A Mckinsey study on the class of 2030 reveals that nearly 100% of students would prioritize personalisation in the classroom over automation in what shows that the need for the teacher can never be replaced by technology.
Technology is not stand-alone anymore as it needs to be embedded into every day learning where it gets customized for the needs of the individual student.
This ensures that technology in use for learning in the modern classroom adapts to the aptitude and capacity of the student in order to bring out the best in them when training. The Mckinsey’s report dubbed “Class of 2030” involved input from 2000 students, 2000 teachers and 70 thought leaders worldwide. Employers believe that only about 42% of graduates are adequately equipped with social and emotional skills needed for the fourth industrial revolution workplace.
According to the study, 40% of jobs in growth industries required soft skills with emotional and social attributes being twice as predictive of a student’s academic results as home environment and demographics. Personalisation of learning was seen to free up up to 30% of the teacher’s time, hence creating more time to connect with their students in the learning process.
“Two in three of the children who are just now starting school will find themselves in jobs that don’t exist yet, according to a recent WEF estimate, so we need to rise to that challenge, because it is the responsibility of our generation to prepare the next for the post-Fourth Industrial Revolution workplace. Digital transformation plays a central role in that, to be sure, but Microsoft believes that educational institutes must lead the way in delivering soft-skills training and collaborative, student-centric learning experiences,” said Anthony Salcito, Microsoft Vice President of Worldwide Education during his keynote at the ongoing Bett Middle East and Africa conference.
Technology moves quite fast and we cannot predict what it will look like in 2030 when the current kindergarten students will be graduating. Students learn best from doing and collaborating, and involving technology shouldn’t change the learning process, but it does influence how the modern student captures learning.
During the conference,Microsoft showcased their version of the modern school where the modern student and the modern teacher interact with technology as the enabler. OneNote for education which is in it’s second year since introduction comes in very handy to get the teacher to connect with the student in lesson planning, revision, homework and student performance monitoring. It allows a teacher give assignments, assess when it gets done and on the same platform allows the student to do corrections. All these changes can be tracked by the teacher.
