The ability to develop and foster our human intellectual resources becomes society's most pressing challenge. Raymond Kurzweil, MIT, author of The Age of Intelligent Machines
As the world becomes networked and the computer becomes an everyday tool in our lives, the idea of the empowered learner is becoming a reality. The implications are huge yet remain largely unexamined. This transformation in education, long delayed but inevitable, is challenging our fundamental assumptions about the way learning is organised and accessed.
Institutional boundaries are blurring. Constraints on the demand and supply of education are being loosened. Control is beginning to pass away from institutions and towards individual learners as life-long learning becomes the dominant paradigm.
In this kind of world, education is likely to be substantially different in many ways from what we have now. It will be diverse, increasingly driven by the needs of the learner, and the market it generates will be dynamic, global and massive in scale.
These changes pose an immense challenge to the existing system, bringing with them huge disruption as well as many new and exciting possibilities. What policies are needed to ensure that technology helps to deliver the prize of a modern education system providing high-quality learning opportunities more widely than ever before? How will our infrastructure have to adapt? What will be the role of the school, college or university? How might the relationship of teachers, learners and their families change? And what are the risks we should be focussing on?...