Digitization, Employability, and Internationalization: The Keystones of Future Education

How we work, socialize, shop, and travel has drastically changed over the last decade and will continue to do so more rapidly after the COVID-19 pandemic. The speed at which technological and social breakthroughs continue to transform our reality will only increase. Therefore, we must recognize that education will have to face both current and future challenges. Only then will our societies be freer, our companies more sustainable, and our professionals better qualified and more employable for a digital revolution—known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution—that will continue indefinitely.

If there is one thing that we have learned over the last few years, it is that every technological advancement is followed by another one of greater significance, complexity, and profundity. Technological innovations have completely transformed analogical procedures which have either been replaced or improved. These changes have spared neither companies nor job categories over the last five years. Evidence suggests that much more will need to be redesigned immediately: everything from work methodologies, salaries, commitments between companies and employees to schedules, physical attendance, international commuting, and labor legislation.

New approaches in education are needed to overcome these sweeping changes. The educational sector will have to be digitized to take advantage of the internet’s infinite capacity for connectivity, leading to new methodologies and learning models that will revolve around the student experience.

In this sense, we should reexamine the concept of the classroom, which serves as a barrier to access in the globalized world, and bury old-fashioned practices in content creation and evaluation methods. What is the purpose of evaluating students for their ability to memorize data when any computer system can do this better? Why not replace these activities with capacities resilient to technological change, such as creativity and teamwork?

Technology and Academia

Luckily, higher education is learning to transform. The best academic institutions are already embracing the benefits of technology by designing and updating educational methodologies. Knowledge can now be conveyed worldwide in spite of linguistic and geographical barriers.

This is the case with the University of Chicago. Founded in the late 19th century, the University has updated its teaching methods to transmit knowledge and improve procedures that have given rise to thousands of new professional roles in the digital economy. Efforts to design an extensive digital and educational portfolio of lifelong remote learning programs that focus on meeting the employment requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution have come to fruition.

The University of Chicago is building a digital ecosystem that allows professionals seeking to increase their employment opportunities to specialize in a field of expertise that will stay relevant for the foreseeable future. By eliminating linguistic and geographical barriers, high-quality digital education will transform, improve, and allow societies to solve today’s most pressing concerns, such as migratory flows caused by economic disparities between countries.

Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

To adequately train professionals for the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, institutions need to meet two requirements. The first is a deep understanding of and familiarity with disruptive technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cybersecurity, IoT, machine learning, robotics, big data, and data science. The second is the ability to create new habits to foster lifelong learning. Learning will always be an essential part of our professional development. In a world impacted by technology, the traditional route of college to graduate school is becoming irrelevant.

A new crop of EdTech companies is helping universities embrace digital transformation. The University of Chicago is facing future challenges by partnering with EdTech companies to design technical and dynamic programs through face-to-face and remote instruction. They are fostering customized learning methods that fully adapt to a professional's daily routine without having to interrupt their career path.

Education must be the keystone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All countries and academic institutions face the challenge of reskilling several generations of professionals that have been left behind during the digital era. This is now an urgent social need. The education sector has millions of professionals qualified for past challenges that cannot yet adapt to changing demands. Now is the moment to develop digital educational solutions that support future needs.