This paper traces the evolution of education from the stone age to the agricultural age, to the industrial age, and the Information and AI Age. In the hunter-gatherer stage, the master hunter taught the hunting tricks to his offspring. In the agricultural age, methods of farming were passed on from one generation to the other by the head of the family. However, the industrial age led to the invention of a new form of education, called mass education. Unfortunately, mass education with its regimentation that killed creativity and individuality has become less relevant today. It has to give way to customized education that promotes creativity and diversity among the students. This paper highlights the impact of technology in making education flexible and customized to individual needs. Robots are likely to replace teachers in certain areas. New concepts in education, such as the Just-in-time education, Hop-on & hop-off model of education, Uberization of education, borderless education, modern Gurukul, and Micro lessons are also discussed in this article. Finally, the changing role of teachers and strategies for teachers to remain relevant are discussed.

E Education has to be in sync with society and the life that the learner leads. Present-day education is far removed from the nature of jobs available and societal needs. Different studies point to the fact that close to 80 percent of engineering graduates are unemployable (*See Footnote 1). Higher education institutions should also serve a public purpose moving beyond narrow self-serving concerns, as well as enforce social change to reflect the nature of a society that its members desire (Shapiro *See Footnote 2).

Our education system neither serves the individual need nor that of the society. Something is fundamentally wrong with present-day education. In this paper, we shall attempt to track the changes in education over a while and attempt to build possible scenarios of future education.

Evolution of Education
During the agricultural age, the past repeated itself into the future. In such a society, the most sensible way to prepare a child was to arm him with the skills of the past- for these were precisely the same skills he would need in the future. The head of the family passed on the practical techniques along with the value systems to his/her offspring. Knowledge was transmitted, not by specialists concentrated in schools, but through the family, religious institutions, and skilled artisans & warriors. Learners and teachers were dispersed throughout the entire community. Education was decentralized just as the work was carried out in distributed agricultural farms.

However, the Industrial age disrupted the stable life of the agricultural age. Knowledge of the agricultural age was not relevant for the industrial age. It demanded skills that neither family nor religion could, by themselves, provide. It forced an upheaval in the value system. For example, punctuality is an important discipline needed during the industrial age. If you're on an assembly line and you're late, you mess up the work of 10,000 people down the line. Out in the farm fields, on the other hand, if you go out with your family to pick a crop, and you come ten minutes late, your uncle covers for you and it’s no big deal. Consequently, the mass education system was born which is characterized by regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid system of seating, grouping, grading, and marking, coupled with the authoritarian role of the teachers (Alvin Tofler *See Footnote 3).

In school, when the bells ring children must be inside the classrooms. They march from class to class when the bells ring again. And many people take a yellow bus to school which is a preparation for commuting to work. And you do rote and repetitive work as you would do on an assembly line. This worked well for the industrial age. Though we are amid the Information and AI age, we continue to follow the industrial age model of Assembly line production of graduates. We continue to teach the same subjects for years. However, businesses change at lightning speed due to rapidly changing technology, consumer preferences, and competitive pressures. Education is moving at snail’s speed.

We are living in a rapidly changing society that makes knowledge and skills obsolete in a very short time. In the next 10 years, close to 80 percent of the future jobs are going to be new to the world, which will require new skills. Hence the type of graduates needed in the future are people with `fast forgetting’ ability, ‘learning-to-learn’ skills and ‘cope-ability’ and an ability to adapt to an ever-changing world. The single most important quality for the leaders and organizations would be 'agility’. Past trends are of no use in forecasting the future. They should act like film Directors who assemble talent for a project and move on to new ones on completion. As they are shooting for one film (project) they should have the script ready for the new one. Leaders will move from one project to another in a rapidly changing environment. Each project will require skills and experiences hitherto unheard of by the leader and the team.

Except for the core team (like the Director will have his favorite music director, cameraman, and Assistants), most employees will be hired on an hourly or piece-rate basis. The term used for this new breed of employees is called "techno-coolies". Metrics and systems need to be developed to manage these new breeds of employees and leaders. Consequently, the schools of the future, if they wish to facilitate adaptation later in life, will have to experiment with far more varied arrangements. Classes with several teachers -and a single student; classes with several teachers and a group of students; students organized into temporary task forces and project teams; students shifting from group work to individual or independent work and back-all these and their permutations will need to be employed to, give the student some advance taste of the experience he will face later on when he begins to move through the impermanent organizational geography of the AI age.

Just in time Education
Education in the new world is shifting from the pipeline model to the platform model. In a pipeline model, the students are admitted in batches and processed in assembly lines, and delivered as uniform finished products. In the platform model, the content will be on a platform and delivery will be customized to the needs of the individual students in modules of a few hours to any number of years. In the AI age, it does not make sense to complete education in a fixed number of years. They would acquire knowledge as and when needed throughout their lifetime.

Educational Institutions should rethink the batch processing model and develop customized education models to suit individual needs. Typical classroom models will give way to hybrid learning models. Students should be able to learn anytime from anywhere. Typically, colleges should be open 24 hours a day. Colleges have to be completely integrated into the community, to take advantage of the skills in the community. So, the boundaries of the Universities should become porous to let local businesses set up offices inside the varsity campus.

Impact of Technology
Availability of information has unquestionably empowered education. Technologies like satellite communication, telecommunication bandwidths, the Internet, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have brought information within a student’s and a teacher’s reach. There are contents made by the best of the teachers available for anyone with a mobile phone and an internet connection. This undermines the role of teachers as “all knowers”.

The full benefits of technology can be reaped only when education is made customized and personalized. Students should have the flexibility to take any course, anywhere at any time of their choice. This I call the Hop-on and Hop-off Model of Education.

Hop-on and Hop-off Model of Education
Degrees should become less relevant and the relevant credits earned should only be counted for employment. One should keep earning credits as long as a person is alive. Learning is a lifelong activity. Just as one eats whenever he/she feels hungry, one should earn additional credits every time a person feels low on knowledge and skills. To facilitate this level of flexibility to students they should not be attached to a single institute. For example, a student wanting an MBA should have the flexibility to take his marketing courses from one Institute and analytics courses from another Institute or college. There should not be any start date or end date for any of the programs. Though this is already happening informally, there is no organized framework that has been set up so far. The Government of India did formulate a National Skill Qualification Framework way back in 2013, though it has not found widespread application. This was done to promote lifelong learning and skill development. It envisages multiple entries and exits between vocational education, skill training, general education, technical education, and job markets. One of the key needs for NSQF as given in the report is, “The credit accumulation and transfer system that will be integrated with the NSQF will allow people to move between education, vocational training and work at different stages in their lives according to their needs and convenience. It will be possible for a student to leave the education domain, get some practical experience in the industry and return to studies to gain qualifications to progress higher in his chosen Career”.

One should be able to get on to the education mode whenever it is needed and go back to work after acquiring the additional competencies. The education can be delivered online, off-line, or in the blended model. The student could do the course on the full-time mode or do it on a part-time basis while in employment. The courses have to be modularized so that a student can take only as much as he/she needs. For example, one should be able to do just one credit of a course or even go up to five or more credits on a subject in one stretch.

Micro Lessons and Modern Gurukul
Micro lessons assume greater importance in this changed scenario. Micro lessons are bite-sized modules that focus only on key elements or messages of a learning topic. Unlike traditional modules that take hours to get completed, micro-lessons are designed for self-paced learning that can be completed only within five to ten minutes. Micro Teaching is a proven method so you can micro-teach to the best of your abilities and ultimately drive better learning results. This will allow students to sample the courses and decide whether to go further or move on to something different. The learning management system should allow the student to assemble micro-lessons from various courses and make his courses. Instead of the current course-based credit system, we should move to a micro-lesson-based credit system that will make education flexible and completely customizable to the individual needs of the students.

If there are prerequisites, they should be set by taking every micro lesson as a unit not at the course level. If a teacher is a specialist in an area, he/she can go on adding more and more units of micro lessons to his course so that that itself could become a program, like MBA in Blockchain or even Ph.D. in a niche area. Students will move on to other courses at different stages. But one or two may stick on with the teacher or the guru for the rest of their life. This I call the 'modern gurukul’ system of learning.

Uberization of Education
We can draw inspiration from the taxi service industry. It was fragmented. The service quality differed from one service provider to another. The prices varied a lot. There was a huge mismatch between demand and supply. All these were before the entry of aggregators like OLA and Uber. A new word called Uberization has entered the dictionary to connote the conversion of existing jobs and services into discrete tasks that can be requested on-demand; the adoption of the business model used by the taxi service Uber. Unlike the Uber model where there are primarily three elements only there – the driver with his taxi, customer, and the platform. The platform combines real-time data, mobile payments, and dynamic pricing to offer on-demand service at the door-steps of the consumers. In education, the service provider is the teacher with his/her knowledge of certain subjects or a robot equipped with the subject knowledge. The delivery could happen face to face or online. For face-to-face to happen the present system will not work. There must be vertical and horizontal linkages between institutions and programs to make this hop-on and hop-off education a reality. Since the Institutions have already got on to the technology platform, it may not be a tall order to establish these linkages. However, some new Institutions have to be born to certify and manage these interinstitutional agreements.
Since the quality and standards are going to be different in different institutions, we will need a new institution that will give credit equivalence across colleges and courses. This will employ experts who will assess courses and establish credit equivalence.

New Institutions will be born that would do counseling and offer advice on courses and colleges that a student can choose. Artificial intelligence-based Apps will also come to market that would do exactly what these counseling institutions offer. Colleges and universities will start specializing in specific subjects. Colleges which are the best for each subject will be able to reach out to a large number of students – both through physical and virtual classrooms. This way the efficiencies of the entire education system will dramatically be improved. Many of the also-ran institutions will close down.

Uberization will happen in the education system too. There will be regional clusters formed which will function as one single institution offering many different courses. There could also be specialized clusters that offer specialized courses. These cluster brands that aggregate courses and offer different packages to students will become more popular than individual colleges and Universities. They will also offer custom-built programs for corporations.

Borderless Education
All boundaries between vocation education and conventional learning will be broken. College education and continuing education will all become the same. Credits earned from regular engineering colleges will have equivalence with polytechnics and other vocational programs. Open university credits can be combined with regular Universities. Distance education credits will have equivalence with face-to-face learning credits. Credits from the residential program will not be very different from that of non-residential or online programs. There will be equivalence available between credits earned in IITs and other Institutions. It will not matter whether you earned credits in Kashmir or Kanyakumari. Education will become truly borderless. The Education Industry is one of the most inefficiently run in the whole world. Efficiencies have been brought about in every industry through automation and aggregation. However, the education industry remains the most fragmented with inefficient and outdated knowledge delivery processes. India alone has close to 700 Universities and 40,000 colleges. Though each college has a library there is no sharing of resources. It is a different matter that students hardly visit these libraries.

Take the case of 3000 plus engineering colleges. Most of them teach the same kind of courses. But each college has its own set of faculty members; some are good but many are not so good. This leads to serious differences in the quality of education provided in different colleges. If this is the case why not think of introducing some systems that will ensure that the best teachers are available to all the colleges?

We also have a situation where some colleges have excess demand for the limited seats that they have while many others find it difficult to even fill their sanctioned strength of students. When seats go waste, imagine the plight of teachers and unutilized lab equipment in these institutions. Is it not a national waste that so many seats go unused? Can we not use technology to bridge this unevenness in terms of demand and quality of education in these colleges? The other major problem haunting engineering education is their inability to cope with the new developments. They are grappling with an outdated curriculum. There is a dire need to introduce new subjects such as Big data, cyber security, IoT, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Even if these courses are added to the curriculum there are no trained teachers to offer these courses. Can we not use technology to find a solution to this mismatch? The starting point is to make a network of colleges. A simple approach would be to make smart classrooms in every college that should be capable of receiving classes happening in any other college in the network. When the best of the teachers in the network teaches a course in his college, it can be made available to all the other colleges which are members of the network. Nowadays, video conferencing solutions have become so robust that two-way audio and video will be possible. The recorded classes can be made available in the LMS for the use of students. This will straight away help the college management to reduce the redundant and inefficient teachers.

Robot Teachers
Another way to reduce cost and improve productivity is through the use of Robot Teachers. Interactive robots are making their way into schools and colleges. According to Lynch (*See Footnote 4 ), “Finland and other countries, for example, have already experimented with instructional robots. These machines ask questions, listen for responses, and read facial expressions as they interact with students.” The commercials Robots in operation include Elias, Keepon, Nao, Evo OVObot, and Tega.

They use several cameras to monitor the students in a class and using facial recognition tools they study the emotions to classify students– those who have understood, those struggling to get the concepts, those not attentive, and so on. These inputs are given to the Robot Teacher on a real-time basis and the robot employs different instructional strategies to manage different categories of students. For example, it may ask those who have understood the subject to teach those who have not. It will pull up those who are not attentive and so on.

When students ask questions, these Robots are capable of going beyond the data available to them to scan the net to find answers. They use natural language processing capabilities to communicate with the students in a manner that is understood by them. While introducing new subjects, we will just need to change the cartridge containing the subject matter to get the Robot ready to teach.

See the Picture Below for an AI-enabled robot —dressed in formal female attire— that teaches lessons in Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History, and Physics to Classes 7-9 (Image Courtesy: Indus International School, Bangalore).

"Our robots impart lessons daily in five subjects to about 300 students in Classes 7-9 in four sections by turns. They also interact with them and respond to questions in the subjects," Indus International School's chief design officer, Vignesh Rao told in an interview withLiveMint (*See Footnote 5).

It is a humanoid Robot that is employed by the Bangalore school. Technology has produced robot teachers that look like humans, call out rolls, smile, and even scold students. The biggest advantage of humanoids is that they do not get fatigued. Any number of questions you ask would respond to every question. It will have no emotional baggage. It can be made to teach any subject. There is no limitation on what it can teach. It could teach anything from Philosophy to rocket science. We only need to do the curriculum and instruction design. Robots are expected to improve teaching by providing greater levels of individualized learning and providing objective and timely grading. Robots can conduct any number of tests and instantly evaluate the students. It can also offer customized tests to suit individual competencies.

Universities too have started deploying Robot teachers. According to a World Economic Forum report, “Yuki” (*See Footnote 6), the first robot lecturer, was introduced in Germany in 2019 and has already started delivering lectures to university students at The Philipps University of Marburg. The robot acts as a teaching assistant during lectures. He can get a sense of how students are doing academically, and what kind of support they need. He can also have them take tests. Some students have found Yuki useful – despite the fact he still requires some significant improvements to be fully functional.

Robots could replace teachers to a great extent. Humans will be needed only to impart, maybe ethics and values and to teach at the elementary school level. The role of teachers could drastically change in the future. The education industry will need teachers for content creation, instructional design, and research for knowledge creation.

Changing Role of the Teachers
Technology cannot be the remedy for all the ills of education. Teachers continue to be the cornerstone of our education system. They are the shapers of the children who are going to shape the future. Ideally, the best minds should perform this duty. Teaching should also be the highest paid job so that it attracts the best minds. Unfortunately, despite the critical role teachers play in building a society, teaching continues to be among the least lucrative professions.

Traditional education systems were designed to make information about the past available to a student, the assumption being they would be able to handle a similar situation in the future. But the digital age has killed the very concept of ‘predictability’. Today, the role of the education system and the teacher has to evolve from ‘introducing students to the past’ to ‘empowering students to shape the unpredictable future’. Very few teachers are inherently prepared for this and the different education systems are severely lacking in training them for this huge responsibility. The over-emphasis on right or wrong evaluation also needs a relook where children are encouraged to create, make mistakes, and explore beyond set objectives. The digital age offers countless tools to facilitate this, but the systemic approach needs to be redefined.

At the same time, the traditional roles performed by the teachers may get replaced by robots. For example, structured subjects like mathematics, sciences, Programming, analytics and IT may be easily amenable to robotization. In that scenario, teachers’ roles will shift to one of the content creators. Disaggregation of the role of the teacher will find the arrival of specialists who design courses, others who deliver courses, and another set of people who assess the students. Teachers cannot rest on their past laurels. The Ph.D. earned itself has a shorter life due to new knowledge that gets created at a rapid pace. The present method of peer evaluation of research articles and assessed through citations will be replaced by new methods to assess their impact on society and the field of study.

Conclusion
On the whole, education is at a crossroads. We may witness the arrival of cloud colleges. Degrees from reputed large institutions may become less relevant as new knowledge may come from cloud colleges. The present monoliths like Harvard, Oxford, etc. may become monuments and show-pieces. Mass education is over; customized and flexible education is the order of the day.

Footnotes:

1. (i) A staggering 80% of engineers in India are unemployable: Report, Business Insider, July 17, 2020.
   (ii) Over 80% Indian engineers are unemployable, lacking new-age technology skills: Report, India Today, March 21, 2019.
2. Shapiro HT (2005) A larger sense of purpose: Higher education and society. Princeton University Press, Princeton
3. (i) Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970), (ii) The Eco-Spasm Report (1975), (iii) The Third Wave (1980), (iv) Previews & Premises (1983), (v) Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990),(vi) War and Anti-War (1995), (Vii) Revolutionary Wealth (2006)
4. Lynch, Mathew (2019), The Rise of the Robot Teacher, The Tech Edvocate, April 16, 2019, Link (accessed on October 17, 2019).
5. Live Mint article, Robots turn teachers in Bengaluru school, by Fakir Balaji, September 1, 2019, Link, accessed on October 19, 2019.
6. Meet Yuki, The First Humanoid Robot Lecturer, April 25, 2019, Robotics Biz, Link, accessed on March 20, 2022