Daily Inspiration: “The gaming generatIon has suddenly met with an ongoing need for distance education……”

“The gaming generatIon has suddenly met with an ongoing need for distance education. Wouldn’t it make sense to add some gamification to make it a little bit more interesting for them?” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I will be spending the day today filming a trends piece that takes a look at how Covid-19 has provided interesting new pathways to the future. I’ll do an edit over the next few days and expect to post it early next week.

Here’s a good example of what I might cover. Just about one year ago, I was on stage in New Orleans as the opening speaker for the Career Education Colleges & Universities annual conference – they were known as the Association of Private Colleges and Universities when they had me in 5 years before. (It’s always fun when a client brings you back for an updated look at the future!)

My keynote took a look at the future of education from a variety of perspectives. My daily quote on that day – and the opening slide in my deck, observed: “You need to deliver knowledge that you aren’t yet aware of, for jobs that don’t yet exist, to a group of people who don’t know that they will need it. And you need to do it yesterday!”

Daily Inspiration: “You need to deliver knowledge … that doesn’t exist .. and do it yesterday!”

Let’s add to that the proviso “….and you need to do it in new formats that are innovative, interesting and engaging!”

There’s been a lot of distance education going on, and I would be thinking at this point, the kids are bored silly with what they see. You can only listen to a droning professor in a monotone voice rattle on for so long before you click away. And since many institutions will be continuing on with this grand experiment for quite some time into 2021, wouldn’t it make sense to change it up a bit?

Some weeks ago, when I was doing my weekly show about innovating through the downturn, I spoke about how I believed there was a big opportunity to combine gamification concepts to online education. After all, like I said – kids are going to be really bored with a continual non-stop virtual screen of sameness!

That’s an example of the type of trend I’ll put to film today in my broadcast studio – the winners in the future will be those who learn how to combine two fast moving and unrelated trends to do something new! Why? In order solve some of the big problems this complex new era has suddenly set upon us – or to create new, disruptive potential.

If we suddenly have millions of kids forced into longer term forms of online education, but they’d rather be playing video games – why not turn this challenge into an opportunity?

This new future provides us new and fresh opportunities for creative thinking, and its our ability to understand how trends have changed, the future has veered, and the outcome has morphed, that will provide us the best pathway for success.