The 60-Year Curriculum

New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy

Christopher Dede, John Richards, Christopher J. Dede, John Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000050295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

The 60-Year Curriculum explores models and strategies for lifelong learning in an era of profound economic disruption and reinvention. Over the next half-century, globalization, regional threats to sustainability, climate change, and technologies such as artificial intelligence and data mining will transform our education and workforce sectors. In turn, higher education must shift to offer every student life-wide opportunities for the continuous upskilling they will need to achieve decades of worthwhile employability. This cutting-edge book describes the evolution of new models—covering computer science, inclusive design, critical thinking, civics, and more—by which universities can increase learners' trajectories across multiple careers from mid-adolescence to retirement. Stakeholders in workforce development, curriculum and instructional design, lifelong learning, and higher and continuing education will find a unique synthesis offering valuable insights and actionable next steps.

1

Introduction

Reconceptualizing Higher Education and Lifelong Learning in the Era of the Synergistic Digital Economy

CHRISTOPHER J. DEDE

Defining the “60-Year Curriculum”

Teenagers’ serious thinking about a career begins by middle adolescence, gradually moving beyond visions of being a rock star or a professional athlete to develop realistic conceptions about their first occupational role (Porfeli & Lee, 2012). Looking ahead, the average lifespan of children born in 2020 is projected to be 90–100 years (Gratton & Scott, 2016), so many current students will need to work until their mid-70s to have enough savings for retirement or some other form of post-work life. In progressing through about 60 years of employment, they will face not only evolving jobs requiring expanding skillsets but also multiple careers as some occupations disappear and new roles appear in workplaces shaped by globalization, environmental crises, and artificial intelligence (AI) (Dede, 2018). As a result of these developments, society must prepare today’s young people for six decades of career growth (e.g., moving from student teacher to lead teacher) and career change (e.g., moving from automobile welding supervisor to high school science teacher) followed by retirement. To fulfill their responsibilities, educators at every level are faced with the increasing challenge of developing young people’s capacity for unceasing reinvention to face an uncertain and changing workplace and for taking on occupations that do not yet exist.

Dr. Gary Matlin at UC-Irvine coined the term the “60-Year Curriculum” (60YC) to refer to continuing education centered on lifelong learning about occupational changes and transitions (Branon, 2018). This book describes a 60YC initiative sponsored by Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education (DCE) and focuses on a transformational evolution of higher education toward novel strategies to enable adults to add skills—via formal instruction, employment, and daily life—as their occupational and personal context evolves and shifts. On-the-job learning is familiar to most people; many of us learn to take on tasks that fall outside of our initial academic training. For example, as a professor in learning technologies I have had to reinvent my teaching and research every few years because of advances in digital technologies and globalization. Young adults today face challenges in finding stable jobs that provide benefits and upward mobility for their occupational role. Now, nations face challenges with continuing employability greater than at any prior time in history. I tell my students to prepare simultaneously for their first two careers, determining which is a better foundation as an initial job while building skills that enable shifting to new work-roles in a future neither they nor I can imagine.

The 60YC is often described in occupational terms, but our initiative is based on a broader educational mission. As argued by Sizer and Sizer:

High schools have long had three core tasks: to prepare young people for the world of work; to prepare them to use their minds well, to think deeply and in an informed way; and to prepare them to be thoughtful citizens and decent human beings.

(1999, p. 10)

In the 21st century, work, civic participation, and family life rely heavily on the ability to collaborate, mentor, and network. Doing these activities well requires moral and ethical capacities that foster mutual benefits. In particular, low-cost videoconferencing and social media have expanded the toolset and skillset required for sharing, co-creating, and negotiating with others, including people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds whom one may never meet face-to-face (Fadel, Trilling, & Bialik, 2015). Thus, all three core tasks posited by Sizer and Sizer are important aspects of what educators must inculcate and evolve via the 60YC.

Achieving the goals of the 60YC requires rethinking the objectives of education. The importance of this shift was highlighted in a 2012 report by the US National Research Council (NRC), Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century, which posits that flexibility, creativity, initiative, innovation, intellectual openness, collaboration, leadership, and conflict resolution are essential for each person (2012). The report argued that cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal dimensions of knowledge and skills are best developed in combination. Table 1.1 categorizes a broad range of knowledge and skills vital in the 21st century, grouped by these dimensions.

TABLE 1.1 Dimensions of Knowledge and Skills

Cognitive Outcomes	Intra-personal Outcomes	Inter-personal Outcomes
Cognitive processes & strategies	Intellectual openness	Teamwork & collaboration
Knowledge	Work ethic & conscientiousness	Leadership
Creativity	Positive core self-evaluation	Communication
Critical thinking	Metacognition	Responsibility
Information literacy	Flexibility	Conflict resolution
Reasoning	Initiative
Innovation	Appreciation of diversity

Some of these skills are seldom included in current educational objectives; others are under-emphasized; and still others have changed due to advances in digital technologies (e.g., filtering information has become more important than finding information). Moreover, and in contrast to industrial-style multiple choice and short-answer testing, achieving and assessing mastery now requires the ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world contexts, demonstrating proficiency via effective, authentic performances. Accenture (2017) summarized and synthesized a variety of frameworks for 21st-century skills.

A report from the UK-based innovation foundation Nesta predicted the nature of work in developed countries in 2030 when the pupils currently starting elementary school begin their careers (Bakhshi, Downing, Osborne, & Schneider, 2017). Its forecast spans only the initial stage of these students’ employment, yet the report describes a future—a little more than a decade away—quite different from the present. Political, environmental, and economic instability are driving rapid, chaotic shifts in work and society. Given this rate of change, education’s role must be long-term capacity building—enhancing students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal skills for a lifetime of flexible adaptation and creative innovation—as well as providing short-term preparation so that they are college-or-career ready. The Nesta report stressed that current educational objectives overemphasize the acquisition of knowledge and underemphasize the mastery of generalizable skills for lifelong employability. Similar to the 2012 NRC report, the skills Nesta highlighted include fluency of ideas, social perceptiveness, systems evaluation, originality, judgment, and decision-making. Nesta emphasized educators must raise aspirations for sophisticated educational outcomes and prepare all students—not only an elite few—to reach ambitious, individual proficiencies in these skills.

A recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report (2018) complemented the NRC and Nesta studies by emphasizing personal well-being, which goes beyond income, wealth, jobs, and earnings to stress equitable access to health, civic engagement, social connections, education, security, life satisfaction, and the environment. This OECD report described knowledge and skills people need for lifelong employability but adds an emphasis on attitudes and values, such as creating new value, reconciling tensions and dilemmas, and taking responsibility through personal agency. This formulation of what students need has less emphasis on cognitive factors and more on intrapersonal (including moral and ethical dimensions) and interpersonal capabilities. These align with Sizer and Sizer’s goals for educational outcomes that produce thoughtful citizens and decent human beings.

Moving beyond Preparation for One’s First Job

Society must help workers who have exhausted their resources for formal education and are faced with ongoing occupational change (Rodrik, 2017). However, the above reports are focused primarily on preparing students at the start of their working lives, getting them ready for their first career, and building transferable skills for future career growth and career change. For that reason, the 60YC initiative centers on the least understood aspect of the lifelong learning and employability challenge: What are the organizational and societal mechanisms by which people can upskill later in their lives when they do not have the time or resources for a full-time academic experience that results in a degree or certificate? Creating these mechanisms requires developing novel services for adults who are learning while working—the focus of this book—and then applying insights from the new organizations delivering those services to the related tasks of improving preparation for initial jobs and of having a satisfying life after retirement.

Because the digitalization of the economy is unprecedented historically, an uncertainty not addressed in these reports is the extent to which advances in technology will create as many jobs as they eliminate (Frey & Osborne, 2013). If not, then new challenges will arise in ensuring that people who are structurally unemployed have adequate incomes and meaningful opportunities outside of paid work.

Adult learners need educational opportunities and stackable credentials not limited to formal degrees and certifications. Thus far, attempts to address learning post-matriculation have centered on what individual institutions might do. For example, in 2015 Stanford developed an aspirational vision called “Open Loop University” (Stanford2025, n.d.), and Georgia Tech has released its report Deliberate Innovation, Lifetime Education (Georgia Tech Commission on Creating the Next in Education, 2018). The hallmarks of these and similar models center on providing a lifelong commitment to alumni that includes periodic opportunities to upskill through services offered by the institution: micro-credentials, mini-mester classes, and credit for accomplishments in life; personalized advising and coaching as new challenges and opportunities emerge; and blended-learning experiences with distributed worldwide availability. Some of these services will require partnerships and collaborations with organizations outside of academia that have complementary strengths and missions (e.g., mentoring the transition to a new job or occupation).

Further, the educational emphasis in college shifts to acquisition of competencies (skills, knowledge, and abilities) rather than disciplinary topics and knowledge communication—the student’s goal is to develop a suite of skills and strategic attitudes to make a difference in the world rather than just attaining formal academic certification to meet the immediate requirements of a particular occupational role. Beyond these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Reconceptualizing Higher Education and Lifelong Learning in the Era of the Synergistic Digital Economy
• 2 Education, Age, and the Machine
• 3 Are We Ready for the Jobs that the Digital Economy Will Offer to Us?
• 4 Employing the 60-Year Curriculum as a Strategic Approach
• 5 Creating the Next in Higher Education at Georgia Tech
• 6 Known for Whom We Include: Designing Models for Lifelong Education at Arizona State University
• 7 Market-Driven Education: The Imperative for Responsive Design and Application
• 8 The Role and Potential of University-Based Executive Education and Professional Development Programs in the 60-Year Curriculum: A Case Example of an Intensive Residential Program for Higher Education Leaders
• 9 Implementing 60-Year Curriculum Learning at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education
• 10 Assessment of the Current State of the 60-Year Curriculum and Research Agenda for the Future
• Notes on Contributors
• Index