In Just Ten Years, the Internet Will Transform Education Like This!
People are increasingly experiencing the convenience brought by technology. Online shopping, online video, and online entertainment have become deeply ingrained. The rapid development of artificial intelligence over just a few years is also astonishing. Various new technological symbols are emerging: speech recognition, machine vision, automatic positioning, 3D, IoT, WiFi, Bluetooth, iBeacon. Every industry is being reshuffled by the wave of the internet. What about the education industry?
Education, too, faces the challenges of reform, improvement, and change.
The pace of progress in education may be somewhat slow. Our ancestors 2,000 years ago gathered in lecture halls to listen to the teachings of Confucius or Socrates. Today's university classrooms are still largely the same, perhaps with the addition of microphones and PowerPoint presentations. In this era of constant information explosion, the needs of learners and teachers remain unmet. In 2012, the year MOOCs began, people started discussing online education. Three years later, no university has collapsed due to MOOCs, leading to doubt and denial. This reminds me of a quote from Bill Gates: people often overestimate what will happen in two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.
In fact, if we look closely around us, we can see that online education has already begun to change: flipped classrooms, giving the initiative to students; answering questions via mobile phone photos, with machines beginning to infiltrate conversations; serving offline institutions to help integrate online and offline (O2O); using hardware in education and training, such as understanding the physical world through robot programming; combining study tours with the tourism market; improving learning efficiency through interactivity, and so on.
Standing at the intersection of the past and the future, I believe MOOCs could be the fulcrum for transforming higher education (because they will greatly unleash teaching productivity, and the massive release of productivity will inevitably lead to changes in production relations). In the next 5 to 10 years, in what other scenarios might an educational revolution occur? Let's spread the wings of our imagination, break free from the constraints of physical time and space, and boldly predict the development of online education over the next decade:
Ten years from now, MOOC certificates will be as important as university diplomas. People will no longer be limited to a four-year undergraduate degree; they will need to continuously update their knowledge on demand. Educational content will be open, not artificially and strictly selected. Aesthetics, art, technology, and personalized lesson plans can all be included. Ten years from now, MOOCs will be used by the vast majority of universities and directly converted into credits. Typically, students will take courses online for the first two years, then attend face-to-face classes at specialized universities to learn alongside peers. This reduces costs and increases flexibility while allowing universities to focus on their strengths. Ten years from now, MOOCs will allow learning of all courses highly related to the internet, such as data science and computer science, finding the best ways to learn these subjects and creating new product and content delivery formats. There will also be many quirky courses: how to land on Mars, how to build a bicycle, how to learn opera singing. Ten years from now, MOOCs will be a primary method for universities to recruit new students, with offline and online each accounting for 50% of university revenue. The integration between the two will be very tight, with MOOCs serving as the foundation and preparation, and university follow-up plans providing extension and reinforcement. This will help establish a scientific ranking system for universities/teachers/courses. Ten years from now, high-quality supplementary course content will also be available for top students. Learning courses and work experience will be seamlessly integrated. If new questions arise at work, appropriate advanced courses can be called upon to supplement what is needed. Ten years from now, people's learning speed will more than double. With the same teaching quality, using online courses, a four-year university degree can be completed faster. Some micro-courses can even be completed by learners within a week instead of four months. More flexible platforms will be provided to unleash the potential of teachers and students, adopting user innovations, modifying lesson plans, exercises, and improving processes. Ten years from now, only half of the content will be taught by full-time university faculty. The best teachers will come from the public. Excellent teachers will become increasingly skilled at teaching online, receiving substantial material rewards and experiencing the joy and sense of achievement that comes from educating others. Ten years from now, we will no longer need to purchase expensive paper textbooks. They will be eliminated and replaced by MOOC electronic textbooks, offering a more comfortable reading experience with search capabilities, intelligent bookmarks to help recall key points, efficient note-taking, and embedded citations. Ten years from now, <50% of learning content will be presented through video. It will be replaced by a variety of other methods, such as writing code directly in a browser, case studies, project work, and immersive interactive experiences. Virtual reality will be widely applied in various teaching scenarios. Ten years from now, the most high-tech positions will require employees to continue their studies on MOOC platforms. Learning results and effectiveness will be directly linked to performance evaluations and promotion pathways.
In fact, this is not just wild imagination. These are several major trends that can already be foreseen. Let's discuss a few specific scenarios.
Diverse and Barrier-Free Learning Access
In 2015, some Chinese learners couldn't find the courses they wanted online. They either struggled to bypass the Great Firewall to browse English courses or gave up entirely.
In 2025, MOOCs will have over 5,000 courses systematically covering the curriculum of top comprehensive universities. Any student, with any internet-connected device, at any time, and in their preferred language, can learn the courses they want.
The Value of Online Certificates
In 2015, although learners could obtain online certificates from MOOCs, the role of the skills learned for vocational education and future development was unclear.
In 2025, with the accumulation and completion of data, and the availability of big data on learning behavior, previous university diplomas will become just static data. Learners can learn on demand, and MOOCs will dynamically adjust tutorials based on individual characteristics, ultimately issuing valuable certificates recognized by future employers.
Learning Communities
In 2025, there will be hundreds or thousands of offline learning communities centered around online education. As small groups, they will regularly adopt new courses. They learn together, collaborate, and face challenges. Soft skills, such as teamwork and communication, will also improve. Initially, the connection between learners and specific courses is loose. Over time, intelligent grouping becomes more reasonable, establishing associations between public or private groups. Binding each learner to a community moderator can also help push them to complete courses. Finally, scoring is based on the learner's completion rate, similar to leveling up in a game.
Furthermore, the courses themselves will come from content generated by other learners: almost every assessment question will be generated by learners; every video and question annotation will be continuously improved by learners and the community; learners will vote on submitted supplementary lectures, etc.; structured forums can be searched at any time, serving as a subject-specific Wikipedia and becoming a more valuable learning resource. All assignments submitted by learners will be visible to other students for review and grading by default. The community can discuss any topic (e.g., courses, job hunting, current hot topics, emotions, personal complaints). Specific features will be provided (e.g., forums, Zhihu, wikis, mailing lists, polls, blogs, instant chat). The community itself can also be further developed to centrally organize and maintain learning resources related to specific topics.
In 2025, learning centers will be located all over the world, serving as extensions of peers and communities, allowing learners to access other learners without barriers. It is conceivable that as learners grow, their circles evolve from elementary school, to middle school, to university. Most communication can occur online, and learners can also regularly participate in offline gatherings of small organizations. Small organizations can then grow into large communities, giving everyone a sense of belonging.
Global High-Skilled Job Market
Whether in developed or developing countries, accompanied by the growth of the middle class, the next 10 years will see serious population aging issues. This means more students will face increasing competition to enter university, while the previous generation will strive to remain relevant in the job market. How can this contradiction be resolved?
MOOCs are one solution: improving the overall quality of the population, enabling more people to quickly acquire new knowledge, and transforming knowledge into productivity. Governments are currently encouraging a wave of entrepreneurship in fields like healthcare, finance, management, and the environment. MOOCs can precisely guide and innovate in these popular topics.
The focus of education will shift towards job opportunities. According to Accenture's predictions, the world will need to fill over 10 million skilled job positions in the next five years. What jobs will make business school graduates more attractive? What new majors will be needed in the next five years? What skills will be required, and what qualifications will applicants need? Maintaining cooperative relationships with companies in the fields of work and recruitment. In the face of global competition, companies need the right talent. How can this gap be filled?
First, provide comprehensive and integrated information about graduates to connect with the recruitment market. Second, employers increase investment in content creation to help improve the curriculum system. Third, create a self-service market that is renewable. Employers create job postings from certain learning sections, and learners then connect with employers through their learning.
Corporate Training and Personal Learning Resumes
Corporate training is a huge market, currently worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but filling high-skilled and managerial composite talent remains very difficult. In 2025, for senior positions at employers, MOOCs will provide the best candidate pool or facilitate promotion from existing employees. Top-tier well-known companies and startups can use specialized courses to update and maintain the skills of high-skilled employees.
In 2025, every learner will already have a public account online, recording their certificates, all project names they have completed, all submitted assignments, badges for course and community participation, which courses they are currently active in, etc. They can choose which lists to make public.
Just as LinkedIn lists what you have done before, MOOC platforms can list what you can do in the future: universities, courses, majors, and professors are all involved; it can be explicit ("courses and experiences I have taken") or implicit (through machine mining, inferring jobs I might be suitable for). Everyone can create a learning resume, sharing their learning interests and achievements. They can connect with other users interested in the same courses and recommend courses to each other. They can share content (e.g., personalized learning paths) and lifestyle content (photos, videos, blogs).
New Learning Models Based on Big Data
To reform education, we must first reform assessment methods; to reform assessment methods, we must reform the data foundation for assessment. In the future, human learning behavior will be recorded as big data, and this big data will be the foundation for assessment.
In 2015, many people could not complete courses, and learning paths were incomplete. In 2025, combining a large number of experiments and the learning big data accumulated by platforms, a new paradigm can be created. It can motivate students to complete courses and lead to future success. It ensures the consolidation of learning outcomes, going beyond rote memorization, and building content knowledge, core cognitive skills, and social skills such as self-control, cooperation, performance, and analysis. The incentive mechanism of the new model is based on behavioral economics and psychology; learning as a social behavior encourages learners to actively cooperate, help each other, solve problems, provide personalized learning experiences, and ultimately achieve the learners' own interests and goals.
At the same time, data science research can be applied to more MOOCs. Previously, many experimental disciplines, such as astronomy (introduction of the Hubble Telescope), biology (DNA sequencing), and medicine (electronic health records), combined with experiments and quantitative observation of massive data, have opened new doors for human learning and become powerful aids in knowledge transfer.
Virtual Reality Interactive Learning
In 2015, teaching scenarios were very simple, only presenting teaching points through multimedia methods like images and videos. In 2025, tools like robots and auxiliary devices will allow people to learn beyond traditional methods, maximizing learning effectiveness through hearing, sight, touch, feeling, and thinking.
Virtual reality presents a three-dimensional, comprehensive teaching model that involves not only interaction with the teacher but also interaction with knowledge. Each knowledge point can be presented three-dimensionally, giving students an immersive experience. For example, the best scenario for learning astronomy and physics is to be placed in the universe; for learning political science, it's best to simulate being a president analyzing the international situation; for learning law, you are a judge making the most impartial judgment in complex situations. The computer knows your learning progress and characteristics, and through certain stimuli and incentives, it provides smarter prompts. This both develops your brain and provides knowledge on demand. The learning scenarios in Big Hero 6 may not be just fantasy.
Artificial Intelligence and Heuristic Search
Artificial intelligence is moving towards the prospect of closely connecting people with objects, services, and knowledge, realizing the possibility of "thinking equals learning." But no matter what stage AI reaches, search is the most basic requirement.
Search methods will move away from text boxes. Currently, voice search, OCR recognition, and image recognition technology are rapidly improving in accuracy. Just saying a sentence or giving a prompt can display a holographic image. This means that in future learning, with just a machine voice engine, more intelligent search based on conscious search will be possible. As soon as the brain thinks of something, it is transmitted via sensors to the cloud and returned to the appropriate terminal. Or, like in Avatar, connecting human consciousness with biology to directly gain superpowers. These are directions currently being explored in the fields of machine learning (Deep Learning) and wearable devices.
The Future of Universities
Technology cannot eliminate universities because universities are places where essential new knowledge and new teaching methods are born. By 2025, it is certain that the lecture hall teaching method will not work. Most content and basic skill practice will be delivered through MOOCs, whose content quality will far surpass traditional classroom teaching because the best will rise to the top, eliminating mediocre teaching.
Offline classroom experience will also add value to MOOCs, focusing on group discussions, experiments, and applied sciences. Universities will invest more effort in activities outside the classroom, perhaps research, tutoring groups composed of teachers or senior students, team activities, volunteer service, internships, studying abroad, etc. The significance of a university is not just the transmission of knowledge content, but supporting and strengthening these core learning behaviors. In fact, universities might become "lifelong" institutions. People can return to school or online classrooms multiple times to choose more opportunities to learn from top masters.
Polyv is the cloud video service provider most focused on online education in China, providing a secure, stable, and reliable cloud video platform for domestic online education. Ten years from now, education may take on a new form, but Polyv will continue to walk hand-in-hand with online education.
