Innovation in Education Systems

Most careers stall for 1 reason: People stop learning. They wait for the company to invest in them. Or for their manager to set up training. High performers, on the other hand, don't wait. They treat learning as part of the job - Even when the workday ends. Not endless study, Just small, repeatable habits - that compound. Here are 11 that make lifelong learning automatic: 1. Keep a "Questions" Note on Your Phone ↳Anytime you wonder about something, jot it down. Research one nightly 2. Replace the Doomscroll ↳Replace 30 minutes of dead scroll time with a course or podcast 3. Teach What You Learn ↳Write a short post, Loom, or explain it to a peer 4. Reverse Engineer Great Work ↳Take an article, pitch, or deck you admire and break down why it works 5. Shadow Someone 2 Steps Ahead ↳Don't ask for mentorship - just observe 6. Then, DO Ask for Mentorship ↳Say: "I admire how well you do X - would you mind coaching me on that?" 7. Run Tiny Experiments ↳Pick one skill and test it live this week 8. Force Repetitions by Tracking ↳For writing, word count. For sales, calls made. Progress is fuel 9. Do "Learning Sprints" ↳One focused topic for 30 days, then switch 10. Revisit Old Material ↳The second read often hits deeper than the first 11. End Your Day with Reflection ↳One line: "What did I learn today?" The compounding effect is real. Small reps + every day = Mastery. Agree? --- ♻️ Share this to inspire other life-long learners. And follow me George Stern for more personal growth content.

Good guidance from the U.S. Department of Education to developers of education technology; focus on shared responsibility, managing risks, and bias mitigation. 🛡️ One think I really like about this document is the use-case specific guidance and examples (clearly there were industry contributors that helped facilitate that). 🎓 Key Guidance for Developers of AI in Education -------------------------------------------------- 🔍 Build Trust: Collaborate with educators, students, and stakeholders to ensure fairness, transparency, and privacy in AI systems. 🛡️ Manage Risks: Identify and mitigate risks like algorithmic bias, data privacy issues, and potential harm to underserved communities. 📊 Show Evidence: Use evidence-based practices to prove your system's impact, including testing for equitable outcomes across diverse groups. ⚖️ Advance Equity: Address discrimination risks, ensure accessibility, and comply with civil rights laws. 🔒 Ensure Safety: Protect data, prevent harmful content, and uphold civil liberties. 💡 Promote Transparency: Communicate clearly about how AI works, its limitations, and its risks. 🤝 Embed Ethics: Incorporate human-centered design and accountability throughout development, ensuring educators and students are part of the process. BABL AI has done a lot of work in the edtech space, and I can see an opportunity for us to provide assurance that some of these guidelines are being followed by companies. #edtech #AIinEducation #aiassurance Khoa Lam, Jeffery Recker, Bryan Ilg, Jovana Davidovic, Ali Hasan, Borhane Blili-Hamelin, PhD, Navrina Singh, GoGuardian, Khan Academy, TeachFX, EDSAFE AI Alliance, Patrick Sullivan

Spider's silk is 5x stronger than steel. Students just built a Camping House with it. Traditional programs graduate 89% of engineers who've never touched real materials. These students built 10 structures in 6 months using nature's blueprints. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵: ↳ Theoretical calculations on whiteboards ↳ Computer simulations without context   ↳ Zero hands-on building experience ↳ Graduates who design what can't be built 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 Students design, budget, and physically construct functional camping structures. Every beam they place teaches load distribution. Every joint they weld reveals material behavior. Every budget overrun teaches project economics. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗣𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆: ↳ Structural analysis through physical feedback ↳ Project management with real deadlines ↳ Cross-functional team collaboration ↳ Resource optimization under constraints ↳ Rapid prototyping and iteration cycles The wisdom flows both ways. When students build in harmony with the landscape, they absorb lessons no simulation can teach. Companies report these graduates solve problems 60% faster - they've learned to think like nature's master builders. 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗘𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵: Each camping house becomes a living laboratory. Students learn to read the land's story - how wind shapes design, how water flows direct foundation work, how sunlight transforms spaces. They're not just building structures - they're crafting relationships between humans and habitat. 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀: 1 hands-on project = 3 semesters of theory come alive 10 structures built = a new generation of earth-conscious innovators 100 programs blooming = an engineering revolution rooted in nature's wisdom The result? Graduates who don't just design buildings - they craft spaces that honor both human needs and natural systems. Follow me for stories where innovation grows from the ground up, not just from theory. Share if you believe the best engineering solutions are written in the language of nature.

🎯 UNESCO ’s new report “AI and the Future of Education” explores how AI is reshaping learning – and why this matters for the future of skills and VET. ✅ Here are the key takeaways: 🔍 Why it matters: ▪️It’s not just about technology – it’s about ethics, inclusion, pedagogy, and policy ▪️AI is no longer a passive tool – it’s becoming an active agent in education: tutors, assessors, even “companions”. ▪️This shift challenges what it means to learn, teach, and assess – raising big questions for TVET and lifelong learning systems. ▪️Equity gap alert: while 1/3 of humanity is offline, access to cutting-edge AI is concentrated among those with resources and linguistic advantage. 🌐 Main Themes & Insights 1️⃣ Inclusive AI futures: ▪️Urgent need to ensure AI does not deepen divides of gender, language, and access. ▪️Locally driven, participatory approaches for Global South and underrepresented learners. 2️⃣ Rethinking pedagogy & assessment: ▪️Hyper-personalization risks isolating learners and weakening teacher roles. ▪️Generative AI disrupts traditional exams – time to shift to continuous, formative, competency-based assessment. 3️⃣ Teachers at the center: ▪️AI should augment, not replace teachers. ▪️Emphasis on teacher AI literacy, co-design of tools, and safeguarding the relational core of education. 4️⃣ Ethics & governance: ▪️Build ethics of care by design – inclusion, transparency, accountability from the start. ▪️Address risks of data privacy, algorithmic bias, and concentration of power. 5️⃣ AI as a geopolitical and policy challenge: ▪️AI is now part of statecraft and global competition – education policy must adapt. ▪️From linear implementation to policy-as-learning – systems need agility and evidence-driven experimentation. 💡 For the VET community: ▪️ AI literacy is no longer optional – for learners, teachers, and managers. ▪️Work-based learning + AI tools can transform skills development – but only with ethical guardrails and human-centred design. ▪️The future of VET = blending technical skills, critical thinking, and digital responsibility. 👉 Read the full UNESCO report to explore how we can shape human-centred, inclusive AI futures in education – and why VET must lead the way. #AIinEducation #FutureOfSkills #VET #EthicalAI #LifelongLearning EfVET European Association of Institutes for Vocational Training (EVBB) European Vocational Training Association - EVTA EUproVET EURASHE eucen EU Employment and Skills Cedefop European Training Foundation OECD Education and Skills International Labour Organization WorldSkills International World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics (WFCP) UNESCO-UNEVOC IEFP - Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional Agência Nacional Erasmus+ Educação e Formação Agencia Nacional SEPIE Erasmus Estudiar en España Teresa e Alexandre Soares dos Santos - Iniciativa Educação ENAIP Veneto

📸✨ Education abroad delivers the ultimate Instagram moments, but the real benefit endures for the duration of one's career. In addition to epic photos and unforgettable stories, students can also return with contextual and cultural agility—a powerful blend of human skills like humility, resilience, and curiosity. These are the skills that will help future-proof their careers. There’s a caveat, though: this kind of growth isn’t automatic. The international experience must be intentionally designed to foster development. Without that structure, the transformation risks staying at the surface level. In the recent AACSB Insights article, Melissa Torres, Marissa Lombardi and I highlight three key features that should be intentionally integrated into education abroad programs to foster development: ✅ Stretch: Students should be immersed in unfamiliar cultural settings that challenge their preconceived notions and encourage them to navigate new social and professional norms. ✅ Connect: Building meaningful relationships with individuals from different cultures helps students adjust their communication, leadership, and teamwork styles, enhancing their interpersonal skills. ✅ Reflect: Encouraging students to reflect on their experiences allows them to recognize and understand the deeper cultural differences that may not be immediately apparent, fostering humility and resilience. Check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/e453bs4J The article underscores that these experiences must be intentionally designed to promote personal and professional growth. Without this, the potential benefits of studying abroad may not be fully realized. #GlobalLeadership #CulturalAgility #EducationAbroad #TransformativeLearning #FutureOfWork #InterculturalCompetence The Forum on Education Abroad Skiilify

Have you ever participated in a cross-cultural simulation? Our students at Imperial Business School have been engaging in a cultural simulation as part of Values Day. Cross-cultural simulation activities require participants (divided into 2 groups) to role play and learn one of two assigned cultural norms. They then send groups of visitors to each other’s cultures to engage and interact, with a debrief to their own group after each visit. At the end of the session, we debrief and discuss the following questions: ❓What was it like to visit the other culture? ❓What was it like to have people visit your culture? ❓What adjectives would you use to describe the other culture? Wondering what the commons takeaways for students from engaging in this are? Well, participants expressed… 👉🏽 how quickly they formed an in-group with people of their own culture. They had a short period of time to learn their cultural norms and even within such a short time, they bonded and felt the need to preserve their own cultural norms. 👉🏽 how isolating and uncomfortable it felt to be part of the out-group visiting the other culture when they didn’t know what the expected norms were. 👉🏽 how after every group that visited the other culture, their descriptions of the other culture progressively moved from being descriptive generalizations to judgmental stereotypes. This teaching activity provides an effective way to get participants to reflect deeply on how cultural norms form, how they are upheld and what inclusion/ exclusion looks and feels like. One thing is very clear - participants have a lot of fun engaging in this activity! Energy levels are high ⚡️ and reflections are deep 🧠! And that is exactly what educators hope an effective teaching intervention achieves 🙌🏾 ❓Can you relate to some of the participants takeaways as you have engaged with a new culture of a different country/ organisation/ institution? #FridayFocus #IBValues Sankalp Chaturvedi Maria Farkas Billee-Jean Smith

The antidote to academic dishonesty isn’t stricter monitoring—it’s deeper engagement. After more than 30 years in education, I’ve learned that students cheat when they see no purpose in their learning. But when we bridge the gap between curriculum and real-world application, something remarkable happens: students become invested in their own growth. Key strategies that work: • Connect every lesson to tangible outcomes • Share stories of how past students used these skills • Invite industry professionals to show practical applications • Create projects that solve real community problems In this way, you will have students who are too engaged in authentic learning to consider shortcuts or cheating with AI. How are you making learning meaningful in your field? I’d love to hear your approaches. #EducationalLeadership #StudentEngagement #TeachingStrategy #ProfessionalDevelopment #EducationInnovation

What if an online course didn’t just teach innovation but operated like a product studio? That’s the design ethos behind New Product Development, a fully asynchronous course I am developing within the Master of Business Management at the University of Auckland. It’s not just about learning innovation theory. It’s about practising innovation as a way of learning and doing so in a way that fits the realities of working professionals. The course unfolds through six studio sprints, each aligned with a real-world product development stage: 🔹Framing opportunities 🔹Discovering unmet needs 🔹Designing value 🔹Building prototypes 🔹Go to market strategy 🔹a final innovation portfolio and pitch Every sprint includes hands-on toolkits, reflection prompts, and optional peer critique. Assessments are artefacts: opportunity maps, personas, low-fidelity prototypes, validation plans, and strategic pitches. These artefacts mirror what students might produce in a product team, innovation unit, or consultancy. But what makes this possible online? I’ve reconceived Canvas LMS not as a content repository but as a virtual studio: 🔹Sprint dashboards replace linear modules. 🔹Toolkits and templates scaffold creative work. 🔹Discussions become “crit walls” for sharing work-in-progress. 🔹Reflection journals trace how students make decisions in uncertain contexts. The pedagogy draws from studio-based learning, design thinking, and agile methodologies but adapted for asynchronous learners. This means no Zoom fatigue, no live workshops, and no assuming everyone’s working on the same schedule. Instead, students build momentum through iterative, flexible engagement directly tied to their own industries, roles, and contexts. Why does this matter? Because the students in this course are not full-time students—they are full-time professionals. Product managers, consultants, public servants, engineers, and social innovators. For them, learning must integrate into the flow of work, not interrupt it. Studio pedagogy allows that. It invites them to explore workplace-relevant challenges, use generative AI ethically and creatively, and produce outputs that can feed back into their own projects. It’s one thing to talk about lifelong learning. It’s another to build courses that make it practical, applied, and meaningful. That’s the promise of studio-based, asynchronous design. I believe it’s a model with broad relevance, far beyond product development. #OnlineLearning #StudioPedagogy #LearningDesign #CanvasLMS #InnovationEducation #ProductManagement #HigherEducation #WorkIntegratedLearning #AsynchronousLearning #EdTech #AIinEducation #Universities

Odisha shows the country what happens when learning moves beyond the classroom and textbooks—into real life.   Guess what? In a pilot program across 80 government-run schools, over 11,000 tribal students were introduced to project-based learning—yes, learning by doing. From recording the daily routines of local weavers to huddling over handmade charts of village haats—stalls, prices, and timings sketched in rich detail—it was learning rooted in real life.  — and the results were powerful: 📚 53% improvement in Odia literacy 📚 +70% improvement in social sciences between two summative assessments  📚 87% of teachers reported a positive shift in student engagement and learning  This wasn't just an “intervention.” It was an invitation — for learners to lead, apply, explore, and engage with the world around them. As someone, who is deeply engaged in experiential youth oriented education experience, this reinforces what many grassroot educators and changemakers already know When learning is local, participatory, and purpose-driven, it transforms lives. India’s learning future lies not in more rote learning, but in more relevance, agency & hands on learning. Have you seen a school, community, or classroom reimagine learning in ways that worked? What would it look like if every learner had access to project-based, community-rooted learning? PS: The Times Of India For those curious about the data, I’ve shared the article I referenced in the comments below. #LearningFutures #EducationInnovation #ProjectBasedLearning #TribalEducation #India #SystemsThinking #YouthEmpowerment #InclusiveLearning

The most effective content strategy isn't about creating more content - it's about capturing unique expertise. In every company, there are subject matter experts with deep industry knowledge. Yet most of this valuable insight never makes it into content because experts don't have time to write. I learned this firsthand while building content strategies across multiple companies. The solution wasn't to pressure experts to write more - it was to change how we captured their knowledge. Through structured interviews, we found experts could share complex insights in 10-15 minutes of conversation. This led to developing a methodical process: ↳ Create detailed interview templates ↳ Focus on real customer challenges ↳ Prepare specific talking points ↳ Extract practical examples ↳ Document success stories ↳ Include specific results This approach produced unique content that stood out from AI-generated articles. Google recognized these pieces contained original insights, not just rewritten information. The key was capturing authentic expertise through conversation rather than forcing experts to write from scratch. By making it easier for experts to share their knowledge, we created content that truly resonated with our audience and met Google's EEAT guidelines. What methods have you found effective for capturing expert knowledge in your organization? *** ♻️ Like this? Please repost. ➡️ Follow me for daily coaching.