The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change.

Some time ago I was involved in a foresight study entitled “The Future of Learning: new ways to learn new skills for future jobs”. The study, launched by the European Commission, aimed at developing visions and scenarios on new ways to acquire skills and competences in Europe in 2020-2030. The following dimensions were mainly addressed:

1. Emergent skills and competences associated with future jobs
2. New ways and practices of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences
3. Associated changes in the roles of the participants in the learning process, i.e. learners and teachers
4. Implications for existing Education and Training institutions, systems and policy frameworks
5. The role of information and communication technologies in transforming and supporting creative and innovative learning
6. Changes and challenges to assessment, certification and accreditation
7. Implications of the envisaged changes for present policy action and support

The study was conducted by a group of researchers from the European Commission Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) in Seville, the TNO (the applied research and technology organisation of the Netherlands), the Open University of the Netherlands and AtticMedia (a specialist learning communications agency from London), and a set of domain experts were involved from different disciplines and organizations, which were asked their contribution to the vision building process based on the “group concept mapping” (GCM) method.

The study, recently published by the IPTS, is worth reading and now available for download.

The report aims to identify, understand and visualise major changes to learning in the future. It developed a descriptive vision of the future, based on existing trends and drivers, and a normative vision outlining how future learning opportunities should be developed to contribute to social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion and economic growth.

The overall vision is that personalisation, collaboration and informalisation (informal learning) are at the core of learning in the future. These terms are not new in education and training but will have to become the central guiding principle for organising learning and teaching in the future. The central learning paradigm is thereby characterised by lifelong and life-wide learning, shaped by the ubiquity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). At the same time, due to fast advances in technology and structural changes to European labour markets that are related to demographic change, globalisation and immigration, generic and transversal skills become more important, which support citizens in becoming lifelong learners who flexibly respond to change, are able to pro-actively develop their competences and thrive in collaborative learning and working environments.

Many of the changes depicted have been foreseen for some time but they now come together in such a way that is becomes urgent and pressing for policymakers to consider them and to propose and implement a fundamental shift in the learning paradigm for the 21st century digital world and economy. To reach the goals of personalised, collaborative and informalised learning, holistic changes need to be made (curricula, pedagogies, assessment, leadership, teacher training, etc.) and mechanisms need to be put in place which make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a reality and support the recognition of informally acquired skills.

You will especially appreciate the way the EU challenges for future learning policies have been described through a set of “user personas”, and in particular:

• Chanta, the 6 year old child of Cambodian immigrants who came to Poitiers (France) in 2023
• Bruno, who lives in Milan (Italy) and is in the 9th grade of a public school
• Emma, a 17-year-old girl who lives in Munich (Germany) and is in her last year of high school
• Joshua, a young man form suburban England who finished his three-year vocational training programme for hotel industry and who is now strugging to find a job
• Sven, a 42-year-old father who lives in the Swedish town of Katrineholm and lost his job when the car factory he worked for closed in 2014
• Martina, now 59, highly qualified and specialized programmer from Prague (Czech Republic) whose skills became obsolete because of the rapid rise of quantum computing and neural self-correcting networks

All these personas have something in common: there seems to be no place for them in their surrounding labour market.

How can they improve their skills and get ready for new professional challenges?
A quick and effective answer can be found in a set of videos produced as part of the study and now available on YouTube.

And you? What do you think will be the challenges of learning in 2020 and beyond?

Cooking videos that work for everybody

While someone still wonders how to get started with mLearning, a good old friend of mine was recently struggling with much more tangible and (sadly enough) trivial concerns as witnessed in the following lines:

Believe me. I spent no less than three days trying to have a bl***y mp4 video showing up in that sh***y tablet. Three crazy days, myself and a couple of colleagues unable to get it running on screen!

Actually, if you could read the whole story, you would see that in the end he found his way through the impenetrable jungle of video resolutions, framerate, codex, and such amenities. He was doing actually ok since he found a few good and effective video conversion tools, among which you might want to try Avidemux, a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

More in general, the pain came when he had tried to embed the right video, in the right format, with the right HTML code that could work on each of the devices to be supported (along with their embedded web browser). And here, to be honest, I could kind of feel his own frustration.

Indeed, if you limit your needs to flash-enabled devices, you can actually sort this out by carefully selecting and integrating one of the several JS and flash-based video players available out there. But even valuable simplification attempts could not make him feel better. The multidimensional matrix of video formats, flash player options and HTML5 compatible-browsers were just too much for him. In the end, he gave up.

This is where I decided to step in, try to get just a little bit further and look at how others were making do with that.

Did I sort it our in the end? Of course no, but I’ve been surfing the web for a while, and happened to see this “vid.ly” upcoming service (still in beta as per now) by a company named encoding.com. Encoding.com markets itself as “the leading global provider of studio-class video services for websites offering user-generated and premium video”.

Besides being presented as the emerging actor in the battle between Google, Microsoft and others over the future of HTML5 video standards, this new service looks very interesting. They say vid.ly seamlessly allows playing the same video on the five major desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari),  mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry (but also Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung), and a bunch of gaming devices sich as Nintendo DS, Wii and PSP.

All in all, the vid.ly service actually looks smart and promising. Their reaction time to my beta activation code request was almost immediate.

If you read through their website, you can see that Vid.ly mostly deliver, out of the original video format, the right “conversion” format for each device attempting to access the video.

When a user visits a vid.ly url we automatically detect the device or browser type and deliver the correctly formatted video from a high quality CDN network.

The conversion is done as soon as your original video format gets uploaded, At that same time, a new unique vid.ly URL is sent to you via email together with a bunch of embedding options. Among which, of course, the ready-made <video> HTML5 embed script, such as the one that you can see below:

<video id="vidly-video" controls="controls" width="640" height="390">
	<source src="http://vid.ly/3e7r1e?content=video" />
	<script id="vidjs" language="javascript"
	 src="http://m.vid.ly/js/html5.js"></script>
</video>

Support for legacy Flash players is also available.

Fine. The idea is smart enough. Most probably we will shortly see something similar (maybe vid.ly itself) embedded in YouTube, Vimeo or such, providing flash-free video streaming to every internet user. At vid.ly they even see their service as a potential booster to Twitter and other social networking sites, considering the massively growing use of such services from mobile devices.

What we all need to see, now, is how the vid.ly guys will cope with our daily customers, who expect their mobile packages to be self-consistent to reduce internet traffic on the go and assure content integrity even with bad or no connectivity at all.

I asked the same question to the vid.ly guys.  Let us see what they will come back with.

___

P.S.: It’s just a pity that I could not include the vid.ly video above using their ready made HTML5 code. Unfortunately the WordPress editor does not seem to digest HTML5 tags yet…