Salutations to you all!
I would also like to take this opportunity to wish all the women out there a wonderful International Women’s Day. There is a lot that leveraging technology can help in fast-tracking the economic inclusion of previously disenfranchised demographics, moreso in issues of breaking the bias.
On an unrelated issue, am I the only one who feels this year seems to be running faster than Usain Bolt? It seems time has sped up while we are still living in a time that churns out a barrage of challenges, which I believe can overwhelm the most serene mind inspite of whatever type of mindset one tries to personify. I hope you can find solace in knowing that no one has it figured out and that this is an opportunity to move in curiosity, humility and vulnerability in all facets of our lives.
In our last chat, we talked about how Digital Transformation is essential to the reform of the education sector. By admission, this sectoral reform is such a weighty subject that requires distillation of thought right from the start. I also admit that there is a lot of work going on in this direction towards Vision 2036 that I may at this time not be privy to. We stand on the sacrifices of those who came before us, which perhaps should serve as a call to arms for collective action on issues that require indigenous human capital to improve the environment that we exist in in whichever shape or form that we can.
Leaders globally are grappling with what feels like a lifetime of hyperbolic and incessant disruption, crises, global conflict, energy uncertainty, food shortages, accelerating inflation, and severe climate events. We have emerged from the narrative of frictional unemployment following the trend called the Great Resignation (mainly in the United States of America), a phenomenon that saw people of employable age quitting their jobs in a form of protest regarding their feelings on unsuitable work environments, to a sharp rise in tech layoffs from the likes of Google and Microsoft underpinning forms of structural unemployment.
I find it difficult to get some sort of resonance on what the real trend is. This has led today’s business leaders and policymakers to introduce the ‘Resilience Consortium’ and ‘Resilience Agenda’ through the World Economic Forum and Mckinsey & Company for the European Union, to enable long-term, sustainable and inclusive growth to steer focus beyond survival capacity. For what it is worth, this makes for very interesting reading for anyone looking to tap into the type of thoughts being applied to how resilience can be built by public-private partnerships to address the challenges that confront us. Energising and synergising systems through collaboration through leverage of debt, equity, and skills allow efficiencies to be introduced through concessions and special-purpose vehicles.
What do digital-ready learning outcomes look like? As we continue to talk about ensuring that the kind of product (student) we want to prepare for the future I believe this answer lies in co-creation with industry. There must be concerted engagement between industry and those who provide curriculum development across the various value chains. We must begin to also look at education as content that can be malleable for all learners and not just for instructor-led interventions. This is to mean that a one-size-fit approach will no longer be effective.
How can technology help us better systems of instruction that are contextual to the future? Technology provides us with leverage. If we are intentional in the kind of channels that will be utilised to reach the previously unreachable, we can make great shifts and inroads in imparting the kind of skills required for the future. We can talk about cloud-based solutions, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality as immediate game changers that can bring learning opportunities that were previously limited by distance and time.
What will the school of the future look like? The school of the future will provide the flexibility for self-paced learning with hybrids in physical and remote instruction. There will also be no limit to where one receives instruction based on where one is located physically, especially with cloud-based solutions and augmented reality (virtual reality). We can also envision the adaptation of hybrid organisations through public-private partnerships and special-purpose vehicles to allow for flexibility and introduce some allocative efficiencies.
To rein this in, my mission has been fulfilled to poke and prod and create a vacuum to be filled by the framing of a robust problem statement. In order to achieve any of the ideals that we wish to attain, we must first look at our strategic intent based on a robust current state analysis and intentionally craft the personas of the current and future products we wish to produce.
I wish you a productive rest of March 2023 and will see you in two weeks’ time.
About Me
Montwedi ‘Monty’ Bakwena is a Digital Transformation Professional with a focus on issues of customer experience strategy, digital operations integration, channel migration, and public-private partnerships.
@LinkedIn _Montwedi Bakwena
