ANNEX 2. Report from the 2016 Global Education Industry Summit, held in Jerusalem on 26-27 September 2016

Session 1: The teacher in the innovative world

Teachers play a strong role in developing innovation in education.

Teachers are connected to three innovate worlds: the classroom, the teaching profession and the ecosystem of policy, technology and other supports and tools.

There is a need for revolution and changing paradigm, while looking to the future of teaching. With the focus moving towards start-ups and entrepreneurships, there is a shift of teachers required to teach towards the unknown.

Personalised learning has become nearly synonymous with innovation in classroom. There is a striking shift in the student-teacher team, where the student is the leader and the teacher is the activator and advisor. Students’ interest becomes the energy that drives the learning. It creates deeper teacher-student relationships, since the teacher has to be aware of the students’ interests and progress, in order to customise the learning process.

Technology can be a major accelerator in education. The use of technology can bring in an immersive experience that a traditional teacher cannot deliver. It can connect students to technical career expertise that a teacher may not have, or connect a student to subjects which they would not otherwise have access. However, technology alone, without teachers, cannot equal innovation in the classroom and cannot teach students life skills, which are part of every great success in society.

Teachers want to be partners in implementing the ecosystem. They are not just costumers of innovative projects. They are participants, co-authors, co-designers, co-implementers and co-leaders of the process. They want to ensure that the policies formulated by the governments reflect what happens in schools. Once teachers are engaged in policy making there are better outcomes and designed programs.

Teachers need to have the autonomy in order to experiment and have the connection to the industry and entrepreneurs. The tools available, especially digital tools, do not yet fulfil the promise of being easy to use, creating big gains and fitting into their work in ways that do not demand more time. Teachers are eager to inform educational developers what they need, since they face the problems in the classroom. The majority of teachers are willing to use digital tools to help solve problems in their classroom.

The system should be based on trust in teachers. Assessment should be used to support, not to punish and control.

Teachers welcome opportunities for collaboration with other teachers, whom they trust and consider experts. They want to contribute to their profession and to the learning and sustaining of their colleagues.

Aging of teaching force becomes a problem once they are perceived as consumers and not part of the innovation process. Governments need to strengthen the status of the teaching profession and attract the most qualified people, but also provide the chance to change their career.

Teachers can play a larger role in the system and help craft policy and advocating. The teaching profession is a mastery of craft, which should leave teachers free to practice what they believe, is the art of teaching.

Session 2: Educating for innovation and entrepreneurship

There is a need for revolution in thinking in order to flip the education system. Education systems need to shift the system from knowledge transmission to instilling 21st century skills and optimising for teamwork, decision making, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence and curiosity. Students need to acquire deep knowledge in particular areas, which should be combined with learning skills.

Redesigning the system requires a new paradigm, involving production and a need to find the way to shift the system without additional expenses.

This revolution does not necessarily require technology. The mindset part is critical for the success of integrating technology in education and nourishing other learning elements.

The secret to reinventing the education is related to three main elements: unit mentality, oriented missions and real-life activities. A class that turns into a team has responsibility for the whole class. Project-based learning can include missions and real activities, which require critical thinking and discovering knowledge by the student. On the other hand, education system should not fix the shift in education to certain types of pedagogy. Project-based learning and design thinking are part of the various types of innovative learning.

Regulations may hamper innovation in education if profession and schools are not involved in the decision-making process. Governments play an important role in listening to teachers and making sure that their ideas are translated into action. Governments should not be experimenting on students of today, because students will not have another chance tomorrow. The challenge is to create a safe space for redesigning the system, and reframing from changing the entire system until perceiving the results of the new system.

The role of governments is to teach entrepreneurship, which is a difficult task for central governments with complex ecosystems. Innovation does not come out of law. Governments need to set up conditions and ambitious goals, to serve as a platform for private and public sectors.

Entrepreneurship can be implemented via the speed boat approach, in which many speed boats, namely pilot programs, are carried out and only successful programs are continued.

Entrepreneurship is not the sole purpose of vocational education. There are vocational education systems where conceptual thinking is part of the application process. The education system should be designed in a way that application goes side by side with thinking skills.

The education system should not be perceived as a public space of people employed as teachers and school leaders, but as an ecosystem that brings together the outside and the inside innovators.

Countries that will be first to relate to the 21st century dimension and redesign the learning environment are going to benefit from huge advantages.

The paradigm shift is not happening on a large scale, due to the fact that universities are based on the traditional system.

Session 3: Educational technology

Technology is the service of a stronger education system. Harnessing the potential of technology to support the learning process requires partnership between the education system and the industry.

The education system, which is very complex system with many stakeholders and moving towards more voice given to parents, local communities and even students, should mobilise the wide variety of people who invest in schools in many different ways. The industry needs to build strong relationships with entrepreneurs and philanthropists, in order to create an ecosystem that delivers on the ambitious goals set for the education system.

There is a difference between the product of ed-tech start-up and the product of traditional education technology. It differs in the value it presents, the content and the pedagogy embedded in the solutions offered.

Start-ups suggest alternatives to the existing reality. The lean start-up process, which identifies the user’s needs through constant movement between the field and the development, creates better products. In the education system, there are two additional elements to this process: 1. Learning from teachers’ experience. Teachers involved in policing and in the development process approach technology in a very active position. 2. The need for new pedagogy based on the radical changes in literacy, memorizing and expressing ourselves. This new pedagogy will be evolving to the encounter between educators who understand the needs and the entrepreneurs who use the language of the internet culture. Start-ups also have the ability to narrow the gap between the old learning paradigms and the rapid technological developments.

On the other hand, start-ups might address just a part of the curriculum and are sometimes time consuming.

Governments encourage ecosystems in various systems, other than education. They face the question of how to move the education system without jeopardizing equality of opportunities, quality and social interactions. The mindset should be changed in the way of encouraging educational technology and start-ups to enter schools.

Schools should adopt a bottom-up revolution, implementing not a very structured process which includes open technological platforms, in order to allow teachers to adapt the content and design. It is important for schools to use sustainable technology which are scalable and not very complex.

In order to build an effective innovative system it is important to measure and understand how students, teachers and parents feel about schools. Assessment is a driver, but if not used appropriately, it may not serve its purpose.

Session 4: Technology in education as a tool for developing innovation

The change brought by the fourth industrial revolution is inevitable, therefore the educational system needs to adapt the new environment of disruptive innovation; with less structured curriculum.

The alternative methods of delivering quality education in open educational resources, available in the internet space, opened up new challenges and opportunities to school education. The education system needs to address the challenge of how schools should function in the coming decade, given the fact that people can learn more and better through informal and on-line learning, but at the same time students being together in the same physical location is an essential part of the learning experience.

Technology must be central to education reform and should be enablers of transformative teaching and learning practices, but it cannot replace human action. It does not offer the social factor and cannot provide sensitive belonging to students.

Schools should use tools built for the consumer in business world and improved for education, that provides access, encourages collaboration, promotes creativity and frees up time for educators to be more connected with their students.

One of the most powerful education technology is the internet itself. An open internet test, for example, can be very challenging for the teacher and student, for finding knowledge.

Many educational systems teach programing from young age. Programing equals thinking. The aim is to change students from the costumers of the internet content to the creator. There is a need to collaborate with the industry sectors in order to train teachers for teaching programming.

Formative assessment can bet administrated via technological tools with better research and applicable. It should not be an activity which is an end point but a continuum that is led back into implementation.

Parents are very important stakeholders of the educational ecosystem. In order to build a sound productive ecosystem, there is a need to consider the role of parents seriously. They should be involved at the first stage concerning any change brought into education, especially when related to technology.

There is a need to create a set of incentives for driving stakeholders to invest energy and creative design for a system that is open for innovation. This requires specifying the criteria to be met, building good measures and concentrating on outcomes, not on inputs.

Conclusion:

• There is a need to build a long-term vision of how to move education systems forward in the future, combined with action.

• Bringing innovation into education is a risk and builds messiness. Educations systems have the responsibility of taking risks in a clever and sensible way, while checking all consequences.

• Change in education is building on trust and combining it with courage.

• The education system needs to implement disruptive changes in order to move the system forward, along with providing incentives to risk takers.

• Many directions of change in education is about empowering learners, along with building a feedback loop that gets students to steer their own learning process.

• The change in the education system, needs also to be about “what” and not only “how” (What kind of skills, attitudes, mindset, soft skills, etc.)

• Innovation should be the profit of all students, which requests inclusive growth and cohesion of the education system.

• There should be a smart combination of using tradition and history of revolutions together with change and innovation.

There is a continuous need of establishing the dialogue between all stakeholders in education, governments, policy makes and education industry leaders, which believe that revolutionary change is needed as early as possible

The next stage of the summit is to respond to the following questions:

• How can we mobilise actors and stakeholders?

• How can we build the incentive system?

• How can we build the R&D functions, which is essential to innovation in any system.?

• The role of universities or academia.

• The role of experts.

• How can we make sure that all schools become the accelerators of change and innovation?

Facilitators’ notes:

The education system is trying to create an encounter between two cultures that are in conflict by definition. From the one hand, there are the policy makers who are dealing with reality from a perspective of systems, structures, process and metrics that should be addressed. From the other hand’ there are the entrepreneurs who are looking for short cuts have open ended solutions instead of a structured roadmap. The main challenge is to create conditions for significant pilots that will create trust and hands-on understanding of the implications of this kind of encounter. It is suggested to create a “Global Ed-Tech Start-ups Friendly Zone”, which can include a community of schools and pilots of start-ups, and will shape (together with the entrepreneurs) a new discourse of education.

Reform and reinvention are different components. The education system needs to be reinvented. Education should be flipped to focus on skills and through the gaining of skills to gain more knowledge as well.

The role of the government is to promote the sustainability of the educational ecosystem with the educational industries. Government policy has to be practiced to create sound partnership between schools and industries. Governments can stimulate new needs in education which can open up a new market for the educational industries. Without strong educational industries it is difficult to develop effective good education.

There are two possible ways in which government policy can provide its impact: to the schools directly or to the industries directly. Providing resources to schools enables schools to choose educational service from the market. Industries will try to meet the needs of the schools rather than develop their own educational services. Providing resources to industries can allow industries to develop and offer various services. Each country can choose the policy within their own context of urgency and public requirements, but it is important for the role of government to consider developing and implementing the policy to create and maintain the sustainability, which is the market.

Governments cannot provide the support for technology at schools for long and at the right way as it is rapidly changing. Private sectors can be more flexible and fast to adapt the changes. Government need to support industries to create the market and guide the educational services for the goals of good education and equity. Creating markets can take longer time to see the results of the policy and the equity in education is not met immediately.

Sustainability of educational technology is essential to see results of the policy. Government policy is only a seed to create the sustainability and it comes from the sound market.

Finally, from an organisational level it is apparent the Summit provides an answer to the need of education ministers to discuss and share the challenges they each face individually.

For the following sumzmits we recommend:

• Maintaining the structure of a two-day summit, with an optional third day in the field, visiting the host countries unique educational facilities.

• Keeping the sessions behind closed doors, with Chatham House rules of discussion.

• Consider elective sessions in smaller working groups to allow ministers to further engage specific topics raised in the plenary.