The way we educate and train adults in our society is changing profoundly and rapidly. But, unfortunately, most of the commentary on this topic tends to obsess over how the delivery of education will change (for instance, how classroom teaching will evolve with new technologies) and overlooks the need to prepare people for an upheaval in the way we select and evaluate different education options.
Some significant shifts lie ahead in the way we approach education. The traditional, 'linear' model of consuming education — where one completes different types of education in an established order (such as school, then university, then professional development, and so on) — is probably going to disintegrate and be replaced with something far more dynamic.
I believe that the end-to-end process of selecting, completing and evaluating education, which I term "buying education", will become a more rapid, complicated and risk-laden process in the future. And I think most of us will need to find ways to become better buyers of education to cope with these changes.
This article explores some of the key ways that changes in the adult education landscape will change the way people go about buying (selecting, completing and evaluating) educational products.
Ways that education is changing
Nobody can predict the future, least of all myself. But if we think about where the current trends are heading, there are some very good clues about the ways that people engage with adult education could be profoundly different in the future.
Technology is increasingly designing courses, not just delivering them
Educational technologies are improving very rapidly but, until now, new technologies have really only enhanced one or more parts of the teaching process by making those parts more efficient or effective. Whether it is replacing whiteboards with PowerPoints, transitioning from ring binders to Learning Management Systems, and even the shift from traditional readings and lectures to video formats, the new technology has revolutionised specific tasks within education, but not education itself.
Most technological advancements have not required instructors to overhaul their overall model for delivering education. While there have been a few such transformations which were made possible by technology, such as the weidspread adoption of the flipped classroom, the overall model of delivering education has remained largely unchanged through dozens of technological 'revolutions'.
But for anyone who is regularly using the latest technologies to learn or teach, a noticeable shift is underway. Increasingly, the technologies are deciding how the learning should be delivered. More and more, it is becoming possible to dictate to these tools the kind of educational content and outcomes which need to be imparted to the learner, and allowing the tool to make judgements about the best way to deliver those. This is a fundamental shift in the way education works.
The mix of education providers is diversifying
Consider this truly mind-blowing statistic, which I have seen repeated across multiple reputable sources:
Demand for higher education between now [2019] and 2030 will be up to 13.9 million new students per year. If you wanted to meet their learning needs in a traditional model it would require governments across the developing world to build an extra 700 universities each year, every year, for the next decade.
Such a massive expansion of universities is extremely (as evident from the absence of any such mobilisation being currently underway). Yet, the demand for education will probably persist and even increase further. So new models of education are, quite simply, inevitable.
We can also expect that new types of education providers are going to emerge to bring about these new models. As long as they don't replace all the current types of providers, there will be far more diversity in the types of education providers that exist, along with what they offer.
The links between education and careers is fusing
Most professions are now evolving so fast that people need to learn constantly to remain competent. Whilst this is not a groundbreaking revelation — commentators have long discussed this phenomenon, and its acceptance is widespread — it is, nonetheless, a significant shift in the realm of adult education. The implication for buying education is also rather clear: that people will need to keep ‘going back’ for more education more times throughout their working life, instead of going to college/university for one large burst at the beginning of adulthood as they have done in the past.
An idea which has crept into this conversation in recent years is the notion that the people will need to 'go back' to education providers to update their knowledge and skills so frequently that completing traditional degree courses (like masters degrees) is going to be unfeasible for most professions in the future. Instead, people are expected to engage with education providers for much smaller 'just in time' pieces of education and training on a regular (and perhaps even a continuous) basis over their whole careers. As a result, the discourse in education circles is moving away from the idea that people will be periodically 'going back' for further education, because they will have never left! The new expectation is that people will have a continuous relationship with education over their entire lifetime. One popular prediction in this space describes this relationship as The 60-year Curriculum.
Note: Just in Time (JIT) is a concept borrowed from production and logistics which, while being used in some education commentary, is probably not a widespread analogy among educators. It does seem to fit the problem very well. If you are not familiar with JIT you could read the Investopedia explanation or watch this fun Bloomberg video for an example. |
Education products are fracturing into ever smaller pieces
This trend may be more pronounced the 'higher' you go in the education ladder, with postgraduate being more more fractured than undergraduate, and so on).
In the previous section, I explored the idea of individuals returning to study so often that, in most cases, they will need to complete smaller ‘just in time’ pieces of education rather than whole degrees. They may just come back for a single day to learn one skill! To meet this need, there will neeed to be more short courses available, so learners can find a product which most closesly matches what they might need to study for their career or their intellectual development right now.
Therefore, at universities (if the traditional university model endures), the course catalogue for a single faculty at a university could explode from a handful of postgraduate degrees to hundreds of much smaller courses. Althought many experts predict that universities will still offer degrees, where these small courses will 'stack up' into a degree upon completing an acceptable combination of them, this system will provide learners with an unprecedented level of choice when compared with the current one.
Outside universities, where the offerings are already far more fragmented, will start to look chaotic. There has been an explosion in the number of short courses over the last decade. Although the market for short courses was already busy and confusing, discerning the value of short courses is becoming increasingly challenging. The digitisation of courses and, more significantly, of the credentials associated with them (which is both a cause and consequence of the surge in new courses), will make the number of options truly overwhelming. Moreover, the emergence of the unhelpful misnomer "microcredentials" is adding yet more confusion to the picture.
Ultimately then, if the number of short courses is exploding, in part because the traditional providers of long-form courses (degrees) are creating many more short courses, and it's extraodinarily difficult to indentify which courses are promising, then people are definitely going to need better tools for buying short courses.
The distinction between formal and informal education is fading
Traditionally, credentials have been neatly categorised into a clear hierarchy. In Australia, for instance, the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) sorts all formal credentials into ten levels of achievement, accompanied by detailed criteria specifying which organisations can confer each level of qualification (administered by different regulators).
While these classification systems have benefited education buyers by providing meaningful categories, they will be less useful and influential going forward. The upkeep of these frameworks is going to struggle to keep pace with the rapid diversification of courses and providers (described above), and the less coverage they provide of the total education landscape, the more of the 'work' of figuring out which courses are high-quality will be transferred to the buyer.
Moreover, informal education providers will continue to explore other ways of strengthening the credentials associated with completing their courses (besides government accreditation). If they succeed in finding an easier solution, which they probably will eventually, they won't bother seeking status in frameworks like the AQF, accelerating the loss of coverage and, therefore, relevance of those frameworks.
There will still always be a place for these government-led classification systems, of course, but they will be most trusted and effective in two areas: accrediting people to do high-risk professions (designing bridges perhaps?) and for the most advanced forms of education, like Master's and Ph.D. programs.
Being fully committed to study is less common
Historically the professional landscape has been easier to navigate because it was characterised by singular commitments — people were generally either a full-time student with an exclusive focus on academic studies, or working a full-time job that crowds out the possibility of other simultaneous pursuits. Presently, however, people seem to be increasingly viewing various work and study commitments like salaried employment, freelancing, entrepreneurship, and academic study, as a 'portfolio' of simultaneous pursuits. Like any portfolio, the weightings of its different components will need to be regularly re-assessed and re-balanced to maintain the right mix.
As education is likely to be one of the pursuits in a person's portfolio at any given time, people will find themselves facing new considerations when making decisions about buying education. Instead of a binary decision about whether to have an education commitment or not, the focus will shift to whether the size of the commitment is right for right now. This is because people will want to scale up or down their education commitments at different times of their life based on its relative benefit, compared to the other options.
For example, in the future, a typical scenario might involve somebody being employed three days by a company, then freelancing on the fourth day, and reserving the fifth day for study. This contrasts sharply with the current norm of working a continuous five day block for a single organisation, as people do now. Now, if one of the activities in this person's portfolio gains a lot of momentum, such as the freelancing, it makes sense for them to reduce the least promising activity by one day and allocate an extra day to freelancing. In many ways, this is no different to managing an investment portfolio, where the portfolio manager uses an expected value heuristic and other tools to optimise the mix.
A ubiquitous teaching platform may emerge
In the foreseeable future, we may witness the ruise of an online platform so incredibly adept at delivering content for optimal learner retention that it achieves near near-universal adoption. Much like how Google Search was so vastly superior to its alternatives it came to shape our experience of the entire internet, we must remain open to possibility that a similarly influential educational technology could emerge.
The current technology is edging ever closer to being able to provide personalised instruction for individual learners. In other words, these tools may soon have the ability to change the content and feedback they present to each learner to match that person's current ability and learning preferences (i.e. similar to what a skilled teacher does in a small classroom setting today). This advancement is a kind of 'promised land' for edtech companies, as transforms such a tool from being useful into something indispensibable. If computerised tools can reliably provide this kind of instruction, the baseline standard of teaching that can be made affordable to learners on a global scale will be dramatically elevated. As a result, any education provider who wants to be differentiated will need to surpass this new standard to remain competitive.
If this scenario unfolds, it's likely that the majority of courses will utilise such a platform to deliver content to learners. While entire courses may not be delivered through the platform alone, as learners still need to engage in other activities besides absorbing content to facilitate deep learning, it's conceivable that every educational institution, from schools to universities, will upload its necessary course content onto such a platform. These institutions would then redirect their efforts towards providing additional experiences outside the platform that complement the learning process.
It is perfectly plausible that the in-person, immersive, and even residential undergraduate-style educational experiences would persist in this environment, because humans will continue to strive for status and resources, making this form of education a desirable option to most. However, I believe these experiences will become more of a luxury product, predominantly associated with a mainstay of elite universities, and this model will be heavily enriched by new technologies anyway.
My predictions about how buying education will change
If the nature education continues to evolve along the trajectories outlined in the previous section, the task of 'buying' education — a term encompassing the selection, completion and evaluation of educational pursuits — is going to become considerably more challenging for learners, in a number of ways:
You will need to make so many more decisions.
In a future where learners will be inundated with a plethora of educational 'products' to choose from and have the ability to customize larger offerings, such as degree programs, to a greater extent, there will simply be an abundance of new decisions to make.
You will not be able to rely on an education provider to craft a long-term plan for your intellectual development.
In a vastly more competitive and dynamic environment, the imperative to 'sell' you more or bigger products will overpower the desire of institutions to guide your overall intellectual development (especially for universities). While educational providers may still offer advice on planning your long-term academic career, it will be too heavily infused with sales, meaning you will no longer be able to rely on it as a benevolent service. You will need to take responsibility for your own journey and devise your own long-term curriculum.
You will need to be good at judging the quality of education BEFORE you do it.
In the future, just as today, relying on trial and error to determine if an educational option was worthwhile will be a very hazardous approach to educatoin buying. The difference is that in the future, it will be even harder and higher stakes. With more products to choose from, there will likely be more junk and fewer gems, making it increasingly difficult to find the truly valuable products. The ability to make better assessments about the worth of educational products before experiencing them will be a crucial skill for navigating this new landscape effectively.
And most people find these things hard to do already!
These things are formidable even in our less complex landscape today. But they will become yet more intimidating in these new conditions of needing to make more decisions about complicated education pathways, on your own, without the benefit of a wise academic from an institution to guide you.
And just in case the implications of these emerging difficulties are not completely clear, the take-home message is:
Make no mistake: deciding what you need to learn, from whom, and by when, will be YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. You won't be able to outsource it.
But I seriously doubt you won't have help! I also predict that:
New sources of support will emerge to assist learners with the buying process
I anticipate that new support systems will arise to help you make informed buying decisions. With greater responsibility and risk placed on the purchaser (i.e. you) in the future, I foresee the rise of an ‘advising’ industry, where the typical adviser would be a hybrid of present day education agents, careers counsellors, course planners and PhD supervisors. They would listen to your aspirations and learning preferences, and use their well-honed methods of sourcing quality education products to present you with a few viable options.
Crucially, they would continue advising you throughout your studies to help ensure you are maximising the value from your chosen provider's offerings, and help you refine and achieve your long-term plans. They might achieve this by helping you to set learning and career goals, monitor the progress of your intellectual and skill development, and offer updated pathways and general guidance about how you can keep moving towards your goals at the right pace (presumably by recommending a different mix of educational products).
In a way, it will be similar to how people who care the most about health and fitness will hire personal trainers, nutritionists and other advisers to help them.
If this sounds costly, I'm sure there will be more budget-friendly options too. Continuing the parallel with health and fitness, I'm sure there will be ebooks, apps and other publications for sale with pre-built and modular programs for you to follow that offer less customisation, but will still provide useful tools and information that make it easier than doing everything yourself from scratch (like the fitness industry's many apps and ebooks with dieting and exercise plans).
So how can you become a better buyer of education?
This question will take many more articles to answer fully. It is my intention to write more articles covering this very important topic by drawing on the perspectives of more experts. I will add links to those articles below as I create them!
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