Education and learning must transform in ways that we thought were only possible in fiction to fit a fast-changing Industry that has itself seen a digital transformation and massive automation in the past decade or so. The time lines of change have come down to unbelievable extents. Whereas a Telephone took 75 Years to develop, the Web took 7 Years, a Facebook 4 Years, Instagram 2 Years and the Pokémon Go only one Month. It is amazing to look back to 2006, when we did not have access to an iPhone, an iPad or Kindle the virtual library of more than 1.5 million books. We did not know 4G or Instagram or Snapchat or even the all-pervasive WhatsApp.
According to a report by the World Economic Forum, “65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist”. Where would the current generation work or what their role would be, is both intriguing and challenging either to predict or visualise. Several changes that began a decade back are metamorphosing to buzz words like Industry 4.0 and Education 4.0 Several new skills and abilities are required to fit the new bill. Today, ability to scale IT infrastructures or everything cloud, ability to reach a consensus that is central to data and analytics, ability to change processes, essential to business process management, ability to connect from production to management or excel in MES integration, ability to analyse performance or the KPIs and create an appropriate ecosystem or the ability to cooperate in a multi-dimensional work place are all sought after skills.
How and where would one acquire them? Besides the technical skills, one must also excel in complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management and coordination with others. The industry further seeks a high level of emotional intelligence, being good at judgement and decision making and be service oriented. One must possess effective negotiation skills apart from exhibiting a great amount of cognitive flexibility. A mindboggling 4.0 scenario indeed. The industry transforming to 4.0, calls for digitalisation of education too. Learning 4.0 is the consequence. The synergy creates an era of alignment between man and machine that we only were privy to in sci-fi movies. People will start communicating with machines instead of just operating them, creating a fascinating hybrid of the Internet of People (IoP) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
The influencers of this change are AI, globalisation of teams, and the new media. Disruptive innovations are the major enablers in the tech space and hence the education imparted must follow them. This compels a high level of skilling, upskilling and reskilling. The universities must shift to interactive and immersive components of teaching and learning that address personal learning needs. The IoT and IoP must combine data through AI to deliver relevant learning solutions.
Industry 4.0 seeks learning from home as much as in a classroom, imitating real-world processes. With the help of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), and now a combination of the two ’Mixed Reality’, experiential and practical training are viable and are cost-effective options. Are we slowly moving to Virtual Universities? Are the brick and mortar edifices becoming things of the past? Though a lot of conventional education will be face to face, IT tools like AI and IoT will fast narrow the distances in delivery which brings us to define Industry 4.0 which is the real catalyst of change.
A working group setup by the German federal government defined Industry 4.0 as “the Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), comprising smart machines, storage systems and production facilities capable of autonomously exchanging information, triggering actions and controlling each other independently facilitating fundamental improvements to the industrial processes involved in manufacturing, engineering, material usage and supply chain and life cycle management.”
The first industrial revolution brought in its wake production machines that used steam-powered engines and water as sources of power, whereas the second introduced telegraphs and railroads into industries. The digital revolution or the third converted analogue systems to digital. The fourth industrial revolution makes customised automation of manufacturing processes and flexible mass production technologies possible where a machine operates independently cooperating with humans, in creating a customer-oriented production and constantly works on maintaining itself, virtually becoming an independent entity that is able to collect data, analyse and advise upon it. All possible, because of self-optimization, self-cognition, and self-customization technology, wherein the manufacturers communicate with computers rather than operate them.
All the portends were available within the third industrial revolution, when a study of early nineties showed how the Japanese auto manufacturers occupied the first seven positions among the top ten manufacturers of the world out beating giants of the time like Ford Motors, Chrysler and the General Motors on cost-performance ratios. This was possible since they outsourced more than 90% of their manufacturing to other countries using digital manufacturing that allowed the numerical machines to be controlled from anywhere on the internet and taking advantage of the availability of labour at a minimal cost in those countries. All that was left to do was, control the quality metrics. A disruption in the entire manufacturing, business supply chain, brought about early dividends. The market was gone, by the time rest of them caught on to the idea.
Universities and the Technical Institutions, some of them built more than a hundred years back, have simply not kept pace with the changes taking place around them. Quality needs investments. That being abysmally low and sometimes none at all, the transformation to meet the industry challenges have never worked. Faculty too, trained a good twenty to thirty years earlier, either remained outdated or disconnected from reality. The current generation brought up on google technologies and social media will not be as accommodating or condescending as their predecessors. It is imperative that our institutes add value to their business, lest they are ousted from the perch, by their new peers, the virtual universities. In a world, where the machines communicate with each other and where manufacturers create CPPS, and industries integrate the real world into a virtual one and enable machines to collect live data, analyse them, and even make decisions based upon them, can we afford either our universities or our children to be left behind?