One thing that was sensible in the past but isn’t anymore is spending the early part of our lives being educated and then coasting on that knowledge across a lifetime. In the Industrial Revolution, things changed slowly enough for such an arrangement to sustain a society, but continuous education and reeducation must be the norm now in the Digital Revolution. It’s not that there’s no value in our current educational institutions, but they need to be merely prelude.

In a TED Talk just given in Istanbul, futurist Thomas Frey predicted two billion jobs will vanish by 2030. I can’t speak to that number or timeframe being correct, but certainly industries are going to rise and fall at an uncomfortable clip. From Frey’s Futurist Speaker post about the five sectors he thinks will be radically remade in the next 15 years:

3.) Education

The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.

All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.

In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?

Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.

With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.

Jobs Going Away

• Teachers.
• Trainers.
• Professors.

New Jobs Created

• Coaches.
• Course designers.
• Learning camps.•