Online Education: Set to Deliver a Massive Sustainability Windfall

What is clear however is that the global education system into which my children are about to enter, is one of the largest industries to face disruption through technology advances and change is affecting all areas therein.

Today lifelong learning overlaps traditional education and training and requires a much more blended approach than we were previously set up to implement. A market of over $5.5 trillion globally, education is split into a series of sectors from K-12 - the sum of primary and secondary education, to graduate and then postgraduate study and on to professional development and finally training and languages. So-called MOOCS (massively open online courses) offer a supermarket approach of delivery and enable access to vast selections of online courses in subjects as diverse as Design Thinking of Innovation to Medical Neuroscience and multiple variations in between and spread across all the education sectors. Today global academic institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Karolinska Institut and Kyoto University as well as companies such as Facebook and Google have opened up their content to a worldwide audience, something previously inconceivable to anyone other than very rich, very privileged or very connected.

Running in parallel with the advances made in delivering education online, are the challenges facing the workplace. A recent World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report predicted that artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and other socio-economic factors that impact the need for human workers will result in as many as 5 million jobs being lost before 2020. Traditional jobs will be replaced with many new jobs but they will be in more specialist sectors that will require a huge retraining and retooling of the workforce.