 Thank you all for coming to the session called the Future of Education. I'm Yoshi Hori of Globis, which we run business school and venture capital. And we're happy, I'm so happy to be moderating this session with great panelists. Let me introduce you to the panelists. Mr. Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Mr. Mark Shantanu, president of Shantanu from... I'm sorry about that. From EDECOMP. From EDECOMP. And also Tan Kian, Mr. Dr. Tan Kian from UNESCO. And we have Mark Kamlet from Provost of Carnegie Mellon University. And we have Dr. Tan Chuan from National University of Singapore. And this is a topic to balance between tradition and innovation. Education needs to be thinking about what to remain and what to change. I am sitting on the Global Agenda Council of New Model of Leadership. We talk about the leadership. There are about 70 plus agenda councils on WF. And they all talk about the leadership. We lack leadership, so we have to think about what are the role of new model of leadership. And that are the main subjects. And then changes happening in terms of globalization, technology, and also generation changes, and multi-stakeholder issues are coming up. So education has to do something to keep up with the changes of the pace of the world. With that, I'd like to structure this session into four. One is to talk about what are the pending issues facing education. And second is to talk about what is the information technology is doing. And third is to talk about what is the interdisciplinary approach is needed. And fourth is to talk about what is the universities. And then we'll talk about the overall issues. I will ask Mr. Gordon Brown to talk about the overall issues. And then we'd like to open up for discussions. We have five panelists in one hour, and I was asked to make a Q&A session earlier, so I'd like to engage the audience. First of all, I'd like to ask Dr. Tang about the pressing issues with current education models. Thank you. From UNESCO's point of view, the microphone is on, it's okay. From UNESCO's point of view, I can think about four issues at a global level. The first one is unbalance the provision of education, which means you have a quite different provision of education from different countries, from developed countries, and then compare with the LDC countries. When we see the same countries from different regions, like the urban region and the rural region, you find a big difference in the provision of education. So this is the first issue I'd like to raise, which is how, what kind of policy the government should adopt to address this kind of unbalanced approach. The second issue I would like to say is in the last 20 years, the access to education at the global level is significantly improved. Compared to 10 years ago, about 70 million more children are in school today. Although school today, we still have about 60 million school children outside of school, but still today we can see the big difference compared to 10 years ago. However, the quality of education is today's biggest challenge. So it's necessary to find the policy attention from access to quality. This is the second issue I'd like to raise. The third issue I think I'd like to raise is that today's is a lack of a provision of a lifelong learning concept. So when people are talking about education, sometimes they're talking about higher education, sometimes they're talking about formal education, but you have to talk about education in a lifelong learning concept, from early childhood to primary, vocational, secondary, higher education, literacy, and adult learning. What is the government policy to promote lifelong learning system in their country? This is the third issue I'd like to raise. The last issue I'd like to say is that today's education, I don't think they can, they are adapt sufficient enough to the daily change of the life, the change of the social life, the change of the technology of today's world. So this today I think is education in a certain way. Education people is the most conservative people. Sometimes they are talking about education in school, education in their own circle. What happened outside? They don't care much. So this is another, I think it's a challenge for many, many government to push their education people to think about what happened in the world and what happened outside, and how you adapt the education to train what we call the new champions today. So in that way we do need partnership with business people so then we can really have a dialogue to tell education people what kind of people we need to train in the future. Thank you very much, Dr. Tan. Dr. Tan has touched upon access, quality, lifelong learning, and also changes needed. I think what Dr. Tan mentioned about education, people in education are quite conservative and maybe resisting changes. I think we have a very good panelist to talk about the issue of the changes happening in terms of educational sphere. Shakun, you can talk about what's happening in terms of the new educational model and IT and e-learning as well. Thank you, and actually picking up from you, Dr. Tan. If you look at the whole area of access to education and quality of education one of the things that's increasingly becoming very clear is that the place to spend your dollars to bring about significant and breakthrough impact is actually by leveraging technology. And broadly, if I see the four areas of education that are in crisis today across the world one is of course the area of primary education and K through 12. And if you see what technology is doing and what can do for K through 12 the results are pretty obvious. Teachers across the world are now increasingly using digital content as a part of their day-to-day classroom instruction and that's creating major impact. In the area of higher education, probably online education putting on OpenCourseWare initiative that MIT and a bunch of other universities are doing promises to change and disrupt existing higher education models like never before and the area of vocational education that has a direct linkage to the development of human capital across the world stands to change completely when you say put tablets in the hands of students because you have a very vast number of courses you have very poor vocational training infrastructure across the world and the connecting thread to all of these can be the powerful use of education technology. Just speaking from my own experience EDUCOM does a lot of work at the very cutting edge of how to leverage IT for education and some of the results that we have seen are very dramatic. Talking about K through 12, we've seen an improvement of between 25 to 30% in student learning outcomes just because you put the teacher in front of a computer that had high quality educational content. Across the world, we see some major problems plaguing the education sector and policy makers are grappling with these problems. For example, the world needs many more schools than they are available today. There aren't enough teachers. There's a whole new millions of people that will enter the work stream that have no opportunity for vocational education. I can't think of anything else except efficient and effective use of technology that can be the big game changer and the big unifying factor across almost every dimension of education that we can think about today. For those of you who don't know about EDUCOM, Shantanu has started business from scratch and became a public company in India which provides e-learning to vocational school to business school as well and one umbrella. Therefore, what Dr. Tan has mentioned about access versus participation, quality or maybe lifelong learning as well or the changes, difficulties in changing the conservative education body, this kind of newly start-up business might be one of the solutions. We'd like to go on then to Dr. Tan, who is a president of National University of Singapore to talk about the different aspects of education which Shantanu has touched upon about e-learning as well as more of the private sector providing education. It's National University and Dr. Tan will talk about what is going on in terms of interdisciplinary approaches happening in university. Please, Dr. Tan. I think what is clear is that interdisciplinary learning will increasingly become the norm for education in the future and there are two main reasons for this. The first is that all of us and particularly graduates are facing more and more complex issues all the time and almost all of these issues will naturally cross many disciplines. So you actually need a much wider intellectual base in order to cope effectively with these types of complex issues. At the same time, people are going to do more and more jobs during the lifetime of the careers. So in fact, we no longer talk about a career for life, we talk about a lifetime of careers. And these jobs may be in very different sectors and again, you need a broader based intellectual foundation in order to more easily upskill or reskill to take up new types of jobs in different sectors. But the critical question is how do you actually most effectively promote cross-disciplinary learning to build those critical skills that are required to do so and of course one way is to have many more courses where many professors from different disciplines teach in the same course. But there are other I think more powerful methods by which you can do so which I think will become more and more of the mainstay in education institutions from schools up to universities. Let me just mention three quick examples. The first is problem-based learning where groups of students are presented with a problem right at the beginning of the course. And in figuring out what the main issues are in working through the problems, they will naturally have to learn across disciplines. So for example, if you take the problem of obesity, you can look at it from a healthcare point of view, how it's defined socially. You can consider how perception of risks occur at individual level about health problems of social obesity, how design of the built environment can affect obesity and so on. So problem-based learning can be a very powerful way to stimulate interest in subjects and also to in a sense naturally lead people to think about across disciplines without consciously considering that they're doing so. Another different type of approach which we have found to be very useful has really been to try to maximize the mix of disciplines among students in a classroom and to specifically design courses that make use of this diversity in order for students to learn from each other across disciplines. So in my university, for example, we have several programs where we have groups of students drawn from many different disciplines engaged in seminal style courses that explore carefully selected topics, for example, the elements of sustainable urbanization or livable cities, and immediately you'll find that students quite often will experience small aha moments when they hear issues brought up by their colleagues, their fellow students who come from a different discipline background. And finally, on the issue of IT online or technology-based learning, in fact, it can be a very powerful adjunct supplement to these types of approaches because it allows actually students to learn at their own pace and at their own time the foundational knowledge, the types of basic information that they need so that when they come to the classroom for the face-to-face interaction, they will be able to spend that time framing problems, debating issues, and trying to find creative solutions. So in the end, I think it is going to be the combination of online education, technology-enhanced education, together with the new modes of learning in the classroom that will allow us to train up this critical thinking and cross-disciplinary knowledge that is going to be so important for the products of the educational process in the future. I think this is a very interesting discussion in a way that Shantanu is a public company so he has to think about efficiency. Efficiency in a way that a public company has to make profit. In a way that in terms of e-learning and IT-way enhanced efficiency, on the other hand, interdisciplinary education requires more complex process and need to involve and engage lots of different scientists and people and professors and could become inefficient. But at the same time, the world is becoming more complex. Therefore, we have to cater to the good quality education, access, participation, and at the same time, we have to think about what is required in terms of education. So I'd like to go on to Mark to talk about as a provost of Carnegie Mellon University to combine efficiency as well as the changing dynamic of the world and how the university is coping it and how do you see it happening? Thanks. Well, I'd like to begin with the higher education in the developed world and then move more globally. In the developed world, a lot of institutions of higher education are between a rock and a hard place to use the proverbial phrasing, particularly those that are publicly financed. In higher education, there have not really been productivity changes in the last thousand years. We deliver education largely in a way we always have that leads to something that's often called Baumol's disease, but it means that the cost of higher education relative to other goods and services is going to continue to grow and we have seen tuition costs continue to rise. That's now being coupled with an unwillingness or an inability of the public to continue to finance and to pay for and to subsidize the higher education activities to the degree to which they traditionally have. And this has led, in the United States, in Great Britain, many places, great pressures for the need to change, radically change the cost curve for higher education that the current system is not in a stable equilibrium. Now, one way to do this, and we've heard great examples in the panel today, is through technology and in particular through online learning, through distance learning, and one way this can be done is through lectures. This is certainly not new. This has been an approach that's been pursued for decades and decades, and it can be very powerful. It's also gotten a huge amount of attention recently as we heard referenced to the MOOCs, massively online open courses. They do have the potential to provide access very broadly to lectures at a very low marginal cost. But such access alone, I think, is likely to prove to be insufficient. And I think that there is an approach that's been developed over the past 30 years, which I want to mention and which I think is going to be central to the evolution of higher ed. And it involves combining cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. One of the things we know from cognitive science of learning taught us over and over that passively watching and listening to lectures can sometimes be a pretty ineffective way to learn and an effective way to grasp and master complex materials. Most students need a very carefully structured learning environment with a great deal of student interaction, a great deal of learning by doing, well-designed explanation, well-designed examples, and highly customized student-specific feedback. The online lectures are a... something that has many, many uses, but those aren't generally the skills that they have. An alternative approach is to embed into an interactive computer mechanism, which could actually be your smartphone, but a tremendous amount of customized artificial intelligence-based capacity for there to be what we call a cognitive tutor, which sort of replaces or serves the place of the traditional lecture. This is a technology that's pretty expensive compared to just taping or videoing a lecture, but it can scale very easily and the marginal cost can be much, much lower, can also be driven down to zero or near zero. It's a very rich and a very interactive environment and there are now many controlled studies that show that it's an alternative and a very effective way of pedagogy, which does impact the cost curve in significant ways. I want to mention two quick examples that I'm familiar with from my institution. One of them is an organization called Carnegie Learning, which has been working in developing cognitive tutors for teaching algebra to eighth graders and is now being used to our three to four hundred thousand students at any given time and has worked its way into about ten percent of all U.S. public school districts. Another is an initiative out of Carnegie Mellon called the Open Learning Initiative, which is taking some of these same principles and approaches in the higher education. This approach, I think, is going to have a large role to play in higher education in developed countries and affecting the cost curve, but it's going to be equally important in the developing world where it will provide great access but also very highly customized and pedagogically effective methods to proceed. Thank you, Mark. I think it's interesting to conceptualize what we have been discussing about. One is higher education and primary education. We have technology efficiency, as well as interdisciplinary on the other side and human touch. And then combining that with the supply model is private enterprises versus public universities. And then we have to combine, depending upon what is required in terms of the needs of the world. With that, Gordon, thank you for being patient. And with that, I'd like to hand over to Gordon to talk about what you thought after this discussion and what you think would be done and what your experiences in terms of education. Can I say, first of all, it's a great pleasure to be speaking alongside some of the great thought leaders for the universities of the future, from Singapore, from Carnegie Mellon in the States, from India, running universities, as well as UNESCO. I actually was once a university lecturer, and universities, as you know, stand for objectivity, impartiality, rationality, the disinterested pursuit of truth, the search for knowledge, and I found that these were all the qualities I had to leave behind when I went into politics. I wanted to start with a story. I was in the newest country in the world, South Sudan, but one of the poorest countries in the world only a few weeks ago. And I met mothers in that country who I talked to about what were their hopes and what were their fears. And what was absolutely fascinating was even in this most remote and poor village that I was visiting, the mothers there, although they lacked food and shelter and safety and security for their children and themselves, what they wanted most of all was education. What they wanted for the children was a chance of education. And that is reflected in everything that you've heard already this evening, that the demand for education, the understanding of its centrality to the economy more than ever, the need to adapt to changing occupational structures by training, retraining, providing constant lifelong education, the heart of the debate about the future economy of the world is about how we improve and we expand our education system. And there's not a mother, I think, throughout the world who doesn't understand now the importance that education will have more so in the future than ever it had in the past. And therefore there's two questions that in a way I want to ask this audience to comment on this evening. The first is this issue of access. Who gets education? So in the next 10 or 20 years, by 2030 at least, the numbers of young people who are graduates of universities will quadruple from 200 million to 800 million. China itself, as I understand it, will raise the number of its graduates from 100 million to 300 million and India will be trying to do something similar. So the demand for higher education will grow. The numbers of people with qualifications will grow. Well, what happens to the rest? We know they need education. We know they need qualifications. Not necessarily university qualifications. But how can we continue to tolerate a situation where 60 million children today are not even going to school, not even having one day at school when the majority of children in some countries are not finishing secondary education, where there are still nearly a billion people in the world who are illiterate. And yet we think and agree that education is so important to a person's opportunities and to our economy's success and still allow this situation to exist in the world where so many people are deprived of a basic right to education. So we will have to do more about this and we will have to mobilise global support to ensure that people in some of the poorest parts of the world have the chance to get education. Then the second issue, what is education going to be like and that's what this debate has been about. And I sometimes think, well, I don't know if it's true that universities have not improved the productivity for a thousand years, as was suggested. We say in Britain that the first 500 years of any institution is always the most difficult. But I do know that a lot of people would say that the classroom is basically one of the few institutions that has been relatively unchanged for more than a century. And that we still practice the same type of educational and curriculum as we might have done a century ago in many, many countries. So can't we learn more about what is being successful and what really works? First of all, we know that leadership matters. And we cannot afford to have low quality education because we are poor teachers. We need 2 million more teachers, 4 million more classrooms in the world, but we also need quality teachers and a school will only be as good as the quality of its teachers. Secondly, we know that leadership matters. If a school is not well led or a university or a college, it's not going to be successful and you need good leaders that you've got to balance for the modern world. The need to have good skills, the 3 R's we call it in Britain, arithmetic and reading and writing, of course, the basic skills and good skills in maths and science where Asia is doing far better than the rest of the world and should be congratulated but also with a creativity in the curriculum that will allow people to learn how to learn and learn how to adapt so how you learn is as important sometimes as what you learn and it seems to me we need to learn from what is successful in creating a curriculum that is both based on the discipline of the basic sciences but also the creativity of the pupil and the question is can that be done also by maintaining equity for the individual pupil and then this final point which has come up about technology and I suppose I would put the challenge this way technology has got the capacity to transform the educational experience and we've just heard how it could be done the teacher doesn't need to be what we call in Britain the sage on the stage the teacher could be the guide by your side as you benefit from the new technology and the teacher becomes more of a tutor than a lecturer as the lecturing is sometimes done better by people who've got a vast genius in that we've been beamed in from the rest of the world but how we apply this technology is important and who gets the benefit of this technology important and really the challenge for our educationalists is can we understand that someone who is the poorest pupil in the remotest part of the world could also get the benefit of this new technology where we can have online learning so that we don't have the problems of access and the inequalities of opportunity that we have at the moment everywhere I go around the world children want to learn parents want them to have these chances teachers want things to be better I think we should now be in a position to bring together all the lessons we're learning from the successes whether it's Finland or China or Singapore or Carnegie Mellon learn all the successes and then try to make sure disseminate all the good things that could be done to improve our education system for the future it's the most important thing for our economy we must now make that happen by applying the reforms that we know can work very good thank you thank you Gordon for raising questions what I'd like to do is to go back again to panelist and then go to the audience because Gordon has raised two or three questions and then I'd like to ask one each to the panelist about the Dr Tan UNESCO you mentioned that access and participation are increasing but Gordon mentioned the other way what is going on and what is UNESCO trying to do actually we are not conflicting each other we work together UNESCO does a great job thank you for asking our voice we're trying to complement each other anyway actually if you compare 20 years ago when the education for all started by that time education for everybody almost was a dream but today yes if you look at the figures it did increase but of course today still have 66 million children still out of school today and I have 770 million adult people cannot read and write so there's still challenges there so that is the I've finished the business that's exactly why US Secretary General launched his new initiative together with Mr. Brown, UNESCO or try to fight okay so Dr Tan of National University of Singapore Gordon mentioned about the changes not happening so much in educational model and Dr Tan mentioned about the conservativeness of the educational body how do you argue that well it's true that we face tremendous challenges to do this because the faculty very conservatizing they're not going to rush out to do these things but I think a model of change that we find works for us is really to find a cluster of champions in different parts of the institution and tools and support them to drive and demonstrate the value of what they're doing demonstrate advocacy through data and then make this known to the rest of the faculty and the faculty are by and large very data driven and if you are able to demonstrate that a particular technique really makes a difference then it becomes much easier to move them so the sense that we have is you need first to have leadership a vision that is prepared to take the required amount of time to transform the way teaching occurs you need the technology platforms that's usually the easier part of the problem and then you need the champions in a cluster with enough demonstration power and then to propagate the change throughout and I would say that this is aided considerably by the fact that today as we are as we hear from Mark there's a lot of talk about the digital tsunami destructive changes coming to education through online types of innovations in edX with MIT and Harvard with Coursera out of Stanford I think these are leading a lot of university presidents and faculty to start to rethink about the model of education and I think this will have an accelerating cumulative effect on the way universities around the world think about this and over time I think there will be a momentum built up for us to lead on these changes Okay Mark Dr. Tan mentioned about digital tsunami lots of artificial intelligence and so forth and Gordon mentioned about leadership how to implement by combining all those digitalization and implement that so that the university can change I think that's the great question universities and higher education other education the institutions are fairly conservative and hard to change there's the old joke that it took 40 years to move the overhead projector from bowling alleys into the classroom and maybe a little bit exaggerated these are technologies which potentially at least really do as the prime minister indicated redefine the role of the teacher and that it's not necessarily the sage on the stage and it's not all going to be lecture based and it's going to be perhaps much more personalized much more adapted to the individual students but it's going to require a very different way of thinking about how a teacher optimally functions how to move from where we are into that framework is I think the most difficult thing to contemplate it could be disruptive in a very non smooth way perhaps I'll go back to Dr. Tan Shantanu about technology can technology do a good job in terms of educating people I would say do we really have an option because I think if you look back over the past a few hundred years as Gordon rightly mentioned we have not changed and the result of not taking some decisions in terms of mass education or bringing more technology to education we now have to pay the price of being conservative and it's not just that the universities have been conservative I think governments across the world have been conservative regulators have been conservative they have stifled private investment in education and today we are sitting on the brink of an international demographic disaster it should have been a demographic dividend but we have to take the opportunity for either school education or university education are essentially contributing to a lot of social conflict around the world so the old models are not going to work the old model is you go you make a school and you make a university is going to take decades to do that and before we don't really have the luxury of that time so the point is we have no option but to rethink so the 21st century or the 22nd century education model is to essentially take some bold decisions and change everything so you have to change the way you deliver education and that's where online education mobile technologies that's where online learning is going to play such an important role but you also have to change the business model for technology for education and changing the business model for education in a partnership in a very fundamental manner Doctor, quickly I just want to add another powerful impetus for change is that the students are going to make us change today at least in the developer people are not born with silver spoons in their mouth they are born with iPhones in their hands and students are used to getting information from all kinds of sources and when they enter schools and universities they are going to expect the same and so if the university or the school is unable to provide the the level of information, the quality of delivery they will find it elsewhere and so I think they will be a potent force to change I will get back to you later on whether you are convinced or not but all I would like to do is to engage the audience and I would like to ask four or five questions please be briefly and we will get back and ask the panelists again so the lady over there I would like to I would like to ask as we know the traditional degree that people got from the university could be seen at the certification of their education background what you mentioned that the long distance education degree hasn't been recognized and accepted by the majorities so that is reality so how do you think this phenomenon thank you let me ask four or five other questions gentleman over there over there I have a question to all of you the use of unemployment is soaring all over the world and I think this is partly because of the gap between what is taught in education and what is needed by companies is how can we accelerate the speed of the change that you discuss in this panel in education which has been quite sluggish over the years thank you one question competition private enterprise my home country Sweden 99.8% of all went to one school system in 1992 now we will put up a competition private enterprise is getting in we are disrupting classes we are building completely new things when will the planned economy controlled by politicians in education move to the private sector and the talents of the private sector can improve it okay I think there is a global shape over there I agree that the future of education is going to be online and cloud based but do you think there is any danger in moving towards that direction in terms of losing the ability to teach skills like teamwork, communications and things like that will promote more entrepreneurship and innovation one more question lots of heads up okay over there yes can I ask Switzerland has the largest capital income in the world and yet comparatively it has less people in higher education more vocational is a lesson that we need less degrees and more skills training okay so first of all I think there is a question addressed to Gordon about the lady and then also the question about the private sector like a public sector to private sector please touch up on that I think the least qualified to answer about the future shape of universities but the first question was about that and let me say I think there are huge and exciting models for the way universities are going to develop that are now being either piloted or discussed and we've had some of it here you've got the global university where you could enter from different parts of the world different portals in different parts of the world and you can do courses in different countries to make up the single degree and I think that will become very common that will be mixed with some of the courses being online rather than in a campus and that will be one of the changes that will come out as well and I think that those countries that continue to restrict universities to a particular national version that has got to be followed irrespective so I think the experimentation the piloting of new models the use of online technology will become very widespread and it may be of course that a lot of the information that I would have got as a student could have come online and this was the point that was being made earlier that the experience of learning the tutoring that comes from a university is going to be important can I just make one final point about our jobs because that's what was being raised as well as this structure of occupations change then the need for wrote learning and the rewards for memorizing and the rewards for manual dexterity will become less but the skills that will be required in decision making in recognising patterns so to speak and in communications will be valued more and so our universities and our institutions of primary, secondary and higher education will have to adapt to that need in the occupational market where IT and computers are going to be able to do a large number of tasks that were previously jobs for people but at the same time there will be certain things of course that cannot be done and where training in wisdom in decision making in recognising processes and patterns and in communication is going to be very important so a lot of education will focus on these things I think in future Who wants to talk about youth unemployment like maybe Mark or Dr. I'll just say one quick thing I think that at least in the United States case the gap is not as subtle as the good question suggests that there's a subtle gap between skills and needs there's a major gap in the United States most of our urban school systems do not get within 30% of 8th graders through algebra that's the nature of the gap so we're not training people who are set for a 21st century economy and if I could just very briefly ask say something about the very good question of teamwork and so forth I think there are ways that teamwork can be done through teams that are scattered at a distance a lot of work these days is working with as the advantage of trans-cultural options as well but the underlying thing of your point I think is very true not all of these things can be done with online learning and lectures certainly not and what I think one finds is that the best approach is typically blended and I think that the future that one can imagine out there is not going to be one that's all one thing that's going to take advantage of a bunch of different approaches what do you want to add? I think on the issue of employment and the nexus of education clearly there's not going to be a one size fit all solution and you really need to tailor it to the nature of your economy and the likelihood of job creation so Singapore for example has a significant manufacturing capacity about 25% of our GDP and therefore we actually have retained polytechnics which are post secondary education as a way of training people up for very good jobs with a lot of opportunities for employment advancement and that has meant that we've been able to keep unemployment at a very low rate I think there's also the issue of time frame of consideration here we're trying to balance training people to be employable through a lifetime and yet how to also train a person to be employable and functional and it's very hard to have a plug and play engineer or anything coming out straight away and so when we train people to be able to process information make sense information there's a slight trade off and we try to match this by having internships and industry types of advisories so that we can tailor the last year of education to better fit with the industry needs but I think we want to take a longer term view in terms of the preparation for individuals to be able to with some appropriate level of shorter training move into new jobs because then that gives you a lot more flexibility as an individual and also gives the economy a lot more flexibility in terms of human resource deployment okay Shatna, do I talk about one of the successful models in the area of skills development using technology has really been to bridge the gap between where the jobs are and where the students or where the candidates are located so we are seeing increasing use of technology in creating teleeducation networks that have proved to be very successful because in most countries in the world the jobs are clustered in few locations whereas people who want to get those jobs are spread across the entire country so using teleeducation networks for example in India has proved to be a huge success because not only do you bridge that gap, that physical divide but you also take very high quality trainers which are always a scarce resource and you put them in front of a camera and you broadcast that lecture across the country you also allow to scale up the human capital in terms of trainers which is a globally scarce resource two questions are not yet answered so Dr Tan maybe to talk about one is about the public sector when the private sector is going to play a major role and he talked about like a socialist model of education what could be done do you want to talk about that or do you want to talk more about the degree, this degree probably private sectors involvement but this is a kind of a new way today we are observing in many countries more and more government want to have a partnership with private sectors mainly not only for actually for getting more funding more importantly is to let them to tell education people what kind of a skill and people education system need to train and today we find really like for example those big companies we are working with like Microsoft like Nokia they all get this involved with the global education and then this is also their responsibility so for us this is not only for the funding as we said now they are more and more involved with the education people to tell them what exactly what's happening in the new technology fund what is really a new skill today we need for example we need digital knowledge we need all the diversified skills so those are things really important to have private sectors get involved and this is today to me is one of the key factor if we want to push education for all not only the government but private sector is so important that's why we are working on that in case of Japan like because there is a huge government deficit I think it happens in most of the advanced nations that deregulation has to be needed more private sectors and more dynamic entrepreneurs have to come in I think that's the movement that's the trend is going on the gentleman raised a very interesting point about what is how come you have to make so much like higher education like in case of Switzerland or maybe in Germany more vocational education is more needed in terms of higher education like universities may not be suited to the real world who would argue that who would talk about that I'll make a very quick comment on that as an organization that has one foot in both these domains I think we have to we shouldn't think in terms of these two being separate buckets I think higher education has to become more vocational and vocational education has to become more comprehensive so I think the solution for the 21st century is really a blend of both the moment we start thinking about this is degree and this is vocational education we are already putting ourselves in a box and some of the successful models today actually break that conceptual barrier Mark and Dr. Tan do you agree? Well I think my sense is more like different pathways that may be required so the individuals can move so that it doesn't mean that we don't get a degree there's the end of your life which is quite often the sentiment in many parts of Asia that the degree is the end in itself is actually not so we I think we need to create more pathways some people can go into non-degree bearing technical education spend a few years in industry take a degree, move into a different job and I think creating many different pathways each which can fit into some economic need I think that would be the way in which it would give us more resilience over on this system there are lots of hands raised one lady in the front and maybe one gentleman standing up as well first lady in the front thank you I prefer to ask my question in Chinese I want to ask you I want to ask the gentleman sitting here what the future education how the future education will face the challenge there are a lot of women joining in the university education but the course for college entrance examination for women, for girls students are higher than those for the female for female are higher for the male so how can we face this challenge the guy over there who is standing up over there thank you thank you very much my name is Andrea I'm a global shaper and one day I was asked who was your best teacher and I thought about it only a few seconds the reply was actually it was a peer and he was younger than me probably one of the reasons why I'm here today is because this guy inspired me so my question is what is the role of young people in education, in teaching actually what is the role of young people in reshaping the education system are we going to ask them what they want, how they want education to be interesting lady talked about gender and then global shaper talked about young people teaching one more question thank you Gordon mentioned earlier on that education is the most important driver for the economy and it's interesting here at the world economic forum whatever someone is talking about is really important health is really important education is really important and the question I have is what are we willing to eliminate what of the important things should we not do to be able to make significant progress in education it's a question to all of you but that inspired it so we have five plus more minutes and what I would like to do is ask each panelist to comment on the questions and final remarks with one minute each so let me start with Dr. Tan what to eliminate I guess it's going to be a big tradeoff but I think we need to be more productive as Mark says we've got to find ways to maintain quality but at a larger scale requiring less inputs and in that way we might be able to balance the needs across a broad spectrum of different dimensions I think the main takeaway I get from this session really is the needs for developing developing countries are very different there are technologies innovations and pedagogies and we really need in a sense to have a menu of innovations that are happening in different places so that countries or places, institutions that are looking for different types of solutions would have some kind of resource to guide them as to different approaches that might be applicable for their situation because in the end everybody has to create their own solutions specific to their needs and to where they want to go so I'd like to begin with just a word or two about the comment on peer interactions and the role of interaction with one fellow students we talked a little bit about how teachers roles are going to have to change there's tremendous evidence that suggests that your peers is one of the best ways to learn in fact a lot of evidence shows that one of the best ways to teach a student is to ask that student to try to formulate the lesson for one of his friends and I think that this reconceptualization of the role of all the players is surely one of the opportunities and challenges before us and then to summarize there is a tremendous set of opportunities to find ways where we don't have to sacrifice not doing one thing because it's too expensive to do other things there's got to be ways to try to make the educational process more cost effective one of the great opportunities we've talked about on learning and so forth but we're entering a phase where not only will this occur in the cloud but our capabilities in dealing with huge amounts of data so-called big data is progressing in fabulous ways where we're going to have so much more ability to figure out more easily what really is effective and try to take advantage of that as we move forward Thank you Dr. Tan Just quickly two points the first one about it just gender equity which is this is really a challenge is a universal it's not only in China I have to tell you it is almost for this for 20 years in UNESCO we're talking to all minister of education everybody agreed with that of course then they still have a long way to go so need the specific measures the last point I want to make is about the vacation education today I met so many minister of education and they asked them what are the challenges they always answered the first challenge for them is teacher the second is always a vocational skills and of course they got a pressure from to have to find a way to train the young people to get a job but the final point is to creating a job is not education can do it's economic people so it's not boring Okay, Satna Yeah now make a quick point about you know the comment on young people my organization works with about 22 million and all of them are below the age of about 18 and one of the things that we observe is that young people are very smart they will find the way that they can learn better so they are in fact I would say learning today in spite of the education system not because of the education system and if you see the amount of education that is going on today on Skype, on Facebook on various cooperative learning platforms I think technology has a game changing role to play here some of the things that educationists have always dreamed of but it's never been possible to do for example how do you do self-paced learning you can't do that when you put 40 kids inside one classroom and put one teacher to do the job that's where technology comes in plays a really important role how do you do cooperative learning especially when you want to do cooperative learning across provincial borders or across global borders and some of the first people to take advantage of these new technologies are going to be the young people below the age of 18 so these people are already finding the way they are leveraging technologies in ways that the inventors of those technologies never dreamed that they would be used in that particular manner a quick comment also on the issue of gender now that's an issue that really is important in the country that I come from India and there are you know for traditional reasons for historical reasons for religious reasons the girl child has been so disadvantaged in India and I think that you just don't need it's not only the government that has to step in I think civil society has to step in and you cannot talk about future of education if you're not talking of 50% of humanity and outside the big cities if you go down to the villages I think that's a very serious issue that we cannot ignore at all. I think the same point in our country in Britain because of the investment in girls equivalent to the investment in boys girls now do better in schooling they get better qualifications they've got most of the university degrees they are the people who enter the professions more than men do now whether it's law accountancy or other professions like medicine and therefore those countries that fail to develop the potential of their girls and women are really doing not only these girls and women in this service but doing a huge disservice to the future of their countries. I just give you one example in South Sudan which I just visited, 400 girls only in secondary education at 14 and 15 in a country of 10 million people when there should be 150,000 girls if it was the correct pro rata rate and so a 1 in 400 chance of getting senior secondary education in a country like South Sudan such as a discrimination that still exists so we have to do better I think we probably spend on average about 400 dollars for the whole education of the typical African girl and we spend about 100,000 dollars for the education of a child in America or in Europe and therefore the inequality is such that we are denying a whole generation of people chances if we don't take action and my point is it's to the detriment of the whole economy and the whole society and not just something that is so unfair to an individual that we should feel angry about it in the first place so I do agree that we need to do more to promote girls and women's education well this has been very stimulating and inspiring discussion the topic of education you can see that the whole room is packed and it shows that education has a strong interest to other people I believe that education has a strong power to change people and at the same time create jobs as well and also change the society as well and the topic about future of education I have learned from this discussion that is so diverse I think it's good to have diverse suppliers of education like education providers, suppliers of different business models of universities, vocational studies and at the same time different choices of the people who are choosing what career to take so I think the way to go may be deregulation, more diversity and more different ideas and more different business models both private and public sectors and at the same time leadership is required I hope all of you who are here today will do something better for the future of education Thank you very much