by Andreas Schleicher
In a world where the kind of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitise and automate, it will be our imagination, our awareness and our sense of responsibility that will enable us to harness the opportunities of the 21st century to shape the world for the better. Tomorrow’s schools will need to help students think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. They will need to help students develop a strong sense of right and wrong, and sensitivity to the claims that others make. What will it take for schools to be able to do this? Technology can help us not just to conserve educational practice, but to transform it. The most visible benefit of technology in education is greater personalisation and a more active approach to learning. While you study math on a computer, that computer can now study you, and how you learn math, and then make your learning experience so much more granular, much more adaptive and so much more interactive. We are also seeing big leaps in assessment and exams, such as assessments through simulations, hands-on assessment in vocational settings, or machine learning algorithms scoring essays. Perhaps learning analytics holds the greatest promise. It gives teachers get a real sense of how different students learn differently, where students get interested and where they get bored, where they advance and where they get stuck. It can also give teachers a better sense how they can structure learning time and which students need what extra support. But technology is only as good as its use, and while improvement in education is easy to proclaim, it is very difficult to achieve. The keynote will look at many successes from which we can learn – not by copying and pasting solutions from other schools or countries, but by looking seriously and dispassionately at effective practice and policy around the world.