The world is gradually expanding virtually, as are the things in it. The way we study and impact knowledge to bring about change is also not left out of the dynamics.

Education has traditionally required us to spend a significant portion of our formative learning material in a classroom before leaving to put it to use in the real world. But given how quickly things are changing nowadays, everything we know today might be obsolete tomorrow.

To ensure that we are better prepared for the rapidly changing world of today, our learning processes must also adapt, embracing technology and ideas such as lifelong learning.

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However, in this piece, Eduvision’s Hamzat Ibrahim Abaga talks about the key trends that have the potential to engineer changes in the education sector now and in the years to come.

Soft Skills and STEM

Interpersonal problem-solving, relationship management, conflict resolution, and teamwork are examples of soft skills. Therefore, it is improbable that machines will ever be able to reproduce these human skills.

In a world where AI assumes many of our ordinary and uninteresting technical jobs, they will become more and more significant. This indicates that as these skills become more important to businesses and industries, they will increasingly be taught as a part of technical education. HR professionals claim that although “soft skills” like mathematics, engineering, and computer programming are “hard skills,” they are much more difficult to quantify and evaluate.

STEM education will increasingly emphasize these crucial skills in 2023, and efforts to measure and evaluate corporate capacities in this area will also increase.

Remote, Online, and Hybrid Learning

Schools, colleges, and course providers were obliged to create the capacity to provide education remotely as a result of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. Massive online open courses (MOOCs), however, had already begun to revolutionize the field of online education before this.

Teachers can reach kids in schools through technology and online learning, regardless of how remote the communities are. In a world where approximately 270 million children don’t attend school because they live in remote or rural areas, this might be a big step toward ensuring equality of access to education.

The rise of ed-tech platforms like Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, and EdX is the primary force behind this. These platforms are made to support the “lifelong learning” philosophy, which is likely to grow more popular as a result of the quickening speed of technology development. This philosophy calls for skills to be regularly updated and “topped up” using novel models like micro-learning or nano-learning.

Celebrity-led and well-known instructors are now offering courses online as a new trend in the field of distance education. There are options to study with Martin Scorsese, Julia Donaldson, or Bob Iger, all masters in their respective fields, via the Masterclass and Maestro platforms (the latter of which was developed by the BBC).

Artificial Intelligence 

Every sector of the economy and area of human endeavor, including education, is being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI), which has been dubbed the most revolutionary technology of the twenty-first century. It can be found in the classroom in the form of virtual assistants that can help students and teachers manage their time and finish their assignments, tutoring programs that can offer individualized instruction to students of all ages and skill levels, the technology that powers remote and online learning platforms where it can adjust the pace of instruction to meet students’ needs, language translation in educational settings where students speak a variety of languages, and multimedia learning environments.

According to reports, some Chinese schools have even started employing computer vision systems and facial recognition technologies to check their kids’ attention levels during class.

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According to UNESCO, AI has the potential to help tackle some of the toughest challenges in education today, including addressing inequalities in the way schooling is provided around the world and improving access to knowledge globally. However, it also creates challenges of its own – with the effort required to ensure that the rollout of this highly disruptive technology is done in a way that is fair and doesn’t itself contribute to those inequalities.

Not Just College

High schools have and will continue to devote more resources in 2023 to preparing students for career possibilities that do not necessarily involve regular college courses. Schools have collaborated with companies to develop or create new solutions to problems brought on by the skills gap, and vocational and technical courses that teach a variety of skills are likely to gain popularity. 43 percent of high school graduates in the United States go on to attend college, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nevertheless, a disproportionate amount of school resources are focused on preparing this minority group, while less teaching focuses on students who plan to continue their education in less traditional ways, such as apprenticeships or on-the-job training. As the demands of the new labor market shift away from seeking purely college-educated graduates and towards developing a workforce with the necessary skills, we can expect to see this change in the future. In Europe, 2023 has been designated the European Year of Skills.

This recognizes that a focus on vocational education and training alongside traditional academic, subject-based training may be the key to developing new drivers of economic growth in the face of a global slowdown or recession.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

The use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), two types of extended reality (XR), in educational institutions is growing. Users of VR can enter a virtual world, and there are a huge and expanding variety of “experiences” that allow us to do everything from travel back in time and see history firsthand to practice for challenging and dangerous activities like making repairs in dangerous conditions.

In 2023, virtual classrooms, which enable the delivery of remote learning and class activities in a more immersive and experiential setting, will become more popular as another use case. VR is already being utilized in healthcare training for a variety of purposes, including teaching surgeons how to do surgery and allowing nursing students to practice providing emergency care.

Unlike virtual reality (VR), augmented reality includes superimposing computer-generated graphics over what the viewer is viewing. A device is still needed (such as a phone, tablet, or headset). The benefit of this is that it can give real-time information, such as alerting a trainee in a manufacturing environment that a piece of machinery might be hazardous.

Computer vision algorithms that analyze the images captured by the headset’s cameras make this possible. In schools, augmented reality (AR) textbooks are becoming available that contain images, and models that “come alive” when looked at through a smartphone camera, enabling students to get a closer, more in-depth look at anything from ancient Roman architecture to the inner workings of the human body. Museums and sites of historical or scientific interest are also increasingly adding AR experiences.