Ehlers Future Skills

The Future of Learning and Higher Education
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-7519-3908-9
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 334 Seiten

The starting point for the enormous career of the Future Skills concept is the insight that current concepts of higher education do not meet the urgent needs of our societies with convincing future concepts. Neither are they fit to help sustain our environment nor associated social or economic challenges. While social challenges are exacerbated by an accelerating process of globalisation and digital advancement, at the same time these are the very forces that enable a multitude of new options for human development. In this situation of digital acceleration, the characteristic feature is that of uncertainty and the inevitable necessity is that of creative responsibility. The NextSkills Studies are about models for future relevant skills, so-called Future Skills. They are developed through a multitude of research activities over the last decade, involving a diverse range of international experts. Future Skills are the skills that enable future graduates to master the challenges of the future in the best possible way. The results show that in order to deal with future challenges, students must develop curiosity, imagination, vision, resilience and self-confidence, as well as the ability to act in a self-organised way. They must be able to understand and respect the ideas, perspectives and values of others, and they must be able to deal with mistakes and regressions, while at the same time progressing with care, even against difficulties.

Ulf is a learning innovation expert, founder of mindful-leaders.net, serial entrepreneur, and Professor for Educational Management and Lifelong Learning at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in Karlsruhe in 2011. From 2011-2017 he held the position of Vicepresident at the same university and has been responsible for Quality and Academic Affairs. He held positions as Associate Professor of University Duisburg-Essen (Germany), Professor for Technology Enhanced Learning of University Augsburg (Germany) and Associate Professor of the Graduate School for Management and Technology of the University of Maryland University College (USA). Ulf has delivered keynotes and been speaking to audiences in more than 45 countries. He is author of more than 10 books and 150 scholarly articles with over 3000 academic citations. Ulf is a trained coach, facilitator and expert for mindful communication, and holds degrees in English Language, Social Sciences and Education Sciences from the University of Bielefeld, where he finished his Ph.D. with honors in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning in 2003. He was awarded his habilitation in 2008 from the University of Duisburg-Essen. His writings on Quality in education are internationally awarded.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ehlers, Ulf-Daniel

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Preface
Also, each effect demands an equally strong counter-effect,
begetting demands equally active receiving. The present
must therefore be prepared already for the future. (Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen über Staatsverfassung) I wrote this book to open up a conversation about how the new world of skill demands in a post knowledge era, will look like. And to stimulate an exchange about how higher education might evolve their institutions to better align teaching and learning in the light of these new demands. Writing this book was both easy and hard. Easy, because I have the privilege to be fully immersed into the global community of learning innovators in higher education and also businesses in our own institution and across the entire field of higher education. Hard, because the ideas I am presenting here – that we are entering a post-knowledge era with Future Skills on the rise and that higher education institutions will change its shape and appearance – are both nascent and contestable. In the book I try to say some new things – and hopefully some true things – about how higher education is changing. The book is meant to look ahead, to provoke and to inspire. That is why I chose such a title: Future Skills – sounds strange, at least at first sight it does! The title is creating doubts and it annoys. At least from an educational science point of view it is fair to say that dealing with the subject of Future Skills is a paradox in itself already. Why? Skills, i.e. abilities and competences, are per se aimed at mastering future challenges. So why impregnate such a future concept again with the addition “Future”? If you, however, take time and deal with the subject of Future Skills more in-depth it quickly becomes clear that there is more at stake. More than just finding a new terminology for the concept of competence. Future Skills initiatives are currently being developed all over the world in various shapes and forms, many of whom are discussed in detail in this book. Some are sectoral, for schools or universities, others national, e.g. the initiative Future Skills Canada or also international, e.g. from the OECD, the EU or the World Economic Forum. All approaches have one thing in common – they all reflect the changed social conditions for work, education and life and analyse important Future Skills. Many of these concepts focus on skills for employees in a digitised world. In particular those are focussing on digital data-related skills which originated already in the 1990s and 2000s and were discussed there as digital or information literacy. These approaches are now often enriched with important intercultural communication and cooperation skills. In other Future Skills approaches, the topic appears as a continuation of the concept of lifelong learning, in order to ensure a fit between constantly changing requirements on the one hand side and the capabilities of the individual to cope with them on the other hand side. Often this comes along with a strong focus on an economic impetus of participation of the individual in the labour market, sometimes also coloured differently as Skills for Life. And in fact, it is hard to find approaches that attempt to establish a more holistic educational reference frame within a widened understanding. This brief analysis already shows that there is obviously more at stake than just a renaissance of the concept of competence in a new shape and form. Apparently, there is a need to charge the concept of competence and give it direction. The underlying reason is a societal change of the magnitude of a tectonic shift alongside with huge pressures on organisations to change their mode of operation, their way of working, and in consequence also asks for a profound change in the higher education sector. It asks the question how the university as an institution can master the future and the question as to what the future of higher education looks like. How difficult the task is to understand this future is expressed in the fact that under conditions of emergent social developments the understanding of the future results less and less from knowing the past; and also in the recognition that our social, political and economic realities more and more are the result of emergent processes – meaning, they develop self-organised cannot be determined in advance and often appear seemingly without a clear trigger. Emergence comes along as a more and more influential phenomenon in all spheres of life. The ability to deal with these ever faster accelerating contexts in the future is following less and less the known and widely practiced paradigm of knowledge acquisition based on ready-made curricula in higher education but requires a radical situative change. The concept of lifelong learning with its various implementations’ varieties, the idea of a post knowledge society, competence orientation in education institutions, and the digitally ubiquitous and constantly available information and knowledge are the ingredients which will form the basis to compose new, flexible and connected learning pathways. The very concept of Future Skills asks for fundamental change. It asks for more than a simple list of skills that schools or higher education institutions can use and base their curricula on in order to be able to guarantee their learners a future-proof and secure preparation for all eventualities. Future Skills still goes deeper and reaches wider. It calls for change which is so profound that it touches on the foundations of our educational and labour system. In highly developed organisations in which Future Skills play a major role already, work processes are often subject to drastic changes, responsibility structures and patterns of action shift. In higher education the notion of Future Skills questions the preparatory proposition according to which students can be prepared through knowledge acquisition for the futures to come. It is true that the concept of key competences over the last two decades, at least in higher education institutions, has given rise to the idea that, in addition to knowledge transfer, other aspects, precisely those key competences play an important role in preparing for the labour market. In addition, capacity to shape the world we live in, citizenship and competences for life have gained importance. However, the complete integration of a deep competence orientation in the sense of the ability to deal with highly emergent systems, emergent organisations and unknown situations of the future, has so far only been introduced to a limited extent. The emerging discussion about Future Skills deals with the question of how this emerging can be done. Adding to this debate is the currently emerging movement of occupationalisation of academic education in an emerging educational society. It is raising the issue how both aspects can be combined – in this this book we argue that both concepts support each other as two sides of the same coin. This book deals with three topics: Topic 1 is the analysis of the background, the change in organisational structures and the drivers against which the Future Skills concept is currently rising. Theme 2 is the appraisal of skills based on various empirical studies, and theme 3 is an elaboration of drivers and scenarios for the university of the future. All three topics are dealt with on basis of empirically validated concepts and follow on from the international discussion that exists in this area and which are being scientifically investigated within this book. This book is therefore not aiming to contribute a finite and finalised list of Future Skills to the current discussion in the field – even though a huge further step has been taken through the work, compared with many existing concepts. Its specific and unique contribution consists of working out the underlying structures of Future Skills for higher education. The book develops a model that describes the underlying structures and processes of change which form the base for the development of Future Skills and with its Triple Helix Model identifies three basic components that constitute Future Skills, as the ability of individuals to act in future highly emerging contexts. The Triple Helix-Model of Future Skills is able to map the areas that are important for Future Skills and has a greater explanatory depth than the simple lists presented so far on this topic in other contexts. “Future Skills – Future of Learning – Future of Universities” is the first book on the subject of Future Skills and is at the same time the first empirical work on the theme, rooted in educational science. It covers not only the question of Future Skills for future work, but also Future Skills as a fundamental capacity to act in a changing world. This is a book about the future. It is inspired through the present and informed by the past. It lives out of the concerns voiced in moments of reflection and all the same out of the hopes that higher education can contribute to a culturally rich, personally rewarding, sustainable, prosperous and happy future for all. For us all but especially for our children. I would like to thank all those involved who have contributed to making this book a reality. This book benefits from conversations with colleagues from near and far and all over the world. From interviews, discussions and contributions from students, friends, colleagues, scholars and business...