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A growing online education market
The online learning market is growing at a consistent 5% rate, with a projected $240 billion value by 2023. One of the things heard frequently during EdTech company pitches at various events is that the percentage of online learners is high, yet the percentage of retention and completion is variable. In Switzerland several start-ups are working on developing new applications in education, based in the EdTech Collider in Lausanne. More and more EdTechs are looking at the K12 areas – from kindergarten to the end of school certification, in the USA the SATs and in Switzerland the Maturité. digitalswitzerland is engaged across the board in promoting digitalisation, including throughout school and lifelong education, through its NextGeneration and educationdigital platforms.
From virtual to real – the human element remains important
Khan Academy (see Khan academy with individualized education tools for pupils) was a precursor to a movement that has been more or less widely adopted. A few years back, the big discussion in the online education area was the value of certification. In 2016, the Huffington Post wrote that online certification was a great way to get a job, seeming to close the debate in the public eye. Classes, which prior to the digital age were restricted to ex cathedra lectures, talks and exercises based on physical products (e.g. in biology and chemistry classes), can now be designed differently. Both teachers and students can and indeed are using different tools, which range from engaging devices to teach the students to online courses and games, and virtual reality.
A real, live classroom offers all sorts of validations for learning: behavioural, social, academic and community involvement, which many of the new purely digital technologies did not provide for teachers or students. It is interesting to see that now that avatars, gaming and VR and other technologies are bringing in these dimensions. As a complement, Khan Academy has now opened an experimental real school called Khan Lab School.
Education in and out of school
What Khan Academy has excelled at is precisely what others are struggling with: retention and completion. By personalising learning, they could jump start results. Within Switzerland, schooling is compulsory, so children either have to attend classes in public schools or be schooled elsewhere. The system is not geared towards personalised learning, causing some families to pull their children out of the formal system. Thus homeschooling is on the rise, with some 1,000 children in Switzerland being schooled at home, 40% of which are in the canton of Vaud.
Online courses support and complement compulsory course work in school and at home. However, the exams remain state exams. Thus the philosophical question remains whether certification is still important in a fast-changing world in which we know that a large percentage of professions that exist today will no longer exist tomorrow and what must change in the education system to prepare our children for this fast evolution. Khan Academy’s initial success based on personalised learning gave high retention and completion rates as the need was high. This led to the need for certification. There will be a change in certification, in what direction and how institutions handle it, one that only the future will reveal how this develops. What is certain is that personalised learning is here to stay: everyone has access to whatever he or she wants to learn.
It is up to you to take the chances and keep learning… lifelong.
“The (education) goals of the past were standardisation and compliance, with students educated in age cohorts, following the same standard curriculum, all assessed at the same time. The future is about building instruction from student passions and capacities, helping students to personalise their learning and assessment in ways that foster engagement and talents, and it’s about encouraging students to be ingenious.” Andreas Schleicher, OECD education expert.
This is exactly what drives us within the Education&Talent pillar at digitalswitzerland: we foster interest and passion for digitalisation, nurture eagerness and opportunities for lifelong education, and attract top talent to Swiss universities and technical schools.
Goals within Education&Talent pillar
With our members and education partners within digitalswitzerland, we are working towards the following goals:
• to create current and future generations that are ready for an ever-evolving workplace,
• upskilling current generations so that they are able to go with the flow, and
• making Switzerland attractive to top talents in the STEM and technology fields.
«nextgeneration»: Getting more youth and teachers involved
Coding, computational thinking, entrepreneurship and familiarization with STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) must be targeted at children and young adults, to create curiosity and promote interest in and vocations for these areas of activity.
«educationdigital.ch»: SMEs and digitalisation
Throughout a working life, people must have the necessary digital skills to adapt to an ever-changing environment. This is not about coding, it is about embedding digitalisation in the workplace, something especially SMEs are still facing many challenges. Issues around data protection and storage, privacy and lack of knowledge of all the helpful tools available are some of the elements slowing uptake by Swiss SMEs, as well as lack of time and resources with the relevant digital skills. digitalswitzerland is working with partners to help SMEs address this through training and information of and for their employees. educationdigital.ch is digitalswitzerland’s free platform that lists courses to learn digital skills for the future.
Keep Switzerland competitive
In a worldwide competition for top talent and attractiveness, the Swiss ecosystem is doing well and seeks to do even better. We thus look to foment top talent from within the student ranks and attract top academic and professional talent to the country. This requires appropriate incentives: infrastructure, career paths, research opportunities, salaries, and work life balance. Through its members, digitalswitzerland is promoting discussion around the subject to keep it in the spotlight of decision-makers.
Bringing it all together
School and university educations, as well as apprenticeships, form the basis for an educated workforce. The Swiss population has many opportunities for lifelong education, online and offline. Lifelong education is the key to keeping people in employment, growing business opportunities and being agile in ever more competitive markets. digitalswitzerland is the partner for those interested in digitisation.
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In China, facial recognition systems automatically identify individuals from a database of digital images. These biometric computer applications are now being used in areas such as public security, financial services, transport and retail across the country. It has become a very efficient method to find for example suspects searched by the police. This measure can lead on one hand to more security in public space, but on the other hand raises questions about privacy and data security. How is the data collected and what will happen to it?
This scenario is not science fiction, but reality in China . Technology will change worldwide how we travel, work, shop, get-well, communicate and stay informed. In short: how we live. Great new possibilities are opening up. However, with it new challenges and questions that needs to be answered. We asked swissfuture, the Swiss Society for Future Studies, to identify for us the most relevant megatrends and their implications and challenges for Switzerland. Digitalization is itself a megatrend and was interpreted within this context. The following blog post aims to give you a short overview of the resulting report (in German) of swissfuture and summarize the most relevant challenges stemming from the megatrends. The report is intended to serve as the basis for the formulation of new roundtables and bets in the context of our digitalswitzerland challenge. Note: the views and recommendation of the report are not digitalswitzerland’s own.
A trend is considered a megatrend, if it is epochal, global and ubiquitous. Besides digitalization, the growth of population (together with individualization) is considered a megatrend. Swissfuture estimates that until 2040, around 10 million people will live in Switzerland and in 2050, 9 billions worldwide. Hand in hand with these development goes the megatrend of urbanization. Numerous new megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants will be created. Due to the expansion of health, more people have access to health care and as a consequence, will live longer (aging society). For Switzerland, this means that until 2050, 50% of the population will be over 65. So, more people have to share the same amount of resources and climate change will also affect our country: The increase in temperature compared to the pre-industrial era is twice as large as on a worldwide average (ecologization and scarcity of resources). The pace of technological innovation is increasing (acceleration) and with this the intensity of transport and communication (nomadization and connectivity). With the globalization and new technology on the rise, knowledge or at least information is proliferating (expansion of knowledge and education) and citizens increasingly insist on disclosure of information on data, structures and interests of public and private companies (transparency).
Swissfuture has analyzed the megatrends with regards what they call our “living worlds” and encountered 20 challenges. Of these 20 challenges, the following are of particular interest for Switzerland and thus, for our digitalswitzerland challenge:
Challenge 1: Data Protection
Digitalization, connectivity and particularly technological autonomization (the evaluation of information through intelligent systems) create “transparent people”. It is often almost impossible for an individual to know who has information about him, especially information that can infringe on his privacy. Informational self-determination is (still) almost unattainable despite legal protection. Therefore: How can informational self-determination be enforced in the digital world?
Challenge 2: Democracy and Digitalization
It is necessary to have a relevant public sphere in which citizens inform themselves (expansion of knowledge) and exchange viewpoints. Social media (connectivity) can greatly contribute to this, but at the same time it harbors the danger of filter bubbles: individualization promotes social networking among like-minded people—with the drawback that other perspectives are considered less and less, and, in an extreme case, it can lead to fragmentation and tribalism in society. Therefore: How can digital transformation support political participation, civic competence and political responsibility and contribute to a relevant, political public sphere?
Challenge 3: Digital Healthcare
Healthcare in Switzerland is very expensive; the system contains many disincentives and redundancies. With more transparency and better networking (connectivity) the healthcare system could become more efficient. Therefore: How can digitalization contribute to the optimization of healthcare in Switzerland?
Challenge 4: The roll of the state in the 4th Industrial Revolution
In discussing the 4th Industrial Revolution, one often hears about the mass substitution of the workforce with autonomous systems and smart robots (technological autonomization) throughout the entire industrial sector. Since the intermediaries in many sectors can become redundant through trusted networking (blockchains), this challenge could be even further exacerbated. Admittedly, there is justifiable doubt around this scenario, but should it be the case (at least transitionally) that structural unemployment massively increases, and thereby much of the tax base disappears and the social transfer costs greatly increase at the same time, the question is: how will the state finance itself? Therefore: How will the state be financed in the future?
Challenge 5: Job Market 4.0
It can be assumed that in the future fewer employees will have indefinite and stable employment contracts than is the case today. Digitalization and connectivity have generated new business models that reduce employee work contracts, which will increasingly have to be acquired independently (individualization). There is an increased risk that informal economy will represent a growing portion of the national economic output, resulting in more employees having inadequate labor and employment protections. Therefore: How can new forms of work, resulting from platform business models, be developed in accordance with labor and employment laws?
Challenge 6: Demands on the Job Market
It to be expected that, as a part of technological advancement and the 4th Industrial Revolution, demands on the job market are changing—faster than ever. Although education levels continue to increase (expansion of knowledge), we will need models that make possible and promote continued further education and retraining in the future. Therefore: How do we maintain the employability of the workforce in times of rapid change?
Challenge 7: Competency in Digitalization
Basic knowledge in programming and dealing with digitalization are now considered cultural techniques like reading and writing (expansion of knowledge). Only those who have this basic knowledge can exercise informal self-determination and deal critically with digitalization, autonomic systems and bots (technological automatization). Therefore: What level of competency do primary school students need in digitalization?
Challenge 8: Dealing with A.I.
Self-learning machines produce results that have not been previously programmed by a person (technological autonomization). This raises the question of who may claim authorship of these results and also who must take the responsibility for any resulting damages. In the future will we need a new legal entity for artificial intelligence with rights and liabilities alongside natural persons and corporate bodies? Therefore: What does artificial intelligence mean for research, authorship and questions of liability?
It is part of digitalswitzerland’s vision to bring innovation forward in order to tackle the challenges of digitalization. Thus, within the “digitalswitzerland challenge” we are in the stage of brainstorming and idea collection for future bets and roundtables (first phase) and the underlying report “Megatrends and Challenges for Switzerland” serves as idea provider . The most relevant topics on the digitalswitzerland challenge platform (determined by click-rates, likes, and personal judgement) then form a possible basis for the generation of bets (second phase). Within interdisciplinary and cross-sector teams, we aim to think and work on those major challenges and try to find concrete solutions for Switzerland. In the following weeks, we try to dive deeper into the individual challenges and present you some of the current research on the topics or even measures in Switzerland or abroad, which have already been taken with regards to those challenges.
To stay informed about our future bets and roundtables within the context of the digitalwitzerland challenge, please subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter and we will keep you posted!
Are nation states outdated and will technology take over our world? Will we be all Google citizens or Amazon-ians one day? Business leaders, techies and the brightest minds from Silicon Valley and Europe gathered on 18 January 2018 to discuss this year’s WorldWebForum provocative topic «end of nation». A vibrant and enthusiastic conference crowd celebrated disruptive technologies and business models.
Right at the beginning, Swiss Federal Councillor Johann Schneider-Ammann contradicted the conference’s slogan with a plea for a strong state. He underlined opportunities of the new technological possibilities and at the same time pointed out that with the fast-changing environment, increasing complexity and new technologies, lifelong learning is becoming a necessity. In the past, young people learned in school almost everything they needed for their later career. Today, the learning process is a continuous one and what was relevant two years ago, might be already outdated today. With digitization and automatization comes the fear of being replaced by robots. As Federal Councilor Schneider-Ammann admitted, he himself would not want to live on a planet with an 85% unemployment rate. He closed his statement by saying that as in every revolution, there might be losers. Therefore, for him, states are not outdated, but needed more than ever.
Mark Thompson, bestseller author and Senior Executive Coach, who worked amongst others for Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, asked how to stay fit in a digital age. In his keynote, he talked about “Productive Paranoia”. This is not a paranoia based on fear or hiding from reality – instead it is the willingness to look at competitors and what they are doing right. Secondly, Thompson pointed out that it is not safe to play it safe anymore, but to take risks and develop a culture of failure. In Switzerland, there is room for improvement and risk-taking. What still is missing is a Swiss culture of failure.
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Carissa Carter, director teaching and learning from Stanford University, was talking about empathy and responsibility and how to solve problems with design thinking. One of the Tesla’s early investors, Nancy Pfund, spoke about responsibility and impact investment. According to her, in the past, many people believed that it would be enough to force change in a society by donating money to political parties and politicians. After the Trump election, many more people recognized that this does not suffice anymore and started committing themselves to a positive change in society.
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Lino Guzzella, President of ETH Zurich and steering committee member of digitalswitzerland, gave a short insight into the challenges that a world leading university with a public mandate is facing in the digital era. Among others, he talked about Artificial Intelligence and told the public that he was asked once, whether an AI would have discovered Newton’s Law of Gravitation. His answer to that is simple: ‘If Newton had AI, he would have done that simply much faster and earlier. Artificial Intelligence is a fantastic development with a huge potential that will be just an additional tool to the capacity of humans. Guzzella sees this as a new dimension of human’s creativity space and is convinced that with bringing artificial and natural intelligence together, we will have a better chance to cope with the big challenges.
digitalswitzerland founder and CEO Ringier, Marc Walder, talked with Hugh Forrest, director South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival and Taavi Kotka, former Chief Information Officer for the Estonian Government, about global innovation hubs. The tiny post-soviet country Estonia has become a leading pioneer in digital governance. For Marc Walder this is the perfect example of how the digital change could be embraced. The panelists further talked about the need to feel the urgency: when the pain is enough, you need to change. Switzerland needs to get this sense of urgency to move forward.
During the panel, Marc Walder announced the date for the second Swiss Digital Day, which will take place on Thursday, 25th October 2018. So, mark this date in your agenda! We are committed to making this unique event even bigger and involve all of the Swiss regions and especially the public. Thus, we would like to hear what you are interested in seeing and experiencing during the Digital Day 2018. What are your questions on digitization? Your opinion is important and valuable to us. If you have any feedback, please write us here.
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Suzanne Di Bianca, Corporate Relations and Chief Philanthropy Officer at Salesforce, inspired with her talk to sign up for the 1:1:1 Pledge. Suzanne pioneered the 1:1:1 Pledge model of integrated corporate philanthropy, which dedicates 1% of Salesforce’s equity, employee time or product back into the community. For Di Bianca, sustainability in business is a must. It is not only about taking and taking from customers, but to give something back. The future belongs to the value-driven companies.
‘Technology is helping to enforce boundaries and at the same time makes them less strong’
Professor David J. Teece from Berkeley University elaborated on the conference’s prediction, ‘the end of nation.’ His conclusion to the question is that if we look back in history, we can assert that companies are way more fragile than nations. In general, the trend in international business has become that more and more companies are stateless and competition between states have increased. There is more complexity, competition and a deep uncertainty. Teece advise to handle uncertainty: what really matters is instinct and the need to align agility and strategy.
As the topic of the conference implied and what is observable on a global scale, tech companies are becoming powerful, even more powerful than certain states. Technology is disrupting business, politics and challenging state authorities. The question is how to realize the full potential of digitization and how to cushion its negative outcomes. To solve those big questions and problems, innovative and smart thinkers are needed and still: the nation state. With all these promising progresses and exciting perspectives ahead, we should not forget that we are still living in a physical and not digital world and in the end, what really counts is how we can use technologies to the advantages of not only a few, but to include everyone.
First, I would like to wish you a great start into 2018 and much success in achieving your New Year’s resolutions. Maybe some of you made some digital resolutions as well. For example, learning how to code, build a website, but also smaller things such as buying a smartphone or a tablet, buying an online-ticket or using Google Maps to find a location. Or you’re going for a big step in the digital world, like founding a new AI startup or raising money in an ICO.
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As in every revolution, live as we know it will be turned upside down. With digitization, the revolution is fast paced and extremely global, meaning less time to adapt, more chances to grow and become international, but also many more competitors from bigger countries and markets. An easy example of this is the smartphone as we know it today, which only turned ten years old recently. In this short amount of time, it turned whole industries upside down while also creating many new young but already very big companies such as UBER, Whatsapp, or Instagram, to name just a few.
Our mission at digitalswitzerland is rather broadly formulated to include the whole spectrum of digitization. We are convinced that there is no aspect of business, politics and society that will remain unaffected by digitization. Hence, only digital innovation in Switzerland can bring us forward.
To be more exact, digitalswitzerland acts as enabler and executioner at the same time. With our many initiatives, we try on the one hand to enable existing activities, bundle them and thus achieve a wider reach (e.g. educationdigital.ch). On the other hand, we execute initiatives such as the Digital Day and many others, where we invite the public together with our members and partners to start the important dialog on opportunities and challenges coming from digitization. Where are we heading? What are the challenges ahead? How can we best prepare to take advantage of the opportunities ahead?
In 2018 we will use our member base as an additional accelerator for our cause. Meaning, we will push the initiatives we started even further and aim for even more impact.
In 2018 we will use our member base as an additional accelerator for our cause. Meaning, we will push the initiatives we started even further and aim for even more impact.
Political Framework
With the Digital Action Plan, we aim to reach further milestones on the concrete implementation projects defined in 2017. We will use the knowledge gained from this profound work to address challenges and raise our concerns regarding the political framework. With regard to the political sphere, we consider the implementation of a sense of urgency concerning the digital revolution as even more important.
Education & Talent
In order to make Switzerland future ready, we need to give our children the right tools and prepare them now for a digital future. Our education system is definitely top-notch compared to other countries. However, we are convinced that we need to adapt that system or at least part of it. We have to invest our resources towards a modernized education system that is able to keep up with the fast-paced technological developments. Thus, coding and entrepreneurship must become a priority for the future curriculum. Furthermore, we need to invest not only in our children, but in all generations and make lifelong learning a new state of mind in Switzerland.
Startup Enablement
In the last two years, we helped accelerate the Swiss startup system with the Kickstart Accelerator and connected startups with investors and corporates. We learned that there are already many fantastic initiatives for Swiss startups to receive “seed money” (to start off). The gaps we are trying to close in 2018:
Thought Leadership
The digitalswitzerland challenge is one of our main initiatives and involves by far most of our members and partners. 2018 is about pushing the bets and roundtables ahead to more collaboration and ultimately bigger bets, in order to take full effect for all of Switzerland.
Public Dialog
The dialog with the Swiss public was started at last year’s digital day and we will keep it ongoing throughout 2018. We will involve SMEs, startups as well as schools in this dialog and will enable regional initiatives to bring more regions onto our platforms as well.
Internationalization
With all these impactful initiatives, we will invest some of our resources to receive increasing global attention as a digital innovation hub. In concrete terms, the goal is to aim very high with a few Swiss specific projects in order to receive international media coverage for what Switzerland is able to achieve when all relevant players work together towards the same goal.
With this prestigious format, we provide our members with insights from selected keynote speakers on various topics related to digital transformation. The aim is to connect decision-makers from industry, academia, business and politics to support and drive change. In this context, the Swiss Digital Summit makes an important contribution to help shape and tackle the complex effects of digitalisation in Switzerland.
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Education is rightly seen as a central pillar to drive the digital transformation. But within this broad field, what should we focus on in Switzerland? Here are three key points we want to shed light on: Future skills, the importance of a growing and diverse workforce and new learning paths for professional education. But let’s start with the question that keeps as busy these days:
Looking into the future through a lense of opportunities, we see digital transformation becoming a meaningful process, going beyond the digitisation of analogue processes towards a fundamental transformation that allows us to overcome critical challenges and problems. But this ‘future’ is not a given one: it will depend on how we shape it. In order to proactively co-create the digital world, we need to invest in the digital literacy of our society and the education of the next generation to create empowered citizens in a digital age. Are we today well equipped for this? In the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2021, Switzerland defended a strong position in 6th place, however, we should critically analyse these numbers and current trends. From an education perspective, we’re facing major challenges: not all digital competences are equally strong among the Swiss population and there are significant gaps between schools in terms of their digital culture, knowledge and processes. Secondly, we will see a dramatic growth in the need for a qualified workforce that cannot be met without a fundamental intervention of all stakeholders. And thirdly already today more than half of the Swiss workforce have a significant need for retraining.
Let’s deep dive into three pillars of action that will impact the following:
A double yes here. But let us not restrict the discussion on skills to digital competences. It’s important to look at comprehensive concepts of skills needed for the future. According to a report by McKinsey, the need for manual and physical skills, as well as basic cognitive ones, will decline, but demand for technological, social, emotional, and higher cognitive skills will grow. We would like to see the discussion on digital skills as part of the broader discussion on skills in the digital age. For example, while most of us will not be data scientists, many jobs will need some data literacy. Therefore a digital mindset and certain skills will be increasingly relevant and will impact the employability.
Understanding the importance of a skill-based Education and a future-oriented development of our skill sets is what led us to collaborate withPro Juventute and showcase 12 role STEM models.
Let them inspire you and the next generation…
Yes, “digital” does not always sound like it, but for the transformation we are in, we urgently need the hands and minds of well qualified professionals. We will see a growing demand for ICT professionals in Switzerland. In this sector alone, we’re expecting a skill shortage of 35,000 specialists by 2028 and many traditionally less digital professions will require new skill sets. The in-depth study produced by the Institute for Economic Studies (IWSB) shows the concerning shortage of skilled workers and highlights that according to current forecasts the future demand for ICT specialists cannot be met either by immigration or by the Swiss education system.
The skill shortage also can not and should not be filled by a narrow group of people: diversity is key. However, let us challenge the take on diversity as a narrative of potential workforce and productivity alone. A diverse workforce composes a cornerstone for creating an inclusive digitalisation and equal participation in the digital world, allowing us to overcome biases and barriers. Therefore it’s imperative to challenge stereotypes of more technical professions and break the deep rooted gender bias. With only 11.43%, there are not enough women in STEM and this must be a priority. Overcoming gender bias must start at an early age at home and in schools and continue at the workplace.
Continuing education is well established in Switzerland, but the question is “who is participating?”. Due to the trend that highly qualified people are more active in lifelong learning than less qualified, the gaps in our society are growing.
In order to solve the skill shortage, we must bring flexibility into the education structures and increase the opportunities and access for career changes.
And on a systemic level, we need to increase investment in apprenticeships, and establish a robust strategy for career changers in Switzerland.
Final sentence:
Switzerland is already well positioned in many areas that are central for the digital economy, however this transformation is moving rapidly while education and lifelong learning systems need long response times to change, a time we can not effort.
Sense of urgency….
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