 Well, good afternoon everyone. My name is John Kayo. I'm the moderator for this session, and it's a pleasure to welcome all of you here. Given the lovely lighting here, I'm not sure whether our panel should break into song or share their deepest thoughts about education. Maybe we'll get both, but certainly this notion of education in relation to the notion of an innovative society could not be a more important topic. Just by way of introduction, so that you have a little bit of background on my own perspective, I've been advising countries on national innovation policy for about 15 years off and on. And what I'd like to say to them is if you want innovation in your country, you have to have people who know how to do it, and if you want people who know how to do it, you have to help them learn how to do it. And this whole notion of how to learn for the purposes of a 21st century innovative society, to my mind, is really in beta, or maybe even in late alpha. There is so much turbulence in the world of education, and actually one can even say that the world of education, per se, and the world of learning are diverging at a very rapid rate. We're in a world now where a colossal amount of content is posted every day on social media, and not all of it is about Beyoncé's latest album. It's also about 12 year olds sharing knowledge of one kind or another, about co-creation, about peer learning, and things of this kind. The notion of the whole education process, formal education, beginning to turn upside down, because in a sense the notion of the sage on the stage, the hierarchical notion of education is giving way to far more lateral and peer oriented models. The notion of education turning inside out, because the locus of learning now can be anywhere that you have a cell phone, and the question of what these things called schools are, and what these humans called teachers are, in some respects is open for discussion as well. We're here to talk about education technology, but we also have to be aware of the fact that technology as a whole is exerting a disruptive influence on education. For my money, one of the biggest areas that I think we will see some dramatic innovation to use a popular term for this session is the whole notion of blockchain and related technologies in relation to credentialing. Once we have a regime for freeing credentialing from traditional mechanisms of authority, and allowing credentials to float around in relation to, let's say, more sophisticated technologies that enable personal digital identity to become a reality, so that individuals can participate in digital market spaces for employment, for skill development, and one can focus on micro-credentialing as opposed to the grand opera of a four-year university degree, a high school diploma, and things of this kind. The flexibility, the agility that that will enable, just to cite one example of the kind of disruptions that we're in store for, I think, is going to be very interesting to watch. So, we as a group here, I think, have a real opportunity to co-create today. We don't have an hour. We have a very distinguished panel, which I'm going to introduce in just a moment, but I want to set an expectation that in our discussion, which I think will occupy most of our time, we have decided as a team that we're each going to make approximately five to seven minutes of remarks, but that means that we want to leave airtime, the majority of the airtime for all of us, and the expectation is that we would actually come up with some actionable insights as to what an education or a learning ecosystem that supports innovative societies should look like. We have lots and lots of examples of best and promising practices. There's lots of ideas out there. There's lots and lots of educational technology. Some of it seems very promising. Others seem perhaps to be motivated more by the desire for the latest commercially attractive bright shiny object, and then there's everything in between. So, we have a lot to cover as a pure community over the next hour. To help us and to get us rolling, we have a very distinguished panel and a very eclectic panel. First of all, we've got Amy Ogan, who has a very imposing title that I will read in its complete glory, the Thomas Lydian Moran Assistant Professor of Learning Science at Carnegie Mellon. She runs a laboratory that is about the whole value chain of developing, testing, deploying, studying the effects of interesting to her and her colleagues educational technology and to us as well. So, she comes directly from the world of education technology. Then we have, and I'll do these in order of the remarks that you're going to hear, we have Ashish Admani, who is the CEO and has been the CEO for the past three years of junior achievement. Junior achievement is, in fact, at least as I parse it, a great example of this diverging of education and learning because the learning experience under a junior achievement umbrella does not necessarily occur in the brick and mortar traditional hierarchical teacher driven infrastructure of traditional education. And I think his experience in terms of occupying a particular kind of place in a particular ecosystem that creates intellectual capital, distribution capability and also funding capacity because, you know, now we're talking not just about government officials in ministries of education writing checks for new programs which could actually take quite a while, nor are we necessarily just talking about Sandhill Road Venture Capitalist funding new innovations. But we're talking now also about corporate social responsibility programs of which there are many. We're talking about employee engagement programs to take the muscle of a talented workforce and apply it to the notion of learning and education for an innovative society, for a society that is able to progress and do great things. So I think we're going to hear some very interesting perspectives from Ashish. And then finally, we have Suzanne Portier, who is both a principal and a vice chancellor at McGill University. And I now understand that a principal is essentially the chief executive president equivalent. And the vice chancellor, who she also tells me does not get paid, is the person who is empowered to give out degrees. So we have in one person two sides of the education equation. And her, I think value proposition for us today will be to address specifically some of the issues of higher education. Having made those introductions, I don't want to constrain any of you in any way. I mean, I think it's important that they know who you are. But I think at this point, perhaps we should turn it over to the panel. I just want to make one other point, which is that, you know, part of the reason that I volunteered to do this moderating role is because this whole notion of innovation learning in a sense has been a obsession of mine for the past 30 years. I developed the innovation curriculum at Harvard Business School back when innovation was still a somewhat countercultural term in a graduate school of business, taught at the MIT Media Lab, Stanford as well, and their executive programs for innovation. And I'm currently very much involved in thinking about how young people, let's say K through 12 young people, can learn the skills of innovative thinking and innovative leadership, which is represented in the organization that I started a few years ago called Edgemakers. So with that, let me turn it over to my colleague to my left, Amy Ogan. Thanks. Thank you. So I think one of the goals here was to talk about the variety of stakeholders that are involved in this whole ecosystem. And so I'm here to represent the research and academic side of the table. I'm one of the young scientists here at the World Economic Forum. And so I thought I'd tell you a little bit about some of the things that are happening at Carnegie Mellon University in our labs, where there's really exciting opportunities, both because we have access to the latest learning sciences, but also access to the latest technologies. And so we see some extreme promise in the ability to deliver adaptive education through the use of a variety of technologies. And when I say that, I mean everything from low-tech examples, for instance, we have a project in the Côte d'Ivoire where we're looking at delivering literacy curriculum to children whose parents may not be literate in the language that they're learning in schools entirely by basic phone. So these are technologies that children already have access to in the home and where they can call in and use our interactive voice response system to actually access the latest in a literacy curriculum that listens to the children and can provide them with targeted support for exactly the literacy skills they need, including teaching them games that they can then go and play offline after they hang up. So that's one example of a more low-tech solution that uses technology that's already available in the environment. And we work the whole way up to actually trying to get learners off of screens and putting sensors in the environment, for example, in a classroom where we can collect all sorts of data on exactly what's happening in the class, keep it anonymous, but collect everything from facial expressions, movements to where the teacher walks around the classroom, where they're looking, have they looked at every student and engaged with each child individually, process all of that, and provide it back to the instructor so that they can actually see what's been happening in their classroom with a fidelity that's impossible for them to achieve on their own in the moment and helping provide them with professional development opportunities that let them improve what's happening in their own classroom. So to me, these are the really exciting things that are coming out of academia, which we would love to be able to see in more of a global deployment in places where a particular technology makes sense and can integrate into the community more widely. And another advantage that we have in academia is the ability to really focus on efficacy. So we actually have the freedom to spend the time and effort necessary to really evaluate the learning outcomes that are happening with our technologies and use them in iterative development cycles so that we actually can make solid promises about what we're delivering to a particular community. So I'm really excited to be here and to talk about the ways in which we can partner with all of the other aspects of the ecosystem in order to provide the best quality education and really the learning opportunities that are going to be needed in the future as we move towards a faster pace need for new skills and new development. So just to follow up question, you know, the old saying is that innovation isn't innovation until the new thing is adopted. And so what have you learned about the enablers and the obstacles of actually taking the great work that you do and injecting it into the mainstream? Ah, well, that's a great question. One of the things that we have learned is I loved that you were talking about new models of learning. One thing that we have learned is that while peer learning is very powerful, it's not successful by in and of itself. And we really need to integrate with other members of the community in order to make sure both that adoption happens and that learning actually happens. So we love peer learning models when parents are also on board and supportive of educational opportunities, when teachers but also other community members can support these learning opportunities and when governments are involved as well. So we've run into any number of obstacles trying to work, you know, across the needs and goals of each of those members of this ecosystem. And we really find that in order to provide equitable and just educational opportunities, we need to involve all of those stakeholders together. Coalition building becomes really key. Absolutely. Okay, understood. Well, thank you for that. So she's the floor is yours. Thank you. And I want to say that I had a chance to see a demo of your technology a couple years ago in Davos, and it was amazing. So thank you there. So I'm not sure how many of you already know about junior achievement before I go into a spiel about junior achievement. Can you just raise your hand if you already know what we do? Great. So about maybe a quarter. So I'll keep it brief. So junior achievement is an organization that has offices in 116 countries and we reach schools and we reach kids and we partner with governments and with the private sector. And we do this in a multi stakeholder way quite simply because it creates more sustainable programs to actually focus on changing the mindset of young people. So that's really our goal is to supplement school education by focusing on mindset shift to really get young people ready for the future of work. The future of work constantly is changing. So our programs constantly change. And the organization is turning 100 next year. So to last that long is a good indication of how often we've had to reinvent ourselves. And we're right in the middle of a reinvention right now particularly thrust upon this idea of creating an innovative entrepreneurial future. The WEF study the WEF report future of jobs report which I recommend that you all read if you haven't read it already has a lot of great data to anticipate where we're headed. One of the data points is it's possible the average young person will have over 20 jobs in the course of their life. From my perspective if you're going to have 20 jobs it means it's possible that you actually are going to be fired five times or at least leave involuntarily five times. And I'm not sure about the people in this room but it's it's it takes a mindset shift and a resilience to be able to have that type of transition in one's life. In my view the innovative mindset is very tied to self efficacy and the ability to believe in one's own success. So to be able to persevere through occasional challenges as you build your innovative product or you accomplish the innovative goal that you've set or set the innovative ambition which you believe is what's motivating you. So how do you create that mindset? The good news has been lots of research great great academics have done research on how to create that mindset. And it really comes down to a handful of things. One of the things is actually having a role model at a young age that allows you to believe you can do more than maybe what your parents have done because that's usually your scope of influence is your relatives and friends parents etc but being exposed to a role model relatively early in life particularly if you're a girl can truly change your own capacity for thinking where you're going to end up. What we've found is the role model also has to be a person who has a similar background to the young person. So exposing a young kid to Jack Ma who will be speaking tomorrow while it's great it's not going to create necessarily the mindset shift that would happen. I'll tell you a quick story I was in India and we had young girls in eighth grade who the daughters of rickshaw drivers and we took them to GE healthcare for the day and we asked them how many of you are interested in science and about one out of ten hands went up. Then we exposed them to sort of people who work for GE healthcare who had careers. One of the speakers was a 28 year old woman I remember her very well who was an innovative nutritionist for GE healthcare. She designed really creative meals in hospitals to ensure that people got a nutritional value and she was so eloquent in her speech and she said I used to be just like you and now I get to work in this air-conditioned office where a lot of girls was their first time going to an air-conditioned office and this is the job that I have and we asked them at the end of the day how many of you are interested in science. Every hand went up in the room and I truly believe the reason that happened is because they all wanted to be just like that attractive 20 year old woman who spoke really articulately about her passion for her career and they looked up to her. That's just one example of a story I can tell you so many more from other parts of the world. If you don't know JA we sometimes go by in-jaws in the Middle East and young enterprise in the UK and we customize our brand for every part of the world partly because the programs tend to be customized for local need. For example in in-jaws in the Middle East we have programs in partnership with government schools and we're really one of the first NGOs allowed into some of these schools to teach entrepreneurship education. So it's such an opportunity to impact countries that otherwise hadn't prioritized entrepreneurship education and prioritized even you know teaching to the test. So as we think about how to truly build an innovative mindset I'll talk a bit about stakeholders perhaps a bit later on in my remarks but I fundamentally believe that it's about mindset shift. Terrific thank you very much. Suzanne? Thank you. My colleague has already mentioned some numbers about the future of work and of course there's a great report that was published yesterday so we'll all dig into it but those numbers are telling us I think what we need to prepare for. Skills having to be renewed every three five years. People entering our universities right now will do jobs we don't even know about we can't even imagine. I think this is the future and we have to prepare for it. People ask me often what's the challenge for you in universities? The challenge I think is that we have to prepare individuals to be both job ready and future ready and future ready and job ready it means preparing them for the next three years five years ten years 25 years 50 years maybe even more because of course we're also projecting that people will live to be 100 year old and will have those many jobs 20 jobs so how do we do that because there's a short term demand but there's also a very long term demand and I think that what is needed and I think that's where almost all universities are moving is to have a much more richer set of offering an environment that offers many different kinds of learning opportunities not just sitting in a classroom or doing a laboratory in science but many different opportunities learning opportunities are offered nowadays in bite size tailored just in time type of opportunities but also in work integrated learning and internships in industries we also need to take people in those deep dive deep learning we talk about it in AI well humans have to be able to do deep learning and these kinds of experience have to be offered also to our students and from what I see in our own universities but across the world this is where universities are moving the one thing I would note also is this is where students are moving so we're talking here about innovative societies students are doing just that on their own they're creating their own initiatives for learning they're launching them they're leading them they're creating innovative communities on our campus and they go even further they create innovative communities globally because they're all connected globally now our chair mentioned learning inside brick walls in universities well that's no longer quite true I mentioned just two two initiatives at my university very briefly because they're not inside brick walls we're working with cities in china and in brazil in the training of medical doctors for family medicines so these are people who are already working as doctors and we're contextualizing what they need to learn in their own community through some online learning and some also very intense in-person learning another thing we're doing and it's not inside brick walls is working with our first nations of original community right next to our campus just a few miles kilometers away but bringing learning in their own community and contextualize for their values for their traditional knowledge helping them learn in their own community this is not inside brick walls anymore and what I'm telling you about my universe is happening everywhere so I'll tell you the two things that really to me are the most important thing in terms of preparing individuals for this world I think we as individual and certainly through of our students have to take leadership in our own learning path in shaping our learning path and also in shaping our own career path so leadership and I'm seeing students doing just that and the other thing that I think is extremely important is to teach individuals and it may start at primary school in kindergarten make them discover and explore their great capacity for learning because they'll have to learn throughout their lives and so they have to discover that and understand and I'll end with one story here because it's something I heard at Davos in January and made a big impression on me a young woman who was part of the global shaper community coming from Africa to Davos and she described in a very simple way what she wanted from her education she said I want to have confidence in my own learning capacity that's what she want she wanted to be able whatever she was facing as a new opportunity a new challenge to be able to say I've never done that but you know what I can figure it out I can figure where I can do more learning in order to be able to do what you're asking me I have confidence I have confidence in finding the tools I need and I have confidence in my own learning if we can graduate students from universities with those two things leadership in shaping their own learning and career path and confidence in their learning I think we'll be okay well we have three really wonderful articulations of the kind of opportunity spaces that exist in the education and learning space today you know whether it be technology whether it be the in a sense co-curricular space around making the bridge from learning to employability or a hundred-year-old people or what my colleagues at at the Harvard School of Continuing Education call the 60-year curriculum which means that none of us are really off the hook but we have to keep learning we have to keep going so you know I think we ought to just get right into the subject matter at hand you know here we are I think a room filled with experience and opinions about the subject at hand what are some best or promising practices that you all have seen for coalition building for the introduction of new technology what are your thoughts about what you've just heard from the the floor here and perhaps you could also start thinking about what is it that this kind of a community could do to actually begin to prototype the kind of ecosystem that might be required to take meaningful action so I'll throw it all open to you I'm sure you've got thoughts and you know we can also keep talking up here but we'd love to hear from you as well yes right here in front when I was listening to you I was very inspired thank you for that I come from a startup so I'm in the innovation community in the business side and when we talk about startups or innovation there must be a unique selling proposal and I believe for every human there is unique contribution proposal that they can deliver to world and I'm there's a question and comment in the same sentence that I believe and I'm trying to ask is there are some technologies to help young people to find their own unique contribution proposal to to future economy or to future companies future jobs because as many career shifts that they will have the unique motivation they have for contribution comes from their inside and they have to find it and in the workplace I see people that who found their unique contribution they can thrive in the business and I'm asking your comments about it any thoughts so I guess I can jump in and say that we have this particular program which I think gives me the data to intelligently answer your question the program is in I think 90 countries now and it's the same program where kids are asked to create a business while they're in high school and five years ago the businesses look different than the businesses now and I think that's because there's some gravitational pull of interest in some areas one of which is social entrepreneurship so about 70 percent of high school students now when asked to create a business on their own they're creating a business which has some social benefit for the world which is worldwide which is a worldwide trend okay frankly I think it's even more in some parts of the world in the less developed parts of the world the traditionally less developed parts of the world and the emerging economies which shocked me actually you think it would be the western economies but it's not and the reason I use that data point is I think that there is this self-motivation frankly the UN global goals as much as sometimes they don't get their fair share of attention I do believe that in some countries it's seeped into the culture of how people feel they're making a contribution to the world I think that's already happened schools are teaching it now yeah so to think that's actually influencing the direction of young people's business choices I mean I think that makes me very optimistic for the future of the world yeah I'll add just to that because we're seeing that in universities in Canada 50 percent over 50 percent of young people want to be entrepreneurs and they start to cut their teeth on social innovation they also do all sorts of other innovation technology innovation every university has entrepreneur centers and social innovation but what amaze me is exactly what he says it starts very young in life and I remember talking to one of our students who got a road scholarship and learning about her path and she said well at the age of nine I created this organization to do this this and that you know it was for social benefit to help other children age of nine so they come to our universities after they've launched two or three social innovation projects I mean the serial entrepreneurs are there in our universities when they arrive and so they're not about to abandon that kind of excitement that they've learned how to bring to their own lives and they do that I was just going to add that from a technology point of view one of the things that we've been doing to work to inculcate such an attitude from an early age is to use technology to scaffold students in being reviewers of other students work and having the idea that your voice and opinion is actually a valid one now without scaffolding often students really struggle to provide a good critique of another student's idea but we can actually use adaptive technologies to guide students in a way to help them find their voice to find the ways to contribute to other students ideas and so I find this a very valuable approach from very early on and just to come back to the personal identity topic to the extent that down the line you'll be able to represent your credentials not just your academic grades but your internships your co-curricular activities in a way that's on a blockchain so it's got trust associated with it your personal digital identity can negotiate on your behalf in a in a market space that's also inhabited by employers and by NGOs and purveyors of information to essentially negotiate on your behalf to find opportunities that either may fit with your profile or may be different from your profile but interesting for you in terms of like a recommendation engine that's not today but within the next 36 months we're going to start seeing businesses that are that are doing this so what about the rest of you let's get one from over in back there we're gonna have spatial diversity here hi my name is caroline and I run an organization using theater as a social change tool and also with corporations and I've just come in sorry you may have already answered this question but I'd be really interested in your perspective of the role of the arts in education it feels like creativity and innovation is all about tech and actually we're forgetting some of the kind of old-style ways of thinking about creativity and and even this morning I was having a conversation with somebody who's saying like you know that actually somebody in tech who's saying that there's always a push to oh we've got to get skills out there you know skills in tech but actually what we're not doing is educating people on creativity and collaboration lateral thinking a sense of aesthetic the soul qualities the humanity and that's my biggest concern with this drive towards uh sort of technology and education are we actually forgetting uh the soul of what drives creativity in the first place what about so I would say that that um that that's a sad view of technology actually and and at Carnegie Mellon at least one of the things that we do is um provide a very strongly intertwined view of art and technology and so we actually have um multiple initiatives that cross the the two disciplines in order to show students that um creativity is a part of technology and technology can enhance your your creativity and so I agree that this is the future um if you see the art installation that's out here on the the top floor of the the robots that um engage with you follow you through algorithms that are developed for its sensing systems but that all required a background in the arts in order to be able to develop as well so I think that the future is is bringing those two together yeah yeah I'd like to say just one word about this because I think that that's why it is still something that many young people choose is to come to those institutions with their brick walls but they're great campuses where you have those random collision where you run into a person who's studying music another one is doing theater arts another one is in philosophy quantum physics and that's where you broaden very much your own knowledge and your interests you often discover that you have interests you hadn't even known about and you change fields this happens all the time so I think when we think of the the kind of environment we need in our universe it's also that part of the environment that creates those uh encounter those we call it the the creative collisions among people and creating spaces and the way we uh have our campus designed that promotes that at my own universe I'll tell you the best part is and you'll be surprised because it's in Canada people think it's cold all the time that's not true that's a false truth it's actually quite nice and we have a beautiful garden like uh campus where you see people everywhere on the grass at picnic table lots of creative collisions occur right there so in the back there I like to augment what she has said because if we say we do that but our paper chase is about grades about passing the examinations from primary school even nowadays from kindergarten to secondary school and only the one with good grades would then go to the best university the entire grading system only measure the one dimension your analytical and your memory test but then all the other multi talents that the child has is not measured and then we can give some lip service to say all right you know you actually will be by accident meet each other by collision we design the place but we're not gonna measure it so in this case the parents will still pressure cook their children and then everybody becomes like a robot and eventually the AI will replace them so the entire learning system doesn't serve the future at all so how can we start to go back to the human values of how to be a good human being and not be a good robot so I'm actually closer to that point of view partly because I'm I'm normally a very optimistic person you probably hear the word optimism at least three times my remarks but I'm actually somewhat pessimistic on this dimension which is I see more and more we'll use the word programming for the lack of better word of kids to do more before they go to university and there's a trade-off to that and we should be really honest about the trade-off and I do believe one of the trade-offs is on the creative side of the of the mental balance sheet and I think what's happened I guess the piece where I'm optimistic is that's happening in a self-directed way so kids on their own are developing that through spending time frankly on YouTube which is where they spend a lot of time in case you haven't looked at the data and that's where they're getting their creative interface not in schools anymore because schools have to either teach the test or teach to the future of work through these sort of experiential learning opportunities in the front right here thank you I I'm representing people with autism so typically they struggle in the education system but they can be some of the most innovative people this is what we see from big companies that we help to hire autistic people a lot of patents come out of that so so my question is how how can we not just help the kind of standard normal high-performing kids but also get access to those who fly under the radar today and from my experience struggle a lot with the standard expectations my own experiences that we need to create playful environments where they can show us instead of tell us because that's what they're good at I'm looking at hey me but I can say something about what we're seeing in university is certainly a big change in now starting from what's happening in in primary and secondary school who are better equipped now to accompany kids with various situations and appearing to be accompanying them successfully because they're now in our university suddenly all universities in in my country have a fairly large percentage of students who have learning disabilities of one sort or the other and cognitive difficulties but of course as you notice they have other abilities what has happened I think in the last few years that has been really good is that now the stigma associated with those conditions is decreasing so people are better able now to come and tell you I have this this condition I will need to be accommodated for it and then we can do so I think that's the big turning point is not so long ago people didn't even wanted to disclose and didn't want the accommodation therefore we're not able to succeed so well also you know education has up until now or until recently pursued a mass production model where people who learned at different rates were outliers and could not be accommodated in a world where technology enables a high degree of personalization and self-directedness a lot of those bumpiness characteristics kind of go away and I don't mean to sound like a broken record but technology can help here for instance we're exploring ways in which assessments can be done through play for instance and technology is one of the places where that can happen because we have the ability to look at all of the micro decisions that players make when they're engaging in gameplay and this can be accommodating for students of different needs we have the ability to change the way we assess to to having students talk to virtual characters instead of being assessed on a paper test or through interaction with an instructor and we know that this is more accommodating of students with different needs so I'm highly optimistic about our ability to adjust the way that both we teach and that we assess through the use of better technologies so I want to shift the conversation a little bit and ask what can we as a community do what can we do to create this kind of ecosystem and what what's the role of business in doing this we obviously have representatives from the corporate world here as well we've got some leading examples from you know junior achievement and others but what what should we be thinking about let's get a little action orientation going here so the gentleman over there hi my name is Jim Garrett I'm the dean of the college of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the things I wanted to say was I think the biggest challenge is that's that so many times companies will list that great point average as the litmus test for who they're going to look at and they miss this really richness of the person and so I think that's a challenge for all of us we have faculty that do the same thing they they sort of write off students that sort of aren't doing well on the first test that they're basically not going to get it we have to change that mindset it's something Carol Dweck calls the growth mindset that that that it's more about what kind of progress can a person make as opposed to where are they at any given time your idea by blockchain too is interesting it could create a very different type of resume that shows that progress over time I for one want to see what the trajectory looks like not what a given point in time looks like yeah I mean grades are like the streetlight effect you know they're easy to measure and they give you an action item but you know if you imagine a life arc that includes a number of different kinds of activities that don't even involve school per say but are about learning you've got something very different so I think you put your finger on the key issue which is if we can't measure it how can people value it and I think that's a fundamental problem on so many levels in society in fact there was another session on that topic about how data is becoming more and more an obsession and I think what's happened is soft skills are now starting to get measured so one potential avenue of solutions is start measuring soft skills the ssat is now starting to measure soft skills however my personal belief is that will be supplemented by micro credentials so micro credentials will allow branding of and the value of groups of soft skills that people have acquired we've launched for example a micro credential at j a in 28 countries where people have come out of our program now get a micro credential which shows that they've improved in a variety of soft skills including creativity and innovation because they've formed a business well in high school regardless of what their grades were so that's an example of something which I think will get valued over time so here's an idea for the community I mean how about coming together around some effort to if not create standards at least describe what standards might do for us in some of these credentialing areas what the full palette is may be related to the center for the fourth industrial revolution's blockchain team and start thinking about what does what does it mean to credential in the 21st century and who gets to do it and what should it look like and how should we evaluate different kinds of credentials so that we can not only do micro credentialing but then stack them in a way that then influences the people who formerly would look at the great point average but now have a more complex but arguably a much richer and more meaningful set of tasks yes sir thank you my name is kumar ks kumar I just wanted to just ask this question around what can business do for the future of and you talked about the future of work so I'm just as an example I went to a country called Jamaica some years back for years back and I found that what's the challenge the country faced was young people can't afford to go to college and if they went to college they drop out and that's what the prime minister told me so we picked up the students on an earn while you learn model and we worked with very large companies fortune 50 companies and created a new curriculum which is relevant in terms of what they want done you know supply chain and logistics for example you know data analytics and so on and we put this three year degree programs for people who can't afford to be in college and then created the future of work and they're working with us for the last three years now and we employed 5000 people like that at this point in time so and taking another point another segue on this one so what about sports education and how do you bring technology to really take sports education you know think about Hussein Bolt who I met in Jamaica I wanted to take bolt is retiring retired from sprinting at the moment right he's retired but how do we use sports I mean or Bolt's knowledge know how I'm making another hundred sprinters across the world how do you use technology and create a back office where Bolt can actually virtually coach you know few hundreds of young people around the world or even more in in sprint right so that's where possibly yeah I'll be interested probably to invest in that actually I'm looking for the right technology yes absolutely actually there there's if you look at professional athletes they use a lot of technology now and one of the interesting things that's being explored is the idea of personal informatics for athletes and I think that's an idea that could trickle down to amateur athletics and sports education as well so the idea that you have access to all of the data that you create while you're engaged in an activity and coaches can help you learn from it yeah it's really interesting all the way in the back there hello I'm global shipper from Armenia I wanted to present that we have like education is key in Armenia because we are we don't have resources we have brains only we have we had created in Armenia like technological solution for teaching kids from 12 years we have center for creative technologies that are teaching kids like animation design robotics all these technological things plus soft skills presentation skills etc we do that kids but this is private initiative and we have different private things but the question is how we can do that in the public schools how we can shift the public schools to the more to the future of the jobs more to the soft skills and one thing I think this community can do in my opinion I think all the countries have best practices technological gamification on these type of things that need to bring together discuss understand what is applicable we can make kind of toolkit for the for the education ecosystem that will can be replicated in both developed and developing countries and we can share our experience for example Armenia with our experience and I don't know are you with your experience Canada with its experience and this huge community can contribute in that way maybe we can think how we can come together the private sector and the public sector because if there are people keen to work with the state I invite to Armenia because we're really open to discuss and to to take a lot of things we can discuss and we can offer a web to start education related VEP event I don't know to bring the community and to discuss all these best practices and to make the standards and also these toolkits to take and replicate in our countries but thank you great idea Rebecca is Saadia here so our thought was perhaps you could share some thoughts from a forum point of view about what the possibilities are so Saadia is the head of the new center that you've probably heard about for the new economy and congratulations is now a new member of the managing board of the World Economic Forum but has a point of view I think about the subject matters we've been talking about so invite you to share some thoughts with us for a few minutes if you would thank you very much thank you everyone fascinating conversation lots of really great ideas whether it's forms of personalized learning whether it's other uses of technology whether it is having the right kind of role models having the right kind of ecosystem lots and lots of great ideas and I think there are no simple solutions and perhaps we have to accept that maybe there are many many silver bullets and not just one and maybe there will have to be experiments and maybe some will fail but many will succeed and that will transform a lot of lives so what we're trying to do at the forum is provide a platform for some of those experiments some of the most innovative stuff in the center for new economy and society and we've been doing quite a bit of work over the last few years you know some of it is is very much driven by insights like the kind that came out yesterday the future of jobs report but now we're we're trying to move really towards action and we need all of your help with that and I'm going to tell you just about three things that we're doing and if any of you are interested please come and join us and if you have other ideas let's talk about that as well one is trying to understand what is the school of the future and that's something we're going to start developing a little bit of work around but if we had to give a roadmap and maybe there's not just one maybe there are many but if we had to pick out 10 ideas and say this is what the school of the future needs to contain across different income levels taking into account that there are children who are in refugee camps who need to go to school but there are also really fascinating experiments happening in Silicon Valley so let's try to pull all of that together what would the school of your future look like a second aspect is you know you talked about blockchain and certifications do we actually have the same language around skills are HR leaders schools universities is everybody using a different language so trying to do something very ambitious which is create a skills taxonomy that is shared that is pooling information across various sources and then the last aspect is trying to hopefully get governments involved in some of these experiments so we have commitments from Australia Oman South Africa Argentina and India to move towards this closing the skills gap task force initiative that we've created we have those commitments we're focusing very much on adult reskilling and upskilling but the idea is to move in year two towards the schooling system and towards universities so if you're interested in any of that we'd love to work with you thank you thank you thanks to John Suzanne Amy and Ashish for a fantastic panel and it's not over yet so but thank you very much for the for the comments so I think you know we we want to get you out of here on time I mean clearly this could be a three hour discussion we feel like it's frustrating because we feel like we just scratched the surface so I'd like to invite the panel for any concluding thoughts integrative thoughts you know we can't put a bow in this but maybe we can at least try to get a little bit more perspective on the themes so anyone care to share a perspective well I'll share something here I think we have to remember that learning is probably the most exciting rewarding human activity and focus on that and seeing that it's so exciting we need to do it together why not share in the excitement and it's something that keeps us alive and particularly for people who are about to have very long lives they need to be equipped to appreciate the joy of learning and be able to keep that for the rest of their life we just celebrated the 100th anniversary of a person at my university who's one of the leaders in neuroscience discover new form of memory Brenda Milner and that was her message always a message to students is make sure you do something that you really like because you might have to do it for a very long time learning is something that we can we will do for a very very long time and it is truly exciting and rewarding and as educators so this is in the primary school secondary school university let's start from that premise it's exciting it's rewarding let's always use that as the basis of anything we do and it's true for every person every individual we're all different but we can all be excited and rewarded by learning I love that I love that bring the joy back to learning that's a great thought and I think it comes back to the ideas that have been shared about mindset and how important it is for us to think of ourselves as beings who are always engaged in the learning process and that all of us have room to grow and that's just the way of being my other final thought is also something that has been brought up in multiple conversations about the need for contextualized or customized learning opportunities and so one way to use technology is to scale to spread the same thing everywhere the other amazing use of technology is to adapt to customize and to be able to deliver exactly what's needed to the right people at the right time and so that's where I want to see technology go rather than trying to find the one size fits all approach that now you know spreads the world is actually finding the right approach for every learner so I'll try to end on both an optimistic note and a cautionary note if I can so the optimistic note is young people are incredibly resilient and at least from the perspective of our organization we for many many years used to always build our own programs and thought like probably many of you do that our own stuff was the best I've now realized that we have this thing called distribution into schools around the world and if any of you have great technology or great programs that would benefit from being in schools please come talk to me I continue to believe there's so much opportunity if we just focus on the right things that's the optimistic thing the cautionary thing is I think we have to remember that the people in this room are really talking from the position of privilege it's so nice to hear a voice of a global shaper but we really are focused on innovative minds for only a portion of the world and if we focus on the vulnerable sort of populations of the world and how they could fundamentally be left behind which could create such a significant inequality gulf that our conversations about innovation and all the technology in the world won't rescue the world we live in so I want to end on that somewhat cautionary note and realistic note so there was a political scientist of all things named Horst Riddle who back in the 60s coined the phrase wicked problems to differentiate a certain class of challenges that seemingly were insoluble as opposed to easy to solve problems that he referred to as tame problems so this whole question of what is the future of education the future of learning the impact on innovative societies the vector of investment the role of technology the role of corporations all of the things that we've talked about collectively in my mind constitute a wicked problem and Riddle was a smart guy so he said in in summary I'm summarizing a lot of what he said is that to address a wicked problem you have to get all the stakeholders into a shared space and work things out and so I think one of the key takeaways is the importance of coalitions that there it isn't just the teachers union or the parents or the principal of the school but a stakeholders in the surrounding society many different stakeholders and how to orchestrate that conversation I think becomes both the the key challenge as well as the key takeaway for action here you know clearly this whole notion of if we think about what a community like this can do inventorying best and promising practices I mean I can't keep track of what's going on around the world in terms of experiments at a national urban state level but there's a lot of stuff going on how do we make sense of that well you know I mean curating that would be I think a really useful task the suggestion from our colleague from Armenia about a toolkit you know in the 60s there was this thing called the whole earth catalog and it purported to put all of the relevant tools for civilized living into one volume that you could refer to well you know I'd love to have a whole earth catalog for emerging education technology because it changes every week there's new stuff all the time so how do you keep up with it and then how do you get the curation to be able to make sense of it and to be able to say what technology is relevant for what situation what what set of purposes this community can be involved as I just said in terms of setting beginning to approach this whole notion of what are standards what are useful measurements what are credentials how do we represent them in a way that's really useful in a 21st century environment and in terms of a 21st century world of work so I think there are actually a number of exciting horizon tasks for a community like this to undertake I wish us all luck to begin that process I want to thank our terrific panel for a great discussion and thank all of you for being here