In 2013, researchers at Oxford published a paper that history might consider a seminal piece in understanding the impact of automation on employment. Titled “The Future of Employment”, it examines how susceptible jobs are to computerization. The paper ends by estimating the probability of automation of 702 jobs.

Telemarketers have the most automatable job out there, so they’re ranked 702 — there’s a 99% chance computers will learn how to deal with irate customers who don’t need more insurance.

Recreational therapists are ranked 1. Even in the future, the idea of an emotional intervention by Siri or Alexa would be weird for people.

Post-secondary teachers are ranked 112. Pretty good, considering painters, sculptors and illustrators are ranked 131.

Instructional Coordinators? Ranked 16, above any other job in education.

According to the study, the job scores extremely highly on “Creative Intelligence” and “Social Intelligence”. Much more so than teaching, and that’s bound to raise a few eyebrows.

It is difficult to appreciate the importance of instructional coordinators, designers and technologists as an outsider. Experience tells us only about our great teachers — people who took the stage and made every class a memorable experience — and that evidences the importance of their role.

But just like it’s critical for a Jon Stewart to have the Stephen Colberts and John Olivers in the writers room, the teaching experience begins taking shape long before a professor enters the classroom. It begins with a group of instructional designers who plan what needs to be taught, how it should be packaged, which resources need to be deployed for delivery, what standards to comply with and how to impart skills that make a teacher great.

While they already play a pivotal role, the future may require instructional designers to don a new hat — that of heroes and rescuers. Even before AI-powered adaptive learning became Silicon Valley’s favourite new university-killer, it was suggested that MOOCs would make universities obsolete. Both these threats still loom large. But something unexpected happened last month.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink outlined a vision that poses a third threat, and possibly the largest one yet.

Neuralink’s vision

Neuralink’s vision is complex enough to have warranted this 36000-word commentary by Wait But Why. To summarize it, let me invoke the authority on all things future — The Matrix.

This is sort of how Neuralink suggests we may learn in the future

Neuralink is developing a Brain Computer Interface (BCI), a direct communication pathway between the brain and external devices. It could potentially cure disabilities, make telepathic communication possible and most importantly, merge the human brain with artificial intelligence and the cloud. In other words, the long-term vision of Neuralink is to help humans leapfrog into a post-sensory, post-learning era.

What’s astounding is that The Matrix’s depiction is actually simpler than what Neuralink aims to do. Imagine if you wanted to know something and you just did. No operator, no furious keystrokes needed. How far are we from that day?

“BMIs (Brain Machine Interfaces) for reasons other than disability might not come for 50 years and mass adoption would take even longer.”

- Ramez Naam, author of the Nexus Trilogy

The difficulty of the task is so large that it’s justifiable to question whether it will (or can) happen at all. However, when a new field opens up and investment by the billions starts pouring in, it’s prudent to ask certain questions sooner rather than later.

The future of learning is a guessing game, but with plenty of hints

So what is the future? Will classrooms be purely online? Will robots teach? Will the power of AI merge with human brains and propel us into some sort of artificial evolution? Will we bypass learning by doing and go straight to learning by wanting? There are no certain answers to those hypotheticals yet, but we can start by asking two more questions in response:

What do we know today about how people learn?

This is where instructional design, the art of packaging and delivering information, offers some answers. Let’s say you want to introduce students to what Einstein thought about gravity and space-time curvature.

Method 1: You can tell them

Go to class and say -

Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity which describes gravity not as a force, but as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass/energy.

(Definition courtesy Wikipedia)

Method 2: You can show them

Go to class and project this on the screen:

Thanks NASA

Method 3: Or you can give them something to do and experience

… like Professor Dan Burns here (YouTube), who used a spandex fabric with some snooker balls and marbles to explain a number of complex things related to space-time bending — why do all planets revolve in the same direction, what happens to star debris, and where do satellites come from. All in 10 minutes.

Interestingly, Professor Burns didn’t invent this experiment. Stanford’s Gravity Probe B program did.

So how do we learn? It’s like going up a ladder. Remember. Understand. Apply. Analyze. Evaluate. Create. These are the 6 levels of learning objectives, as postulated by Bloom’s Taxonomy, one of the foremost theories in instructional design.

The second question we need to ask is much more basic and therefore, difficult:

What is education?

Even if hard-wiring knowledge into the brain becomes a reality one day, what notion of “learning” would it adhere to? “Hardwired critical evaluation” is an oxymoron. “Fed into the brain” is quite literally the opposite of “discovered”. And any education method that doesn’t facilitate discovery, the cornerstone of all progress, is incomplete.

The very question “what is education” is philosophical, and the closest anyone has ever come to a definition was 2400 years ago. Fittingly, it was a philosopher.

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel”

- Socrates

We need to solve a big structural problem

Feeding something into the brain is akin to filling a vessel and if that poses a threat to the university system, it exposes a highly entrenched issue. Are schools and colleges guilty of relying too heavily on rote learning? Isn’t the value of such a skill bound to decrease in the long run? Tens of millions of bachelor’s degree holders need employment for another 4–5 decades. How much of the damage has already been done?

The war on rote learning and mere accumulation of facts hasn’t even started yet, but the writing on the wall is that formal education will have economic reasons to address the facts. A growing body of work focuses on active, experiential, inquiry-based, Socratic and blended learning but universities need to accelerate the pace of change.

Arguably, instructional designers need to get involved with every course at every level right from Kindergarten to Postdoc, and this is a monumental task. Are we, structurally speaking, preparing for the change?

Numbers say no.

The (Teacher to Instructional Coordinator) ratio problem

The teacher to student ratio has been a widely recognized metric to gauge the quality of education for a long time, but we may have overlooked an increasingly important determinant of the quality of education.

The number of instructional coordinators per teacher may drop over the next decade. Source here.

The good news (because there’s always some)

The education system is chockablock with visionaries and there’s plenty of people to have faith in. The fact that the university system has flourished for over 2600 years since the days of Taxila is proof of its tremendous capacity to respond and adapt. It has fought religious dogma, been home to history’s best minds and now it supplies the highest quality manpower to the world economy. Today, it is stronger than it has ever been.

Even if facts and know-how get commoditized in the future, the kind of learning that builds capability for discovery never will, so we need to make sure that that’s what formal education offers to students. Our classrooms need teaching methods that make instilling curiosity a key objective of every course at every level. The field of instructional design needs to be thought of as a critical enabler of such a change — a far cry from the current state where the onus to change is lopsidedly on professors, who’re already short on time and resources.

A long time ago, horse-drawn carriages didn’t expect competition from automobiles. Newspapers didn’t expect it from the internet. And Kodak didn’t expect it from phone makers. Schools and colleges should expect it from AI and Neuralink, and simply get to work. As the saying goes, the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.