The global education sector has experienced more disruption and rapid change over the course of 2020 than it has over the past few decades, writes Susannah Belcher, Chief Operations Officer at FutureLearn. As schools close, universities pivot harder to digital, and professionals need to adapt and reskill, the demand for online learning is set to pick up rather than slow down.
As the international education sector grapples with the impact COVID-19 is having on student mobility, Chief Content & Partnership Officer at FutureLearn, Justin Cooke, argues that the technology is available for the education sector to lead the way in combating the coronavirus, both the spread of the virus itself and its impact on learning and economies.
In the US, Chinese students make up over one third of all international students. In the UK, one-third of all non-EU students at British campuses are now from China. And in Australia, Chinese students make up 10 per cent of all students. It is clear that Chinese students represent a significant percentage of international cohorts so it’s no surprise that the education sector, as well as those students, are being impacted by the coronavirus. But the question is what are we going to do about it?
With the coronavirus and the related travel bans, many Chinese students can’t enter the countries they are supposed to be studying in. This impacts their studies, of course, but also the economies of those countries.
Over the last few years, technological innovation has driven change at an unprecedented rate, resulting in the emergence of a talent economy: ‘A collaborative, transparent, technology-enabled, rapid-cycle way of doing business […] where employers and employees seek each other out on a playing field that is broader and more level than ever before.’, according to Deloitte.
One of the biggest changes in this new world is the role of new technologies is making it easier for people to learn and work from anywhere in the world – challenging all our assumptions about what the workplace, and the education space, should look like.