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| Emil Robertsson, Thomas Koponen and Tobias Strandh at EdTechX 2017 - London |
It was one
of the hottest week in ages in London and a premonition of one of the most
interesting conferences I’ve attended lately, EdTechX 2017. Last year when me
and Emil from Informator attended the conference we found lots of new material
for the progress of our own training work at Informator and this year when we’ve
grown even more in the Nordic approach, it felt natural to also have Thomas
Koponen with us representing the Finnish perspective (and helping us cover as
many different sessions as possible).
Charles
McIntyre and Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet, co-founders of EdTech Europe conference
kicked of the opening Keynote with tons of interesting data about what is happening
in the EdTech world right now. Looking at the five years since this conference
started, a lot has happened! In the digitization process we’ve gone from
content is king + E-books to the definite rise of learning transfer platforms
that now is an upcoming fact for both us in the adult education area. Looking
at our own work this is without a doubt true! We’ve been implementing the
Training Cloud over the last two years and are now partnering up with EdTech
leader Claned to take the next step. For the youth education sector, we’ve gone
from “Moocs will never replace University Degrees” to “Universities doomed to
disappear” (which might be a bit excessive, but looking at the rising number of
students worldwide, there is no doubt that the need for a digital alternative).
The learning world has moved on from
flipped classrooms and extreme focus on courseware to using bots and a more
project and phenomenon based learning. As one of the lecturers said;
In 2017 we
do not need to fill students with tons of facts in the same sense as before, we
have computers everywhere for this exact purpose. Our main goal ahead should be
to teach students how to find the facts they need and focus on teach them how
to use it!
Speaking on
teachers… the calculations show that when the population of the world continues
to grow, of course the need for good teachers do the same. Today in 2017 we
have about 2.7 million teachers (as profession) worldwide. In 2020 the need
will be almost 11 million and in 2030 there should be 25.8 million teachers
needed to provide every child with a primary education. Even in the best of
worlds I do think we all see the need to find additions to the human factor
here! Bots and artificial intelligence will continue to add value and resources
to the education sector and I personally see that we need to focus more on
helping the leaders of our big companies really assimilate the digital
transformation that is needed to take us all into the modern society! For us
that works in the IT education industry it seems like a small step, but we need
to bear in mind that many of our clients have merely looked at IT as a painful
but necessary tool before. We must level up from only delivering product based
training to a much wider perspective for all major employers to actually
embrace the fact that digital has grown to be an essential part of all
companies, no matter which industry you are focusing on!
In her
keynote, Esther Wojcicki (Chief Learning Officer, Planet3) looked at the
questions of how can technology empower students of today and how is the role
of the teacher changing? As we’ve already concluded and implemented in our own
work, technology can and will help in the learning journey for our students and
it was really interesting listening to panelists as Jason Wong (global product
manager at Google Education) explaining technologies that Google work on to
assist both teachers and students and Anne Kauth (Professional Development and
Partnerships at Minerva Schools) talking about how they’ve already started
implementing more and more technology in their training to help the teachers in
focusing on how to really teach students how to work with the new ideas, more
than just teaching them the theory. This thinking really lines up with how we
at Informator Tieturi more and more have moved on to the learning transfer
practice where we flip the classroom and use the training cloud as a complement
where our clients can learn in their own pace and actually get more out from
the expert hours, practicing their new found knowledge together with world
leading experts! In a world where time constraints collide with expert shortage,
it really is our duty as an EdTech leader to do our very best to help both our
students as well as the industry to move on to a more effective way of
learning!
This year
at EdTechX, my reflection is that we are talking more and more about best
practices for the learning industry and the new products are more examples of
ways to getting there. Learning portals and collaboration platforms is still
the main factor and I do think that everyone attending the conference shares
these ideas. The big thing for us now is to actually continue the work back
home, teaching and sharing our joint ideas to both the people we work with as
well as getting better in actually explaining the essential need to our clients
(no matter if it is in the corporate or private world). Sadly, there are still
many processes and regulations set as guide lines several centuries ago that
still are in use even if the digital transformation has taken us all into an
entirely new spot. There still is so many leaders and managers out there that
are reluctant to change because “we’ve never done it like this before” and THAT
is our main work ahead. We need to continue giving the clients what we as experts
believe is the best possible solution and not always listen to exactly what is
asked for. I’d like to end with looking back at the alleged words of wisdom
from Henry Ford almost a 100 years ago;
“If I had
asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Our work
continues...
/Tobias
Strandh, Nordic Director
