By Sophia Demetriades Toftdahl
A current emerging trend is the shift in western education where we are slowly moving away from the university (which is likely to collapse unless they collaborate more with industry) and towards personalised, customised education which increases engagement in candidates or students. And it’s being replaced my mentors and coaches.
Library is free, internet is almost free, courses are easily available online. What is not so available in the current university are good teachers, and I say that with the utmost respect for those few of my teachers that were excellent, good teachers are a scarcity in the university today because all they do is to sit inside the uni and read and write, and they no longer have industry experience, and so we are not closing the gap between education and industry, we are in fact widening it.
It’s not long ago that Chris Anderson explained the idea of teacher as mentor, teacher as coach, teacher as informant. Who the teacher is will also change. It mightn’t be an academic in the future, it could be someone from industry…
Then, we have internships, which have been very popular in parts of Europe and the US for decades with the intension of being a transition between study and work life. Yet now, because some people are incredibly skilled at taking advantage of others, and some very negative, and some don’t have the skills to make sure they are not taken advantage of, we are experiencing a somewhat bad name for internships. Not everywhere of course, there are some excellent internships out there, and I’d like to believe we offer them too. What I mean is the fear of internships lurking in the university halls and in media.
I’d like to take us back to the origin of the university, I’d like to walk you down the hall with Plato and Aristotle, I’d like to challenge you to ask them what the meaning of university is (learn how to think in a different way) and compare it to what we are doing today (conforming), and then answer this question:
Considering the emerging trend of personalised and customised education, which increases engagement and motivation in students. What will the university look like in 10 years?
Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520) School of Athens
What is fascinating about the fresco The School of Athens is the fact that many known philosophers, poets and mathematicians that lived in different periods of time are depicted together in the same room, as if they were contemporaries. Some say this is just a homage to great thinkers, but others say that the intention of Raphael was to pass on a message. What message would this be?
Read more at Suite101: Raphael – the Symbolism of The School of Athens | Suite101 http://suite101.com/article/raphael–the-symbolism-of-the-school-of-athens-a188908#ixzz2MtYNP38M
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