Welcome to Week 3

Hello again, and welcome to Week 3 of Higher Education 4.0: Certifying your future.

We are pleased that you have joined us once more, on what is our final week of the masterclass. Last week, we explored the central topic of micro-credentials in some depth.

This week, we will shift the focus to another critical topic, new forms of pedagogy for new times. The emergence of Industry 4.0 has given rise to the concept of Higher Education 4.0, which has in turn gotten us thinking about Pedagogy 4.0 and the future of learning. You might like to start this week by glancing through The Future of Learning Report published in February 2021 by FutureLearn. Let us know what you think of this report?

We don’t have space this week to explore all of the interesting threads contained in the report, so we have chosen to anchor our discussion of Pedagogy 4.0 in the language of “authentic pedagogies” and the notion of a “learner-centred” approach. A hybrid mix of these two elements is predicated on three interwoven assumptions:

• Authentic pedagogies following learner-centred principles offer considerable potential in terms of responding to the future skills agenda.
• Such pedagogies anchored in real-life challenges are well-suited to supporting new flexible life-long learning pathways and recognition models promoting the co-construction of micro-credentials.
• The adoption of learner-centred, authentic pedagogical approaches helps to connect the classroom to the real-world, and provides greater opportunity to exploit the benefits of digitalisation in reimagining teaching, learning and assessment.

In the next step, we add a little more flesh to some of the ideas and concepts underpinning this week’s topic.