December 10-12, 2024 | Hybrid
  1. Opening plenary: Challenges & Opportunities in Global Higher Educational 
    • 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?

Content

  1. Education for Positive Peace and Conflict Resolution
    • Peace is not merely the absence of war. Education can help promote positive peace and resolve conflicts. Education can foster divisions and highlight contradictory ways of thinking and acting. It can impart modes of thinking that reconcile and resolve apparent contradictions. This session explores ways in which we can educate youth to become leaders in diplomacy and conflict resolution. It identifies the characteristics of a paradigm shift needed in our thinking about development, accomplishment, leadership and success.
  2. Education in Science and Technology Diplomacy for Human Security and Sustainable Development
    • How can education 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 more fully exploit their power for human security and sustainable development?
  3. Transdisciplinary Learning: Integrating perspectives of Science, Technology, Governance, Humanities, 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. We need an education that integrates perspectives from the natural and social sciences, humanities and arts to foster transdisciplinary thinking and holistic solutions. This session will identify ways in which we can impart knowledge that transcends disciplinary perspectives and equips future generations with modes of thinking more capable of preventing and addressing the challenges of the future.
  4. 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 the sciences and humanities to understand the scientific, political, economic, technological, social and ecological dimensions of the challenges and the remedies. 
  5. 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. This session examines the need and value of imparting fundamental skills in diplomacy at all levels and in all fields of education.
  6. 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 geo-engineering have raised the same concerns globally among leaders and the scientific community as well as civil society. This session will identify strategies for transforming education so that it imparts social responsibility along with academic knowledge.
  7. Education for Foresight and Future Vision
    • How do we prepare our youth for an uncertain future? Does history have a direction? 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 examines our capacity for foresight and discusses ways in which our education can endow students with the capacity to more realistically envision and prepare for the future.
  8. Education that fosters Inter-cultural Understanding and Appreciation and the Values of Objectivity & Truthfulness 
    • Increasing geopolitical, racial, ethnic and religious tensions make it clear that we need education that enhances inter-cultural understanding and appreciation. This session identifies the characteristics of an education that respects inter-cultural diversity and promotes a shared human identity.
  9. Education for Women in Leadership
    • What are the issues aspiring women leaders face in education, at the work place, in communities and in leadership positions globally? How can we educate young women and men to develop, recognize and foster the development of women to promote greater gender diversity and inclusion?
  10. Forces for Good in Education: The social role and potential of Capital, Technology and Business (tbc)
    • Capital, Business and Technology all have indispensable roles to play in promoting peace, human security, social progress and sustainable development for all. This session discusses ways in which we can align and enrich business, financial and technical education to address the full spectrum of human needs and social aspirations to fully achieve Agenda 2030 and secure a sustainable future for humanity.
  11. Values-based education
    • WAAS was founded out of a sense of responsibility for the social consequences of scientific discoveries and striving for 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. 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 life on earth.

Pedagogy

  1. 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 some of the opportunities made possible today with generative AI, the challenges to be overcome, and strategies for achieving SDG 4. 
  2. AI as an Aid for Transdisciplinary Education and Integrated Thinking  
    • The need for new ways of thinking permeates the work of the World Academy. Solutions to complex social problems require knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries and can be effective only when underlying root causes and transdisciplinary processes are comprehended. 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.
  3. 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. This session will examine the potential of various educational strategies and technologies — including AI — to help every generation keep pace with the knowledge and skills required to keep pace with rapid changes in global social evolution. 
  4. Educating Instructors, Researchers, Students and Administrators for Use of AI in Learning  
    • Among all of us who are experiencing AI, few are really equipped to harness its power fully or guide students in the use of AI in learning. This session focuses on strategies for enhancing knowledge and skills for fully utilizing the developing potentialities of AI in teaching and learning. 
  5. Life-centered, Contextual Learning 
    • Education is the process of compressing the cumulative experience and insights of countless generations in the past in order to pass on the essence of that learning in an This process of abstracting, abridging and organizing knowledge into separate subjects and levels has led to an increasing fragmentation of knowledge and a mental divorce of abstract knowledge from life experience. Complete learning is only possible when education of each part is viewed and understood in the context of the living whole of which it is a reflection. This panel explores ways to make learning life-centered and contextual. 
  6. 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  have 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. This session will seek ways to reduce errors and biases in both AI-based and traditional education. 
  7. AI, Virtual and Augmented Reality Learning Systems  
    • This session highlights ways in which AI, VR and AR are being and 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.

Delivery Systems

  1. Closing the Educational Time-Warp  
    • There is a growing gap between contemporary human experience and what is taught in our educational system and that gap is widening rapidly with each passing year. What is needed is a major reorientation of educational content and pedagogy 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. This session identifies ways in which our education can strive to close the gap generated by the ever-accelerating speed of technological and social evolution. 
  2. 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 we can 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.  
  3. Reliable Knowledge 
    • What is reliable knowledge? Our problems are an expression of limits imposed by the assumptions, conceptual systems, biases and compartmentalized disciplinary specialization that impose limits on the way we think and act. Future education must not only enhance our knowledge of the objective world in which we live but also of the limits to our rationality and how to overcome them. 
  4. BRIDGES Session: Learning for Social Transformations, building on the SoTF
    • This workshop invites conversation and informal input on specific targets and goals negotiated by the Member States of the UN in the Summit of the Future (SoTF) outcome documents: the Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations). In particular, the session will address what needs to be learned, and what modalities need to be realized, in order realize the ambitions of these agreements to enact the social transformations necessary for future generations to inherit a peaceful and flourishing world. 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. In this effort, harness advanced technologies, pedagogy and delivery systems to expand and enhance global capacity for education of future generations.
  5. Concluding Plenary
    • What steps can we take, as educators, researchers, policy makers and thought leaders, to promote a new paradigm in global higher education.