The educational system of the future is not far off?

After reading the article “ The Future of Higher Education ” and studying the problems and their solutions proposed by the author and commenting, I was inspired to write my argument on this topic, as well as to cite several existing and developed examples.



Based on idealistic views, it can be assumed that in the future education will be accessible to all, however, in order to achieve such a result, it must undergo some changes and solve the following problems:

• Dependence on location. After all, most universities require students to attend lectures and exams, respectively.
• Cost of education. Studying at the university, especially the popular one, always cost a lot of money and is not available to everyone.
• Social and religious stigma. Yes, even though we live in the 21st century, such a phenomenon is still not uncommon and occurs in some countries of the world.
• Low interest of students in the full and successful completion of the curriculum. Young professionals are often faced with the choice between building a career and obtaining academic degrees, because for a number of companies, especially in the field of IT, the experience and skills of the candidate are more important than the presence of a higher education diploma.

Making a conclusion from the problems presented above, the first solution that comes to mind is online training. However, this type of education has a number of problems that need to be addressed:
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• The legitimacy of certificates.
  The Internet is full of various educational content, where at the end of online learning various electronic certificates are issued, but how to evaluate them and prove that they are true?
• A variety of educational content.
  Of course, having a choice is usually a plus, but with so many different paid and free courses, how can you understand in advance that it is worth your time and money?
• All the same low interest of students in the successful completion of courses.
  Only ~ 5% ( Source ) of enrolled students complete online courses.

Based on the currently available technologies, it is still possible to solve these problems systematically. If you create a triangle of interaction between groups such as Pupils , Educational Organizations and Enterprises , where Enterprises will be able to directly dictate requirements for the presence of certain skills (courses completed) for candidates, Educational organizations will be able to provide separate and course blocks for relevant positions in the enterprise, and Students will see transparently what the successful completion of the course / course block will lead to.

Such a system is beneficial for all three parties, as Enterprises will be able to save on recruiting companies and training / advanced training, as well as get a greater percentage of interested and trained specialists for their position. Educational organizations will receive additional students rating, and can also be financed by the enterprises themselves. Students will be able to easily draw up a plan for their studies with subsequent career growth in the best educational institutions in the world.

In addition, many additional opportunities are created for dynamic and facilitated monitoring of the labor market and its trends. Businesses will have access to candidates worldwide, Educational organizations will not be dependent on location, and students will be able to get their dream job.

Having studied the existing options on the Internet, I discovered several projects that deal with the solution of modern problems of education:

• Udacity was created on the basis of a successful pilot online course at Stanford, which attracted 160,000 students from more than 190 countries.
• Coursera has 24 million registered users for its programs and offers over 2,000 online courses.
• Open edX is an open source platform that supports edX courses, which have more than 10,000,000 users. Thanks to this platform, the percentage of students who needed to retake a certain course decreased from 41% in the traditional format to 9% among those who took edX mixed courses.
• Udemy has more than 7 million students and more than 30,000 courses as of 2016. In addition, it has more than 16,000 teachers and 80+ courses in different languages, not counting the training portal “Udemy for Business”.
• Open Source University is a startup that is a global register of skills on the blockchain. If you believe the developers, they plan to combine all online courses into one system and link them with companies and students around the world.

In tandem, they solve almost all the problems presented in the above article , except, unfortunately, the lack of practical training in online training, for example, in the natural sciences. This problem can be solved by creating local representative offices of courses where you can take practical classes in the form of elective courses, or as a compulsory course for certain specialties. Unfortunately, I failed to discover a global and widespread solution to the problem of practice, however, I believe that with such a vector of development of the education system, it will also be solved.