Digital Education: Current and Future Challenges

For many years, online education has been the poor alternative to a full campus experience of higher education. However, this is now changing rapidly: emerging consortia have opened many new learners to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – for free or for lower fees – offering new borderless credentials, and highly engaging experiences. This presentation will showcase some of these developments, and also raise some of the key challenges, such as: the expectations of employers and industry; the expectations of learners and graduates in a digitally-enabled world where learning will increasingly occur in micro sessions on micro devices 24/7/365; and the quality assurance measures that can guide implementation.

Re-defining Higher Education in a Different Era

Society has changed, but what has really changed? The change in the economy, production and market has caused fundamental changes in the workplace, in individuals’ career paths and in life in general. The purely economic objectives of education, GDP growths and employment, is facing fundamental challenges. Added to these are the rapid explosive development of technologies, and the overwhelming chaos in the international arena. The expectations on individual are complex and unprecedented. There are tremendous implications for education in general and for higher education in particular. We are forced to answer questions we have taken for granted – Is higher education indeed for job seeking? Can higher education be over-supplied? Is it really necessary to distinguish between academic higher education and vocational education?