching’
through video conferencing which
enables pupils around the world to
be taught live by a remote teacher.
Furthermore, ‘Virtual Reality’ already
enables pupils to travel through
time and space – to experience the
ancient Coliseum in Rome, life in the
trenches or a World-War One dog-
fight with the Red Baron. Once these
two technologies are combined so
that we have ‘Virtual Reality Teaching’,
it will be possible for a pupil to put
on a headset and ‘feel’ as if they are
in a real classroom with a world-class
teacher, or be taken on a virtual school
visit to any place in time and space.
4. There will be ‘superstar teachers’
commanding very high salaries. One
of the consequences of the rise of
Virtual Reality Teaching is that there
will be the rise of superstar teachers.
The For-Profit sector has a proven
record of investing in talent where
it can make wider savings. It will
inevitably pay to attract top talent,
particularly in shortage subjects and
their global educational networks will
provide a platform which will enable
great Virtual Reality teachers to reach
millions of students. These teachers
will inevitably be very well paid and,
given the nature of the 21 st century, it
is likely that they will be famous and
become celebrities.
Primary Education
5. Primary Teachers will be assisted by
Robots. Young children at a formative
stage of development need human
interaction to shape their learning, thus
it is highly unlikely that it will ever be
possible to replace teachers in primary
schools with technological solutions.
One consequence of the predictions
for secondary education outlined
above is that primary schooling will
need to teach the skills to enable
young people to access non-classroom
based forms of education. It is quite
possible that robots will replace
Teaching Assistants, performing basic
instructive tasks such as teaching basic
mathematics and listening to children
read.
Final Thoughts on the
Future of Schooling
Prophecy is more about reading the
signs of the time and working out a
likely future position from the direction
of travel, rather than receiving some
dislocated revelation from on high.
Prophets are rarely popular because
they are usually delivering a message
that people don't want to hear. I
believe that the signs for the future of
schooling are there for all to see.
In an ideal world every child in the
world would receive the quality of
education that is available at Eton or
Phillips Exeter Academy (or even at
Dubai College or JESS for that matter)
but that isn’t going to happen. The
reality is that there is inequality of
educational provision in the world and
that is very unlikely to change. The
challenge to every true educationalist
is how we can give every child the
opportunity to have at least some form
of basic education and, technology has
a very important role to play in that.
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