Education and Learning

This chapter considers the changes being implemented across levels of formal education with an emphasis on evolutions in K-12 pedagogy. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) framework is used to describe the new learning objectives with an emphasis on 4Cs: Critical thinking & problem solving; Communication; Collaboration; and Creativity & innovation. These aptitudes are seen to be important to enable the next generation of students to become life-long learners hence able to acquire new knowledge in the rapidly-changing 21st Century digital environment. P21 also identifies the life and career skills needed to prepare students for the workforce which include: flexibility and adaptability; initiative and self-direction; social and cross-cultural skills; productivity and accountability; and leadership and responsibility. We see the changes in pedagogy and digital learning support systems suggesting that those entering the workforce will have the potential to be better equipped to deal with the dynamic, and potentially turbulent, demands of the new economy. As ‘potential to’ does not automatically translate into ‘will have’, an obvious implication is that employers will need to careful assess those who have actually acquired these skills. Our primary conclusion is that the major development is not what they learn but how they will learn to learn. Implications of this evolution are offered in subsequent chapters.