Memorandum of future education

Image by Michael Coghlan — https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/6498349887

When robots will take away jobs, what to do with those who lose their jobs? What skills we need to study now to be competitive in 5–10 years? How do we need to teach people to stay masters for artificial intelligent?

For centuries, only the best approach for training and development was an individual face-to-face mentoring, when we could have teachers who gave us personal attention, took into account our unique characteristics, considered the situation in the external environment. Also, such mentors team would provide a full 100% personal support: training, coaching, learning, assessment, risk assessment, analysis and forecasts, psychotherapy when necessary. Imagine that behind you back there is such a team whose sole purpose — to help you achieve your most ambitious goals. The team that can connect you with any intellectual resources.

However, having such team is possible if you are an Arab prince, head of a large corporation or president of the state. It is no secret that many leaders are owed by their successes of invisible mentors commands. This team is a very exclusive, and the content of such a group is very expensive.

If we talk about of the market of personal development, productivity, and education, we can say that such a support system for decision making is the luxury product of the highest possible quality. Sometimes it is inaccessible product even for very wealthy people because it’s not about the cost, but about getting very specific people.

Now imagine that such a support system would be available to anyone, anywhere in the world for the price of mobile communication at the place where they live?

What we talk about? We are talking about the future education system! What is that? To answer this question, we have to understand, how our lives changed, and how our lives will be modified in the next 10–20 years.

Hello, new, wonderful world.

In the past, most people have been part of corporations, their life’s goals were linked to corporate objectives. Companies gave people meaning of life, community, welfare, and career. It was. In a Past time all life strategies were contained three elements: 1) enroll a good university, 2) get in a corporation, and 3) do not screw it up.

Now, however, many people focus their projects. Numbers of such people become more, and those people prefer to choose their personal priorities, rather than corporate’s priorities.

More people are looking for jobs for the meaning of life, rather than only for the money. When people can not find meaning of life in corporations, they create a meaning of life itself.

20 years ago business processes specialists were the most valuable. However, there is evidence that all operations, manufacturing, marketing, sales, logistics, and support will be fully automated for ten years.

Now there is no problem to produce anything, deliver anywhere and support. However, one problem is becoming more and more — creating something new, something that can solve problems more efficiently.

Corporations realize that although they have massive amounts of data about the customer’s behavior, they lack entrepreneurs on board who can use these opportunities and create new products. Corporations are trying to use Machine Learning and Big Data approach to finding new patterns and regularities. It allows to optimize processes and conversions, but it does not replace the intuition of entrepreneurs.

There are no problems with algorithms, but there are problems with getting the right people who would be capable of doing the job for corporations, which entrepreneurs are mostly doing to themselves. While a key goal of the business is to maximize the profit for shareholders, corporations will have difficulties in attracting entrepreneurs.

The most far-sighted organizations understand this point, so they to be transformed from operation processors in something kind of the incubators of ideas and talents.

This trend distributes across countries and sectors, because the operating margin continues to fall, and the margin of innovation continues to grow. Talented people with business ambitions become much more valuable resource than money, equipment, and minerals. The economy is always experiencing a growing shortage of creators, visionaries, and entrepreneurs.

When robots will take away jobs, what to do with those who lose their jobs?

This problem, which now is represented as ephemeral, soon it will become critical. The vast mass of extra people and pensioners who have to get support. But this is not enough. These people should be given the meaning of life.

When people lose hope and meaning, then firstly they sit at home depressed, but later, this depression is converted in aggression, and people fill the prisons.

The problem should be solved by the creation of new meanings of life and the workplaces, rather than robot’s ban. However, where we could get a sufficient number of people who can compete robots? Do we hope to get them from a modern education system? The modern educational system prepares professionals capable of servicing corporate business processes. It does not know how to cultivate creators and entrepreneurs.

So, what requirements must meet the future educational system (FES)?

• The new educational paradigm: to help people realize their dreams and build their unique destiny, to achieve success in the implementation of their projects. Not just to teach and train professionals to fill positions in corporations.
• Education — is a tool, not a goal.
• The ability to help people achieve success in the world, where the critical processes will be sent to machines.
• Capacity to prevent an apocalyptic scenario, when the world will consist only of the technological elite and ghettos filled with people living without hope and meaning.

The amount of changing and diversity increases, therefore, learning will be the primary human activity throughout life!

• The education system should provide equal learning opportunities for all ages. Training to be needed for mature and older people are specifics and differs from educational approaches for children.
• Each situation, problem, and challenge that people face during the learning and life are unique, so the education system should be individualized. We need to adapt programs for man, instead to adapt of man for the curriculum.
• The boundary between learning and work is erasing. We are always learning when working, and we are constantly solving real problems when learning. Therefore, the future system of education should provide full support to the person in solving any problem for lifelong.

The learning function is only a small part of the whole supporting system prepared to help people to achieve their personal goals.

• In a world where critical processes will be transferred to the robots, a person must be creative, but it is not enough.

Develop ideas and bring them to life — different skills; therefore people need to develop entrepreneurship.

• An entrepreneur is about the ability to change the world, to put forward ideas to attract individuals and resources to overcome obstacles and make connections extensively, not just about the money. Money is the metric, not a goal.
• The future education system must be able to prepare the creators and entrepreneurs, people who can create and implement innovations that can overcome the resistance of the environment, to deal uncertainty and lack of resources.
• Anyone passes in his life three repeating phases — student — he learns, professional — he creates, the teacher when he can teach. Good teaching can be possible only when a teacher is regularly involved in the creation and learning cycles.
• The future education system should not divide people into a caste of educators separated from others people. Each person should be able to pass all the key roles — student, a professional, teacher. If a person remains in the role of the teacher is too long, he (she) loses its qualification as a professional, doesn’t feel the market, he has a poor understanding of the students. Long staying in one of the roles slows development.
• Long-term strategies for success gone. Agile approach replaces the waterfall approach in all areas, but it does not give good results too. Short iterations do not solve the main problem — knowing the right direction to move in long term perspective.
• What skills we need to study now to be competitive in 3years. What skills do we need to learn in 5 years to stay competitive for 10 years?
• Forecasts and futurology do not reduce the level of uncertainty and risk. The only approach that can provide the dramatically better solution is the real-time simulation of the trajectory of the individual when we are going through many scenarios and take into account environmental and personal factors.
• This system should be the core of the future educational system because it will help give more reliable tips and predictions that take into account many factors.
• The key product should be a system of destiny building which combines training, recommendations, relationships, access to resources throughout the life.
• The system must be able to provide service to an unlimited number of people, to have the ability to handle a huge number of requests and data in real time.
• The system must be available, that means to have a hybrid model — to provide 90% of the critical resources remotely without physical presence, and provide 5% exclusive features in some locations, only where appropriate.
• The system should have the lowest possible price for the entry level.
  The system should have a well-developed system of financial aid for advanced levels.

The most important.

• The core of the system must be completely personalized, unlimited mentoring 24/7.
• Everyone should have access to mentors who can provide training, coaching, learning, assessment, risk assessment, analysis and forecasts, psychotherapy when necessary.
• Everyone who should be behind has a single purpose — to help the client to achieve any goal.

What is the key challenge of creating such a system? Where is the bottleneck? What is the technical problem?

The basis of effective learning and growth is an action. Success achieved those who does, not those who reads. People make mistakes, fall, draw conclusions, correct and make a new attempts. They repeat the cycle over and over again. The great man said: “Success is the path from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”. However, if your learning cycle is very long, you may lose enthusiasm.

Therefore you need a mentor who gives feedback and supports you on the way. Because most scarce is a perfect intention and ability not to give up, but not knowledge. You want someone who will help to maintain enthusiasm.

Good mentoring is 100% unique, especially when there are complex issues where there are no instant answers. That is why mentoring too hard to automate and scale.

High-quality, personalized and accessible mentoring is a critical bottleneck in modern education system.

All other problems associated with creating and distributing content, testing, and certification, reputation management, the recommendations — resolved, more or less. Therefore, there is a bunch of available content, and there are so few results. Our decision is aimed for creating of mentoring management system which is capable to provide both high-quality, complete and personalized service plus a highly scalable, cost-efficient and affordable system for the mass market.

Why is scalable mentorship management system the core of mentoring?

• On the market, there are many MOOC, who gives any cheap content, but without mentoring support.
• The market has also a lot of universities and incubators that provide mentoring, but very expensive.
• Universities use the old education system, based on the lectures.
• Educational institutions use microscopic part of project-based approach, although it is most effective.
• The reason why the project-based approach has not been sufficiently spread — lack of cost-effective and scalable mentoring management system which is the core of a project-based learning.

Thus, we believe that the there is a demand on market in the segment of affordable project-based courses with quality mentoring support at a price higher than the MOOC, but lower than the price of universities and incubators.

Our goal — to bring a luxury product for the mass international market at competitive prices.