EARNING LEARNERS

1. EARNING LEARNERS 5 TACTICS FOR TURNING TASKS INTO LEARNING ACTIVITIES Sara Skvirsky 2016 Ten-Year Forecast

2. 1 Embed value-laden tasks… …in learning activities New business models will turn users of learning apps into earning learners. Their learning exercises will be designed to accomplish productive work at scales that others will pay for, not only supporting the platform but also making micropayments to the learners. Think pedagogy for pay. Duolingo:Language learning platform connects student exercises with real-world translation tasks Source: Duolingo

3. 2 Leverage social platforms… …for learning with social benefits Over the next decade, networking platforms like LinkedIn or messaging apps like Whatsapp may become credentialing platforms as learners seek to earn credentials from their social interactions and embed those credentials in their working profiles. ChatClass:A Nigerian mobile app enables classes on Whatsapp for high school students Source: Chatclass NG

4. 3 Combine algorithmic matching… …with skills development, testing and hiring The explosion of on-demand work platforms will transform traditional talent recruiting services into talent development and credentialing, linking a variety of skills development, testing, and tracking platforms (including games) with algorithmic gig matching. Andela:Talent development service finds, trains, and places the top 1% of African programmers in global teams, paying for their training Source: The Next Web

5. 4 Connect the cost of educational services… …to commensurate earning opportunities With student loan debt challenging the future for so many young learners, educational services will be subject to the same kind of consumer guarantees as other services—in this case, guaranteeing earnings commensurate with the costs. The result? More focused short courses with job matching opportunities. Udacity:Digital learning platform offers nanodegree programs with money-back guarantee Source: Epic 2020

6. 5 Award credentials for micro-experiences… … in everyday work situations New platforms for tracking learning, earning, and teaching at the micro scale will integrate learning, work for pay, and everyday living into a more seamless experience. The best resumes will be those with micro-credentials for targeted skills and zones of knowledge. The Ledger Fictional scenario describes a future where blockchain-based edublocks are recorded in a global ledger Source: IFTF

7. What’s driving earning learners? According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 70-80% percent of students in the U.S. are working learners—individuals who balance their pursuit of education with earning a paycheck. These working learners are growing in number not only as a result of economic trends—the rising cost of both tuition and student loans—but also as a result of the changing landscape of both work and education. The convergence of online courses and degree programs with on-demand platforms for work and the shift from careers and jobs to portfolios and gigs are creating new opportunities for working while learning, even as the basic definition of work is changing. Over the coming decade, however, this working-learning merger might well take an even bigger step as platforms begin to flip the story: instead of paying for an education and then working to pay off that debt, learners of all ages may find that they can actually get paid to learn. The quintessential signal for this flip is the mobile learning app, Duolingo. Duolingo is a gamified language-learning app. For most users, it’s free. You can learn any of a dozen or so languages without interruptions from ads. Duolingo figured out an alternative system of third-party payment for this service: paid translation services. Say a company needs some text translated. Duolingo creates a translation exercise for learners, breaking the text into bite-sized phrases and then algorithmically putting the phrases back together and billing the company for the service. continued

8. What’s driving earning learners? ...continued Although today’s users don’t actually get paid for the translations they do—they’re getting the app for free, after all—it isn’t hard to imagine a future where users could get a micropayment every time they translate a phrase. They could get paid to learn! It’s easy to imagine that this model might grow to include all kinds of new skill development and learning situations as crowdsourcing algorithms convert tasks into micro-learning experiences and reassemble them into whole completed projects. Learners might set their learning goals not just to achieve skills to be leveraged in future work opportunities but to reach “learned income” goals. Such scenarios might get a boost from blockchain technologies, which could create high-resolution views of micro-learning transactions, building personal learning ledgers as people go through their days, engaging with a world of learning opportunities that also contribute to the production of all kinds of value. On-demand platforms might scour the public portions of these ledgers to bid on workers, flipping today’s model of workers bidding on tasks. They might even assemble the best learning teams to accomplish both the aims of individual learners and the requirements of the task at hand. The result might be the emergence, over the next couple decades, of an economy built on continuous learning.