The Future of Education: How A.I. and Immersive Tech Will Reshape Learning Forever

How Immersive Media and Artificial Intelligence can Change Education Forever

Education is an odd bird: we all know it could be better, while at the same time it is the best it has ever been in human history. For the last two centuries the world went through a great expansion in learning: our literacy rate skyrocketed from 12% to 88% worldwide, and Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education have all seen drastic growth (in schools and students), breaking records on almost a yearly basis.

Our educative curriculum has also evolved, embracing our continuous growing understanding of the world — and the recent boom of the internet has brought self-education to the masses in new and exciting ways, turning websites like Khan Academy, TED, Wikipedia & Youtube into some of the biggest free knowledge hubs in the planet. Imperfections aside, we owe a lot of who we are to this faulty system, and its growth in reach has been phenomenal.    Contemporary learning is still very much archaic. We group students arbitrarily around age, have them go to a physical building 5 times a week to listen to adults speak for about 6 hours, and just kind of hope that all involved parties are qualified enough to keep students engaged and predictably moving through a static educational curriculum.

It works to an extent, but it is not pleasant for anyone — teachers have a lot on their plate, from lesson and assignment planning, to teaching, grading and the expectation of giving hundreds of students individualized attention. On the student side, they are forced to adhere to strict timelines and live under the rule of fear instead of curiosity, with the constant fear of failure looming as they’re assigned labels ranging from A to F at the end of each term.

Today’s educational system is static, generalized and puts less focus on individual self-development than it perhaps should. To make matters worse, students often don’t understand why they are learning the things that they’re learning, which makes certain classes feel arbitrary and purposeless in the face of their personal ambitions (and has a number of neurological implications we’ll soon discuss).

With that being said, what could be done to fix these issues and take education to a new level? What could make education more exciting, fun and practical? I believe it comes down to three simple ideas (that aren’t new by any means) which can finally be fully explored with smart use of technology.

These keys are personalized learning, experiential learning and mastery-based learning. In this article, we’re going to explore these ideas as well as a possible path for education in the future, mixing Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Technologies and several new design paradigms that could change education forever.

The Dream — Part 1: Personalized Learning

‘Personalized Learning’ refers to a diverse variety of programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and strategies that address the distinct learning preferences, interests, aspirations, weaknesses, or cultural backgrounds of individual students. The result of this is an educational experience that’s more fitting to you as an individual and maximizes what you can get out of each class.

A student must care about new information or consider it important for it to be stored as a long-term memory. Memories with personal meaning are most likely to become relational and long-term memories available for later retrieval.” — Dr. Judy Will, Neurologist & Educator.