Disrupting Education Ain’t Easy: Why I chose to roll up my sleeves and joined a “Future Ready School” as an Innovation Advisor
Having spent half a year in the role as the Innovation Advisor of VERSO International School, I am inspired everyday by the incredible team at VERSO, especially our Head of School, Cameron Fox, who is truly a visionary who walks the talk when it comes to “disrupting education”. Oftentimes we get bombarded with the sorry state of affairs in our country’s education, and then soundbites and marketing messages of how a new school is truly revolutionary and cutting edge, only to find out it is a glossy, expensive packaging wrapped around a 100 year old concept of a “old school”. Recently, at the Bangkok Post International Forum 2021 on Unleashing the Future: A Glimpse into 2022 and Beyond, I got a chance to hear Cameron share his vision of how VERSO became and why it is different. This is when I realized, why I join VERSO in the first place.
Rethink the concept of schooling: work, university and the way students learn
As someone who is at the forefront of technology for the past decade, there is no doubt that it has completely changed the global economy and the nature of work. However, I recalled the time when I graduated from business school that I felt naked and incompetent, not having heard of Silicon Valley or startups, nor having any basic skills like coding, design or digital marketing that are increasingly vital future skills that the global economy needs.
Therefore, when Cameron said that schools need to build Future Ready Skills “give learners the capacity to work in a variety of settings and emerging industries”, I realized I was working for the right guy.
That can range from the ability to analyze a situation from multiple perspectives to the ability to present data in more than one language, he said.
“The days of having a single career are over,” Mr Fox said. “Most of our young people will have multiple careers in their lifetimes. So we need to prepare them to be much more flexible, adaptive and creative.”
This could not be more true, for a guy who held a dozen of careers and now is the Chief Transformation Officer at an energy company during the day, and an angel investor, crypto trader, Venture Capitalist at Mandalay Venture Partners as well as Innovation Advisor at VERSO International School in the time between breaks, evenings, weekends and sometimes working in my sleep!
Universities: Enough Already!
Universities also have seen changes, Cameron said, adding that more students are rejecting the standard four-year-degree routine. Instead, they aim to obtain micro-credentials that are more relevant, cost-effective, and valuable when looking for a job.
“Learning will become much more bespoke and personalized in response to the needs and preferences of the market,” he said. “Students will increasingly look for quicker, more efficient ways to learn. This means remote and hybrid models of learning will become increasingly attractive.”
Again, I could not agree more with these statements. For someone who completed his EMBA during Covid, on top for 4 micro-credentialing courses in angel investing, usability engineering and Chinese ecommerce, I have seen first hand the power of these new forms of education that allowed me to get the best courses and instructors in the world, at fraction of the cost of taking a live session while saving time from all the travelling and making it fit my busy schedule without having to sacrifice my income and family time.
“Our young people are hardwired consumers, who has grown up expecting to customize all aspects of their lives; from the food they eat, to how they buy things, where they go and now how they want to learn,” Cameron concluded which is often the reason I tell people why digital disruption will affect all industries. If you can have everything at your fingertips delivered to you near instantaneously, why would you ever tolerate waiting in line to transfer money at a bank or in the rain to hail a taxi? The tolerance of poor user experience is increasing lower, yet schools and universities still cling to an old model that no longer fits in with the expectation the 21st century.
Our people are learning differently
“The pace of change and all aspects of our future lives means everyone will be constantly re-skilling and up-skilling. As we live longer too, learning will become a life long experience. And this is why we need to train students how to learn,” said Cameron.
“They need to know what just-in-time learning looks and feels like. We need to help them to become truly independent, self directed, managers of their own learning journey. And empowering the students with agency and ownership of their learning is a key aspect of the work that we do for our young people at VERSO,” he said.
This is evident in some of our flagship events, like VERSO Hack, which is coming back this Jan 21–23, 2022 on the theme of Future of Foods. We’re taking tried and tested experiential learning tools like hackathons and applying it to 13–18 year old students that want to be a future entrepreneur. When was the last time your school brought in the best founders, venture capitalist and industry thought leaders to hang out with young people?
Old school doesn’t prepare us for the Future
“But it takes time,” Cameron admits. “And sadly, in Old School, the curriculum won’t allow that to happen.”
“So, looking at the future, we’ve got some pretty strong reasons for change. The next question is, how do we do it? How do we build the school of the future here in Thailand.”
That is our challenge in 2015, and I am honored to have a chance to witness Cameron and some of the smartest folks at the world’s leading design consultancy IDEO who tirelessly ran the design thinking workshop in the glass house of the original HUBBA coworking space Ekkamai location (the folks would not tell what the project was about, but it sure looked like a lot of fun!).
Are you ready for New (Design-Driven) School?
Through my ground floor experience witnessing the birth of VERSO in my backyard, to an excitingly ambitious vision and a design driven DNA that no other international school has, I secretly wished to be part of the VERSO team the first moment I met Cameron. But we’ve got a lot of work to do, and with bold vision, it is hard to visualize something you’ve never seen, touch or experienced before. Therefore, seeing is believing, from our Apple Park-like campus, to the incredible staff and students with a designer mindset and practices and curriculum put in action and continuously refined to identify and build the 141 Future Ready Skills needed to thrive in a VUCA world.
In summary, as Cameron puts it:
“The world needs to build its’ creative problem solving capacity. Rarely is our problem solved by an individual sitting at a desk, so we need to train our young people to work collaboratively so we can find creative solutions to some of our biggest challenges.”
Want to see how we are building a Community of Citizen Designers? Come and visit us on Campus and be ready to be blown away, like I was, by the audacity of the vision and the unfolding execution that as the Innovation Advisor, I will be working sleeve’s up with Cameron Fox, our fearless Head of School and Jarett Voytilla, our Head of Upper Loop and the incredible team to bring my decade’s worth of connections, experience and resources to make VERSO the most innovative and entrepreneurial international school in Thailand (and beyond!)
