December 10-12, 2024 | Hybrid
Concept Note
In our rapidly changing and increasingly interdependent world, there is growing awareness of the urgent need for radical transformation of global higher education in order to extend the reach, enhance the quality, and update the curriculum and pedagogy for hundreds of millions of aspiring youth denied access to world class quality, value-based, socially relevant, accessible, affordable education.
The World Academy of Art and Science, the World University Consortium, Istinye University, Istanbul, UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition and Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, Arizona State University are collaborating to conduct the 7th International Future Education Conference bringing together leading thinkers from a wide range of fields to give shape to a future education system fit for purpose in these challenging times of rapid social evolution.
The Conference was held in Istanbul in hybrid format from December 10-12, 2024. It consisted of over 25 sessions in three parallel streams, allowing both speakers and audience to contribute in person or online.
The conference examined multiple dimensions of a paradigm shift in education relating to the objectives, values, pedagogy, content, delivery systems, assessment and accreditation. Advancements in digital connectivity and AI have made it possible to develop deliver systems that provide personalized, interactive, customized, self-paced, contextual, experiential, formal education and life-long learning in all major languages at the local, national and global levels. Separation of knowledge delivery, assessment and accreditation can liberate students from the constraints imposed by cost, bureaucracy and the limitations of physical classroom learning. The aspirations, interests, capacities and pace of each student can be addressed in a manner sensitive to regional and cultural diversity and integrated with the knowledge and capacities required for career success. Continuous learning and work experience can proceed in tandem as parallel processes throughout life. Exclusive focus on information transfer and occupational preparedness can be complemented by development of social skills, mental capacities and personality.
Ultimately, learning must help us understand and fully develop the full potentials of our minds. Most of all we need an education that helps us escape from the narrow objectivist, reductionist, mechanistic, analytic, limited rationality that fragments our view of reality into so many independent parts, denies the interrelationships, interdependence and integration, and separates us from ourselves, one another, the world and nature. As Einstein reminds us in his oft-quoted words, we need an education that helps us avoid trying to solve problems by the same type of thinking that created them.
A special session in the conference will be conducted in collaboration with the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition. This session will invite conversation on specific targets and goals adopted by the UN in the Summit of the Future outcome documents: what needs to be learned and what modalities need to be realized in order to bring about the social transformations necessary for future generations to inherit a peaceful and flourishing world, including the development and democratization of higher education, innovation and research. The conference seeks to be a catalyst for the evolution of global higher education to provide world class, transdisciplinary content, person-centred pedagogy and a low-cost, interactive, personalized, self-paced, lifelong global delivery system.
This event forms part of the HS4A Human Security for All Campaign.