Facing the challenges of the future of education

Abstract

The nature of work is changing, perhaps at a pace that we have not fully grasped. While no one is certain about the kind of work that will exist in the future, what is clear is that many of the manual, repetitive work will be replaced by automation and Artificial Intelligence. Faced with an uncertain tomorrow, there is an urgent need to transform education to prepare the people for the future of work. The articles in this issue of Learning: Research and Practice address some of the concerns related to the future of education. In the face of job replacement and job extinction in the future, professional skills are no longer sufficient to navigate in this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world. It is equally, if not more important, for individuals to develop intrapersonal competencies (National Research Council [NRC], 2012). Often considered as soft-skills, they include attributes such as curiosity, imagination, resilience, and self-regulated learning (OECD, 2018) needed to prepare them for jobs that are not yet created. The importance of developing soft skills in our future workers is highlighted in two of the articles on selfregulated learning in this issue. The first article is “Investigating students’ situation-specific emotional state and motivational goals during a learning project within one primary school classroom” by Järvenoja. The study examines how primary school students’ emotional state and motivational goals (situational motivation) fluctuated while working on a 2-month-long project, and how these goals were connected with students’ descriptions of motivation regulation strategies and learning outcomes. One interesting finding of the study is that students’ ability to recognise different regulatory strategies need not necessarily lead to actualised regulation. Qualitative difference was also found in students’ use of regulatory strategies and their levels of awareness of theirmotivation and emotional state. These findings highlight the importance of increasing students’ awareness of their emotional state and motivational goals if perseverance in learning is desired. The second article on the topic of self-regulation is “Metacognition, calibration and self-regulated learning: An exploratory study of undergraduates in a Business School” by Stoten. Focusing on undergraduates in a business programme at a university, this study investigated the impact of learning diary as a tool to engender metacognitive awareness. Findings show that while the students might develop a sense of metacognitive experience/mastery in using a learning diary, their diary entries indicated that they might not have developed metacognitive knowledge, and were even less aware of how to develop metacognitive skills. If soft skills like self-regulatory learning are key in preparing individuals for the future of work, these two articles signal the need for more research to look into how learners’ awareness of their self-regulatory state can be improved, and how self-regulatory knowledge and strategies can be developed. The uncertain landscape of the future of work has increased the demands on teachers tremendously. Teachers need to embrace and adapt to the constant eco-systemic changes in education (OECD, 2018). As the key to quality learning lies with the teachers (OECD, 2005), two articles in this issue direct the spotlight on the key agents of education change. LEARNING: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE 2019, VOL. 5, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/23735082.2019.1585120