Education 4.0 will unlock the imagination of students

IMAGINE is a word often used by educators to get their students thinking about the subjects they teach.

Now, think of what a student would be capable of if his or her imagination is unlocked from the get-go. This is what Education 4.0 is all about.

So much has been said about the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) but the global Education 4.0 movement deals specifically with the subject of teaching and learning with fresh thinking, assisted by technologies for today and beyond.

Some might refer to Education 4.0 as 21st-century learning or future learning but the things we do to prepare for it, are more important than the terms we use to describe it.

As leading futurist thinker Gerd Leonhard predicted, the next 20 years will bring more changes to humanity than the past 300 years.

In Education 4.0 and IR4.0, this social phenomenon is known as a “disruption”.

The nature of formal education has changed. It has already been disrupted. We understand that students from Gen-Z to Gen Alpha, learn differently from how we learnt 20 or 30 years ago. The question is: What are we, as educators, doing?

Covid-19 is a curse, but it brings a cure for future learning initiatives.

Suddenly, the whole world is pushed online to continue formal learning, forcing many educators to think about what future learning would be like.

Two years before this pandemic, my team at Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), together with senior academics from the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Studies at the Open University of Indonesia (UT), were working to push the Education 4.0 agenda to educators and students at both institutions.

As an open university with nearly one million students in and around the Indonesian archipelago, one of the most difficult challenges UT faced was the delivery of quality open education in a meaningful manner. The digital gap is another critical issue confronting the varsity. UT has been using traditional hard copy textbooks and modules to help their adult students learn.

These adult students are teachers who need to teach the digitally-oriented younger generation.

There is a disconnect between how educators are teaching, whether at secondary school or university level, with the way students are learning.

Yet, not much action is being taken to prepare for this disruption.

Some Malaysian lecturers are also afraid of the future as they still teach using their old PowerPoint presentations when their students can learn more productively using virtual reality technologies.

With a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in place, UiTM Perak and UT have been making great strides in Education 4.0.

UT is interested in the cost and time saving virtual reality technologies we have shared with them.

The plan now is to focus on virtual dry-lab teaching for lab-based courses because the institution cannot afford to bring all of their science teachers to the physical campus.

The future of education is virtual but educators need not fear as this 21st-century delivery system does not detract from the meaningful purpose of learning. On the contrary, it supports and pushes the boundaries of students’ imagination so that they can easily make sense of the learning experience and be ready to acquire skills and knowledge beyond what they already know.

DR AIRIL HAIMI MOHD ADNAN

Senior lecturer

UiTM, Perak