7th International Conference on Future Education

1. Opening Plenary Session: Challenges & Opportunities in Global Higher Education

The premise of this conference is that there is an urgent need for a global educational system capable of addressing the pressing challenges confronting humanity today. This conference explores the potential for developing a world-class, affordable, assessable, person-centered, self-paced higher education for both pre-career and lifelong learning. This open plenary session is intended to examine the urgency and magnitude of the need for such a system as well as the possibility of achieving it. What are the limitations in the current global system of higher education? Can we envision a better system or a new paradigm? What would be its characteristics? What are the opportunities and capabilities available to achieve it?

2A. Education for Women in Leadership

Improving access, coverage, quality and content of higher education is absolutely essential for achieving SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 5 (Gender Equality). Both are closely related to promoting education for women. This session will explore solutions for the problems confronting women in the workplace, in communities and in leadership positions globally and the type of education needed to promote the development of aspiring women leaders. It seeks to address the question: How can we educate young women and men to develop, recognize and foster the education, development and work opportunities for women leaders?

2B. Education for Foresight and Future Vision

All dimensions of global society are changing more rapidly than at any time in the past. Education and actions based on extrapolation from past precedents and present practices are increasingly inadequate to cope with the speed and magnitude of change. What changes are needed in the way we think and the way we educate future generations to prepare our youth for an uncertain future? How can we better understand the past and anticipate emerging challenges of the future? What are the prominent biases and blind spots that distort our perception of the future? This session seeks ways to enhance our capacity for anticipation and foresight. It seeks ways to endow students with the capacity to more realistically envision and prepare for the future.

2C. Values-based Education

WAAS was founded out of a sense of responsibility for the social consequences of scientific discoveries and the welfare of all humanity. At different times, WAAS has focused on different issues – atomic energy, war and peace, the Cold War, education, religion, population growth, food, the environment, digital communications and most recently AI, but the commitment to freedom, equity, and social welfare remains unchanged. This panel explores ways in which the implementation of universal human values can be inculcated in all academic fields of education at all levels, to promote human security and sustainable development for humanity and all.

3A. AI, Virtual and Augmented Reality Learning Systems

This session will highlight the ongoing research at Arizona State University on ways in which Virtual and Augmented Reality can be used to complement and augment conventional ways of learning, and how they can be exploited to make learning more engaging, immersive, experiential, relevant and impactful.

3B. Transdisciplinary Learning: Integrating Perspectives of Science, Technology, Governance, Humanities and Art

Fragmented thinking and siloed functioning have brought us to where we find ourselves today. The problems we confront are multidimensional, complex, interdependent and inseparable. This session seeks to identify ways in which we can impart knowledge that integrates perspectives from the natural and social sciences, humanities and arts to foster transdisciplinary thinking and holistic solutions.

3C. Education on the Impact of Science and Technology and Social Responsibility of Science

WAAS was founded by scientists and artists who were concerned about the social responsibility of science. 65 years later, rapid developments in science and technology including AI, robotics, bio- and geoengineering have raised the same concerns globally among leaders and the scientific community as well as civil society. This session seeks to identify strategies for transforming education so that it imparts awareness of the potential risks to global society, the sense of social responsibility and commitment to address them, and the knowledge needed to do so.

4A. Education for Positive Peace & Conflict Resolution

Peace is not merely the absence of war. Education can help promote positive peace and resolve conflicts. Education can impart modes of thinking needed to understand the complex challenges confronting global society today and the potential means for addressing apparently irreconcilable confrontations. What kind of education is required to foster the development of leaders in diplomacy and conflict resolution? What types of initiatives are needed in order to make it accessible?

4B. Reliable Knowledge

Most real-world problems are an expression of limits imposed by reliability of the assumptions, conceptual systems, biases and compartmentalized disciplinary specialization when they are applied in the real world. Our efforts to enhance the relevance and effectiveness of what is taught for application in the real world must not only enhance our knowledge of the objective world in which we live but also enhance our capacity to bridge the gaps between theoretical assumptions and realworld application. This session will examine the dimensions of reliable knowledge that need to be included in future education.

4C. AI as an Aid for Transdisciplinary

Education and Integrated Thinking The need for new ways of thinking permeates the work of the World Academy. Specialization of disciplines has been identified as a serious obstacle to addressing the complex, interdependent social problems confronting humanity which require knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries. This session examines the capacity of AI to aid the human mind in overcoming its tendency to divide and compartmentalize dimensions of reality that are interdependent and inseparable.

5B. AI for Personalized, Self-paced, Interactive, Multilingual Life-long Learning Systems

How can we use the capabilities of AI to overcome many of the quantitative and qualitative constraints of traditional classroom learning and provide interactive, personalized, self-paced education to each student? This session highlights the research and highly successful classroom application of AI developed by Khan Academy to explore the vast potential made possible today by generative AI, the challenges to be overcome, and its potential contribution to achieving SDG 4.

5C. AI, VR and AR Learning Systems

This session will highlight the developments in Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and discuss how they can be used to support current ways of learning, how the challenges arising from them can be handled, and how these technologies can be best made use of to make lessons more engaging and effective.

6A. Forces for Good in Education: The Social Role and Potential of Capital, Technology and Business

Capital, Business and Technology all have indispensable roles to play in promoting peace, human security, social progress and sustainable development for all. This session seeks ways to align and enrich business, financial and technical education to better understand and address the full spectrum of human needs and social aspirations to achieve Agenda 2030 and secure a sustainable future for humanity.

6B. Education in Science and Technology for Human Security and Sustainable Development

How can science and technology education be enhanced to better equip scientists, engineers, policymakers and business leaders to understand the prospects, challenges, social consequences and policy implications of rapid advances in knowledge and technology, and to provide the necessary knowledge and skills required for effective communication between scientists and policy-makers to more fully exploit the power of S&T for human security and sustainable development?

6C. Education that Fosters Inter-cultural Understanding and Appreciation and the Values of Objectivity & Truthfulness

The human community is rapidly evolving from a diverse network of distinct geopolitical, racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groups into a closely interconnected, interdependent cauldron of intermixed groups. This growing contact is intensifying the awakening of social aspirations and social energy, accelerating discovery and promoting invention. At the same time, it is challenging prevailing beliefs, institutions, customs and cultural practices and generating increasing levels of tension, anxiety and conflict between erstwhile isolated communities.

7A. Education in Human Diplomacy: The Art of Mediation, Negotiation and Effective Human Relations

In these times of escalating geopolitical tensions, all forms of diplomacy have a critical role to play in bridging the gap between contrary points of view, aspirations, needs and objectives: political, intellectual, social, scientific, technological, cultural and individual; most of all, the art of mediation, negotiation and effective human relations that promotes the welfare, well-being and harmony of all. Human diplomacy is an essential skill at all levels and in all fields.

7B. Educating Instructors, Researchers, Students and Administrators for Use of AI in Learning

The continuous introduction of rapid advances in generative AI has created a widening gap between the potentials of the technology in education and the qualifications and skills of instructors, students, researchers and administrators to apply and utilize it productively. Few are really equipped to harness its power fully.

7C. Addressing Errors, Cultural Bias and Hallucinations in AI-based and Traditional Education

Hallucination is neither new nor is it a monopoly of AI. Human thinking has always been fraught with mental, social and cultural biases born of past experience. The quest of science is to reduce the recurrence of error, presumption, misconception and prejudice.

8A. Future Trends for Higher Education: Closing the Educational Time-Warp

There is a widening gap between contemporary human experience and what is taught in our educational system. Educational content and pedagogy need to be reoriented from transmission of acquired knowledge based on past experience to development of the knowledge, skills and capacities needed in a future we cannot fully and clearly envision.

8B. Education Addressing the Climate Challenge, Human Security & Other Sustainable Development Issues

As climate change becomes an existential risk affecting virtually all dimensions of global society with severe disruptions to normal life, we need an education that equips students of all fields of higher education in science, humanities and professions to understand the scientific, political, economic, technological, social and ecological dimensions of climate challenges and the potential remedies for avoiding and addressing them.

8C. Strategies for Accelerated Vocational Training, Career Development and Lifelong Learning

The acquisition of skills through formal education is insufficient preparation for lifelong career development in an age of rapid advances in knowledge and technology, economy and business development. The process of vocational education must be continuous and lifelong.

9A. UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition: Learning for Social Transformations, Building on the SOTF

This session invites conversation and input on specific targets and goals negotiated by UN Member States in the Summit of the Future (SoTF) outcome documents: the Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. The session will address what needs to be learned and what modalities need to be realized at different societal and governance scales in order to achieve the social transformations affirmed in SoTF as necessary for future generations to inherit a peaceful and flourishing world. Learning is not just about individual improvement or study, nor is it exclusively the province of formal educational institutions; it is the process through which people, communities and societies acquire, refine, and apply knowledge, skills, values and experiences collectively over the course of individual lifetimes and across generations, including those not yet born. A major focus would be on the key recommendation of the BRIDGES Coalition’s SoTF side event: Promote the development and democratization of Higher Education, Innovation and Research/Sciences (including humanities, social sciences, arts and traditional/non-academic knowledge domains, in addition to STEM and applied technical disciplines) as crucial to building sufficient knowledge and action capacities and necessary for wide-scale implementation in societies.

10A. Concept of World University: Delivery & Certification Systems for Accessible, Affordable, World Class Education

Twelve years ago, WAAS posed the question in this conference series: How can we provide affordable, interactive, quality, lifelong education to all? This session presents the idea that led to the founding of WUC, six international conferences and more than 15 curriculum development workshops conducted to explore possible answers to this question. With the potential of cutting-edge technology available today, particularly AI, the range of feasible opportunities has multiplied with respect to pedagogy, content and delivery systems. This session focuses on how to integrate the available solutions to offer more quality, affordable, accessible, transdisciplinary, student-centered, multilingual education for all.

11. A-D Proposals for New Paradigm in Pedagogy, Integrated Curriculum, Global Delivery System and Institutional Collaboration

We urgently need to prepare our youth for a future that we are unable to fully anticipate or imagine. Education is the instrument for this purpose. It can serve as a catalyst for social transformation. But the global education system itself is in need of radical transformation to upgrade capacity, quality, reach, and relevance. The current model of education was designed for a period in the past when knowledge and sources of knowledge were limited, classrooms were primarily for knowledge dissemination, and higher education was limited to the privileged. Today we need a comprehensive global strategy that makes better use of the existing technology and other resources, and applies innovative, learner-centred pedagogy to provide affordable, interactive, personalized, relevant, quality education for all. The four breakout rooms in this session will each be focussed on one aspect of the new paradigm in global education that is needed for preparing our youth to face the challenges of the 21st century—pedagogy, curriculum, delivery and institutional collaboration—and propose solutions that will be optimal from the perspective of humanity as a whole. Rapporteurs from each breakout session will present a brief report later in the program.

12A. UNDP Vision of Future Education

13A. Reports from the Breakout Sessions

14. Concluding Plenary: A Vision of Future Education

What steps can we take, as educators, researchers, policymakers and thought leaders, to promote a new paradigm in global higher education that can more effectively address the problems confronting humanity today by making available relevant, quality higher education that is accessible and affordable to all who seek it?