by Dana Halawi, ameinfo.com
Education is one of the main pillars of any society and failing to plan for it a recipe for disaster.
Dubai will need approximately 134 new schools to accommodate 200,600 new seats in time for the 2027/2028 school year, according to a new report from commercial real estate services provider Colliers International.
In its “affordability in Dubai real education sector” report, Colliers noted that the total number of seats is expected to increase to 474,000 by 2027 based on the current population growth rate of 5.1 percent per annum.
This presents potentially lucrative opportunities for investors and operators to build affordable schools, says the report.
Wrong, said John Crestani, an internationally-renowned expert in affiliate marketing, and an education visionary.
“Education will be closer to how people were and how people learned more than a 1000 years ago. I believe that teachers are very important and students will start gathering around teachers, leaders and innovators like they did thousands of years ago. They interact with the particular teachers they envy,” he told AMEinfo in an exclusive interview.
2500 years ago, Plato in about 370 BC didn’t have internet but he said to the masses who followed him: “Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds.”
Is Crestani serious about taking us to those days?
Revolutionary thoughts
Crestani recalls the way people used to gather around teachers in Greek times and this is the way he sees the future of education.
Crestani believes that people must build their foundations by learning for free.
“If you have an internet connection you can build your skills and knowledge of any subject possible,” he said.
“Education should be free. In my opinion, a lot of people are going to be learning online for free in the future, but the education system needs complete disruption.”
The problem, in Crestani’s views, is that the education system has not changed a lot and it is very similar to what it was over 100 years ago, when industrialization started to take shape and needed conformity in education to be able to duplicate manufacturing efforts and produce similar products on the market.
“But things have changed today, with the industrial revolution behind us now, and if you walk into higher education you see that students are more interested in going on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat than they are to actually be in school. We are more interested in learning on You Tube than they are in going to statistics or textbooks,” he said.
He says that the traditional jobs that people relied upon in the past will no longer be enough to carry them forward.
“It is very important for people to become entrepreneurs,” he said.
He clarified that not everybody needs to be an entrepreneur but everybody needs to have specialized skills.
“People need to be self motivated in terms of building their skills set and consistently learning more as hundreds of millions of people will lose their jobs within the next 10 years,” he said.
But how do other experts see the future of education?
Other insights
Christiaan Henny, the founder of eFaqt, the online study platform, says that Students will have more opportunities to learn at different times in different places. “eLearning tools facilitate opportunities for remote, self-paced learning. Classrooms will be flipped, which means the theoretical part is learned outside the classroom, whereas the practical part shall be taught face to face, interactively,” he says.
He adds that students will be able to modify their learning process with tools they feel are necessary for them. “Students will learn with different devices, different programs and techniques based on their own preference,” he said.
TED-Ed, a platform dedicated to discussing students and teachers’ ideas, quotes Josefino Rivera, educator in Buenos Aires, Argentina saying that there will be more creativity in education.
“Because that’s what careers will require, education will be not just taking in information and sharing it back, but also figuring out what to do with that information in the real world,” he says.
