Higher Education
A video clip about user-driven transformation of education, with AI serving as a catalyst
Hear Bert Verhoeven’s perspective on education undergoing a user-driven transformation, becoming personalized and technology-driven, similar to the changes witnessed in the music industry.
Bert Verhoeven:
Education will become user driven. You want education for the right purpose, for the right what you want to achieve. And that doesn’t mean that you’re going to study for three years about something that you won’t use anymore. So it will be much more user driven and it will be technology driven. So in that sense it’s very comparable to, for example, the music industry that changed dramatically from selling records and making a lot of money from that to not making any money from records being recorded, because it was all download first for free and then it became obviously through all the streaming services, you pay for that now. But still, the amount of money that is in the music industry was for many, many years, a lot less as a total than in the seventies or eighties when these records, when we were young, we were buying them for 20, 30 pounds or 10 pounds, 15 pounds and now you download every song for free.
So there’s a lot less money initially in the industry. And what you see now happening though is most recently, with the organization of these streaming services, the new streaming services, that the revenues go up again and that they’re now almost back again to the levels that they were in the seventies and eighties. And so I think you will see something similar in education where initially there will be a shock and this technology and user driven changes will really lead to something we can’t predict as such. There could be institutions that will really flourish and grow very, very fast.
But I believe initially the total amount of money in the industry as a total will be a lot less because of that and because people will not just go and spend $100,000 for a degree that they will never use anymore. So that is not going to happen anymore with AI as a personal learning tool. And so that will be the initial stage and universities and education will have to adapt to that like the music industry had to, like the newspaper industry had to when they went from print to digital. They will have to adapt to that new situation and new innovations will come up and we can’t predict exactly what will happen, but that disruption is inevitable at the moment. That’s very clear and AI will be the catalyst of that.
