Martin Bean and Melissa Loble CanvasCon Europe Keynotes

Now you're all mine. Hey everybody, it's lovely to be back. You'll notice in the program it was sort of described as a lifeline. And some of you might have thought, well that's that's a bit melodramatic. Why are they talking about lifelong learning as a lifeline? But then you listen to all of the presentations today, you feel the pressure in your own lives and you realize that the only constant in our life at work right now is we gotta keep learning to keep up. It was described as curiosity this morning and it really is a lifeline.

It's a lifeline for us as individuals, as parents, for our societies, our communities, our economies, but also for institutions because unless all of us figure out a way to be able to assist people at all ages and stages of their life to be able to get the skills, capabilities, knowledge, and behaviors they need to survive and thrive, we've got a real problem. And so what I'm going to try to do now with that wonderful conversation as a backdrop, is to try to bring to life for you a few of my thoughts about, so what do we need to do? I think it was summed up really well by Johanna that it's not about the students conforming to the way that we want to teach and the way that we want our institutions to run. If we are going to be successful, my two r's, whether it's about revenue or whether it's about relevance, we are going to have to be the ones to adapt. And I I think this slide is great. You heard it come up so many times by the panel, but Toffler's quote here, I think is wonderful.

The illiterate of the twenty first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. To remain relevant, we've got to embrace all types of learning and all types of credentials. Education must enable the learner to respond to community workforce and societal changes in real time. It's a very different type of student. We need to structure differently.

We need to market differently. We need to support them differently. And we need to use technology differently to support them. The disrupted institution of the future is an institution that is very comfortable embracing micro, meso, and macro credentials and knit them together in elegant coherent pathways. We will still confer those degrees and certificates that we know and love, what I've called on this slide tertiary programs and courses, but then we'll do something quite different.

We'll follow people out into life and work. We'll look at their life and work outcomes and we'll break the next frontier of what is pretty ugly in our systems around the world right now. And that is we'll come up with elegant, scalable, flexible and fair recognition of prior learning systems that will allow us to take all that they've done when they weren't with us, knit them back into pathways for recognition and that cycle will continue as they move through life. I talked a little bit and the panel talked about, well why is it a lifeline for institutions? This is my list. It's a dynamic list.

It grows and changes as the years go on, but these are the reasons that I've found that institutions focus on the lifelong learner. There is a crisis of relevance ladies and gentlemen. We might live in a little bit of denial in a bit of a bubble, but if you look at what's going on with governments funding mechanisms and student preferences all around the world, unless we keep up from a reputation perspective, people will find another way. And they are finding another way to work around us. One of my big tips is if you're going to go after the lifelong learner, I don't care which of these is your objective, but have a set of objectives, have a strategy, know why you're doing it, and then put the resources, talent and commitment behind it.

So I thought I'd just wrap up with you by sharing that when I walk into a university, a college, and we start talking about disruption, and I look to the future and think about how to bring my iceberg institution to life, I wanna just quickly walk you through those elements of my disruption continuum as a bit of a provocation. This is my disruption continuum. This is my provocation to institutions to help them get started with their strategy. Take it, take it back to your institutions. The next time you're having a conversation about lifelong learning, start walking through the continuum and having a conversation about where you're at and where you want to get to.

Because a vibrant education system, as you heard loud and clear from the panel, a system that can help humans critically think, reflect, collaborate, challenge. That's what we need in our societies to be able to remain vibrant, healthy, active, and economically sustainable. So we need all of you. What I wanted to do in the next sort of about fifteen minutes is share some insights or some thoughts or connect together much of what I've heard over the last two days. I see this as we pull this together, I see sort of this pattern.

And this pattern is we're talking about three key things or three things that make educational practice, technology infused or not, have the future that we all know what we want it to have. Now, first, we have to think about the human. And we did this this morning quite a bit. Our opening conversation around generations was incredibly powerful. And in fact, we highlighted thinking about how we all collectively are serving five generations.

But we also need to be thinking about future generations. How is the practice that we're doing now transforming the way we think about teaching and learning for the next generation and the generation after that? So for example, and I'm only giving three generations here as examples, but for example, if we think about millennials, there's so many key pieces to learning preferences and how they choose to learn but what I find really interesting is they're truly the first generation that has embraced gamification. They see value in gamified environments and I don't necessarily mean leader boards or, you know, turning every learning opportunity into a video game, but what I do mean is leveraging game based practices, leveling, progressions. Right? Things we know that are underneath game. Rewards.

We talked about credentials in this last panel. They are the first generation that's truly embraced gamification and actually seeks learning opportunities in which game based principles apply. So again, if we think about this context of individuals, the science behind how we function and learn, and then we think about the context in which we do that, All of these create this web when we think about how we build our learning opportunities that gives us a chance to reshape and change how we do our practice to serve future. Now I mentioned science and I do get a little nerdy. Those of you that know, I I, you know, I I get a little nerdy around how does the brain work.

And in fact, over the last ten years, we have learned so much more than we ever knew about how the brain worked. But in particular, I'm interested in neuroplasticity. I think there's the phrase that we've all heard, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That's actually been debunked in the last ten years. It's actually it's it's been debated and debunked and in that, what we've learned is actually you can build neuroplasticity but you have to do it in the right context in the right ways.

And what neuroscience has shared with us is there are there is a process as you can see here and also some key things or triggers or approaches that we can take as educators to initiate that learning at all ages. Research tells us failure is the number one way to learn something new. Failure. But think about our environments, the institutions we exist in. Do we embrace failure through and through? Right? Is that part of our culture? Are we addressing? Are we creating environments in which it is safe to fail? In which we reflect on failure? In which we impact or think about how that translates into who we are as learners? We now have more opportunity to build and teach and learn throughout our work and again, to prepare learners, as Martin was saying earlier, for a future that they may not even know.

Now the last part of this is context. And context I like to think of is everything that's happening around the learner. And we often talk about how we wanna make sure we're serving a whole learner. Right? We wanna serve all aspects and we have incredible learning journeys that we're creating and just learner journeys in general exposed to our institutions. But we have to think not only about all the positive things that we can do, but we also have to think about what are the challenges that learners are bringing and how are we creating environments that enable them to move past those challenges.

This morning's keynote talked quite a bit about the battle for attention. Right? Or this attention economy. And this concept that we are always distracted and grabbing attention is really challenging. So again, thinking about not only who our learners are, how are we wired as humans, but how are we creating environments that actually combat all of those challenges becomes critical in the work that we do. And it's also hopefully inspiring you to think differently about the work that you're doing or to bring back these ideas into your institutions to start to shape and reshape what is the culture of learning for us and how are we understanding us, ourselves as humans throughout the organization to then directly support and serve learners for well into the future.