Cisco : The Future of Education

Today's stop while exploring #TheFutureofPublicSector takes us to education and what the future will make possible for teaching and learning. So, what does the future hold for education as we know it?

With the powerful trend toward digital everywhere, educators will be increasingly challenged to find new and compelling ways to engage learners. Students will continue to be both intrigued and distracted by new technologies and overwhelmed by avalanches of information.

The key will be to help teachers figure out how to use the right technologies at the right time to do the right job for students. This will require teachers to know how to help students sort through data and information to learn what they need to know to secure their future paths.

That path might be college, stackable credentials, certifications, internships, careers, or a combination of all of these. Educators will be able to build bridges between what the workforce needs, and how to effectively prepare students for the future, and for jobs that may not exist today.

Creating the Next Generation of Problem Solvers

One key factor to make this a reality is to enable students to think critically and creatively - to encourage them to demonstrate persistence in solving some of the most difficult challenges we face as a global society. Providing students with real-world obstacles to push through and solve gives them the ability to engage, evaluate data, consider solutions, and forge an entrepreneurial path forward.

Prioritizing Experiential Learning

New technologies will leverage massive amounts of data produced across different technologies, applications, and networks. This data might be about the campus environment, student experience, student performance, student services, data security, or campus security. Schools, colleges, and universities will be compelled to determine how they can effectively leverage data to support and guide better learning outcomes.

Technology is already providing educational institutions the ability to monitor student traffic and space utilization, understand whether or not students are attending courses or using their cafeteria cards, and observe how they are performing in their courses. New applications help universities to engage students in extracurricular activities, provide scheduling information, and help them acclimate to student life. Video and collaboration technologies provide ways for students to attend courses anytime, anywhere, on any device. Those same devices allow educators to scale access to quality learning.

In the future, education will become even more engaging with new applications for virtual reality. Imagine students being able to immerse themselves in the human body without having to do a physical autopsy. Imagine being able to have a virtual guest lecturer who appears to physically be in a learning space.

Making Education More Intelligent

In the future, education will become more intelligent, with new applications that take advantage of artificial intelligence. Imagine automatically detecting the health of students, whether or not they're struggling in a course or with a topic, and if they need financial or academic support. And then, imagine serving up a virtual avatar that is created to help them solve their individual challenge.

In the future, education will be safer and more secure. Imagine better securing faculty, staff, and students, and their data and protecting against ransomware, malware, phishing, and physical threats. New technologies will automatically detect virtual and physical intruders, quarantine them, and resolve the threat.

In the future, education will be intertwined with jobs of the future. Learning will be flexible, relevant, and designed to equip learners for just-in-time jobs. Students will have the ability to solve real-world problems, providing them with the actual, hands-on experience required to evaluate a problem, analyze data, and resolve challenges.

In the future, we can tap into a whole new world of possibility when comes to education. Between the world you live in and the one you imagine, there's a bridge.

Comment below to join the conversation and let us know what you think the future will bring!

Stay tuned to the education blog for more to come around the future of education, and join us for our next installment of our #FutureofPublicSector blog series on the future of transportation. Learn how you can start tapping into the world of possibility, today.

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