How often did you get to listen to the lectures not relevant to your job/profession or your passion? The education ecosystem is changing rapidly with the arrival of new technologies offering students and working professionals alike a way to bulk up their resumes with relevant knowledge and field-specific skills.
According to The Future of Jobs — Employment, Skills and Workplace Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution published in January 2016 by the World Economic Forum, new categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others. The skill sets required in both old and new occupations will change in most industries and transform how and where people work. A potential skills gap can be addressed adequately only by transforming how and where people get their higher education.
As stated in the Future of Jobs report, most of existing education systems at all levels provide highly siloed training and continue many 20th-century practices that are hindering progress in today’s talent and labor market issues.
Two such legacy issues burdening formal education systems worldwide are the dichotomy between humanities and natural sciences and applied and pure training, on the one hand, and the prestige premium attached to tertiary-certified forms of education — rather than the actual content of learning — on the other hand.
Put bluntly, today there is just no good reason to maintain either of these indefinitely. Businesses should work closely with governments, education providers, and others to imagine what a true 21st-century curriculum should look like.
Transforming the Education Landscape
Top universities offer the best lectures, and their students do not face the challenge to land their first jobs. However, they represent a small minority of students. Millions of students still do not have the access nor can they afford to study at the top schools, despite their great talent. Global Education Solution (GLEDOS) is their and the society’s opportunity to realize their potential.
Many educational institutions need years to modernize their programs and adapt their lectures to the market needs. Many professors and lecturers lack the motivation to follow the latest industry trends. With the rapid advancements in science and technology, the “skills gap” is thus widening. GLEDOS addresses the skills-gap challenge by continually collecting the feedback from businesses and through its artificial intelligence (AI) engine providing the input to professors and lecturers on how to (re)shape their lectures. The feeding of up-to-date data increases the relevance (value to market) of students to land a job in their respective fields.
Imagine students who can cut down the education period for a specific job from an average of 4 to 5 years to 1 to 2 years, just because they attended a learning program created by their future employer.
AI + blockchain = A New Education Ecosystem
Besides utilizing the AI engine developed by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Institut Jozef Stefan, the GLEDOS platform will also use the Ethereum blockchain. The latter enables many features that would be difficult or even impossible to achieve using other technologies. One of them are smart contracts which will be used for purchasing training hours — vouchers (tokens), defining the investment criteria (participation, passing score).
Further, curriculum snapshot will enable students at any moment to prove their personal achievements and send them to their potential employers, even to businesses which are not part of the GLEDOS platform. The smart contract logic will be used by the scholarship program — a commitment to receive a scholarship when specific criteria are met. Smart contracts will be used for the certification of content providers, professor accreditation, an educational institution with a license to operate and training centers.
Pay what you consume is the logic of payment with smart contracts based on actual consumption of a particular lecture (proportion payment). GLEDOS token is used to pay for lectures, scholarships, mentorships, other investments, and for payment from HR agencies to get the insights on the job market.
Last but not least, standardization enables increased interoperability between systems and allows data sharing and access.
GLEDOS’ vision is to empower every student to achieve desired career goal and every employer to get the most suitable talent. Bring the utilization of blockchain and artificial intelligence to the next level of common interest.
