Workshop 1| The 4th IR and its Impact on Learning and Teaching
Workshop Overview:
How is the HE Sector preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Tim Hinchcliffe
Advance HE’s latest research entitled Building Higher Education Curricula Fit for the Future (2018) indicates that in order to achieve multi-faceted educational outcomes there needs to be a deeper understanding of the ways in which the experiential, participatory and reflective nature of active, work-based learning is not just a transformative experience for students in HE, but also has the potential to transform society through more flexible and cognitively agile workers and citizens who embrace “a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds” (HMG, Industrial Strategy 2017: p.32).
The next generation of students may only spend a few years, if any, using the content knowledge acquired during their degree program. They will be expected to communicate with colleagues and clients, ethically and professionally across platforms, disciplines, cultures, national boundaries and cyber-physical interfaces. They will have multiple roles and job titles that currently do not exist, work simultaneously for multiple organizations, in a working life that could span 60 years and they will work from home, in the cloud and alongside robots, making decisions based on data drawn from a wide variety of sources.
In this context, the workshop will give participants the opportunity to explore a range of questions, including:
-What type of attributes and competencies do your graduates have and what will they need in thefuture
-Is your current educational portfolio future-proof and what are its defining features?
-How would you represent your learners’ journey through HE and how would you characterize the ways that they interact with the different elements of the curriculum?
-How are we preparing the next generation of learners for Industry 4.0?
-How are we supporting the development of skills to build and use the technology and data that will underpin Industry 4.0?
-In what ways can we utilize truly interdisciplinary approaches that help to develop more resilient, flexible and cognitively agile learners?
-How can we design teaching and learning opportunities to facilitate this “fusion of technologies”?
-How are we ensuring that HE providers remain civic institutions supporting the needs of local communities and sharing knowledge of what Industry 4.0 will mean to them?
Workshop Objectives:
At the end of the workshop participants will have been enabled to:
-Reflect on the challenges and opportunities associated with the impact of Industry 4.0 on Higher Education globally
-Represent their current state of readiness within their institutional context – from questions of curriculum design to stakeholder engagement
-Design a future-facing, holistic educational experience that takes into account the challenges and opportunities explored in the workshop
-Engage with Gamification facilitation techniques
Workshop Facilitator: Tim Hinchcliffe, Senior Advisor in Teaching and Learning, Advance HE