New education models and challenges

An increasingly knowledgeable society is exponentially rising the amount and quality of knowledge that becomes ubiquitously available. Knowledge is becoming more accessible to everyone everywhere as never before.

• There is increased focus on creativity, continuous increase of intelligence, problem solving skills, tolerance, and interaction with the digital world; life-long learning becomes the norm. There is a now solid shift toward competences-based learning. See the Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning.
• Education is diversifying: there is growing peer-to-peer learning, increasing use of bite-sized learning in workplace and personal environments as well as in an increase of home-schooling; Blended learning is a main trend as well as customised, individualised learning. A prime reference is that of the EPSC “10 Trends Transforming Education as We Know It” (2017).
• Internet-based personalized education might increase the risk of "educational bubbles" - children only receiving information that fits their pre-existing knowledge and interest. | Related Megatrends:  Technology
• By 2019, the MOOC movement has reached 110 million learners (excluding China), with 13.5k MOOCs offered since the first MOOC appeared.
• There is a massive increase in OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) (over 6,000 MOOCs in 2015).
• In the next 5-10 years, online courses will be serving more learners than the combined provision of physical courses offered by the world’s universities.
  | Related Megatrends: Technology
• Digital competence developments are observed since very young age across Europe, mainly in family context and in an uneven and patchy way, depending mostly on the digital landscape available and on the digital knowledge in family.
  | Related Megatrends: Inequalities; Work
• With the aim of establishing a shared understanding of digital skills challenges within Europe and beyond, the European Commission has developed three European Digital Competence frameworks: DigComp, DigCompEdu and DigCompOrg.
• The entrepreneurship competence is increasingly recognised as a competence for life, relevant to personal development and fulfilment, finding and progressing in employment, as well as initiating new ventures ranging from community campaigns, social enterprises to new start-up businesses.
• The privacy paradox is intensifying, as the relation between maintaining privacy while "volunteering" increasing amount of private data online becomes more complicated. This sets a significant media literacy challenge for children as well as for educators.
• Socioemotional education and learning (SEL) is will transform the curricula. This is due to the rapid fluctuation of the labour market needs, with an increased demand of the so-called soft skills and the understanding of the role of education for self-fulfilment and satisfaction.
• The above-mentioned Recommendation on KCs for LLL (2018) includes the key competence Personal, Social and Learning to Learn as one of the main competences citizens should have in the context of a LLL society.

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