Excerpt of speech at the Opening of the OECD-Singapore Conference on Higher Education Futures

Because education systems exist and have meaning only in context. These very contexts are evolving, with significant implications on higher education.

The world is changing rapidly and profoundly. An age of globalisation and the internet, of great and increasing speed and consequence.

Industries are becoming less extractive. Less about using natural resources to make, or do things, and more about innovation and ideas. ........

A big shift took place when production was no longer limited to a locality. Today, the world works as one big complex production ecosystem, and production becomes modular as a result. The traditional lines between products and services are becoming increasingly blurred.......

Societies too are changing. People.......continue to be on the move and have rising aspirations. In the past, people moved to urban centres for job opportunities. Today, they move to cultural nodes as well - for lifestyle, spiritual well-being and personal enrichment.
.......The system of higher education exists and evolves within these larger social, economic and technological contexts.........

The OECD’s Skills Outlook says that high skills will be in increasing demand, low skills will be in constant demand, and medium skills will be in decreasing demand. Advances in technology have the potential to replace or transform jobs that not just involve manual work, but also cognitive and increasingly complex intellectual tasks. To prepare people well for this reality, education institutions must be well plugged into the needs of industries and the real and unpredictable world.

Education should as much as possible be like the life for which it prepares. If that is the case, then a learner’s experience in higher education has to evolve to become more innovative, less extractive, more connected to the world, more modular in course delivery, more attuned to the complexity and diversity of students’ individual identities. That is a major challenge all higher education institutions have to face now.

This is one imperative of education, to serve national and societal needs in the context of a changing world.

Excerpt of speech at the Opening of the OECD-Singapore Conference on Higher Education Futures, 14 October 2015, Resorts World Convention Centre, Singapore

Full Speech:  http://bit.ly/1GcWFWt

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