Students in Asia are embracing online higher education because they realise it’s a golden opportunity for them to climb the “social mobility ladder”, a conference has heard.
Giving a keynote speech at the opening of the Going Global Conference 2018 in Malaysia last month (May), technology entrepreneur Dr. Ayesha Khanna said people in many Western nations are frightened about how automation might change the nature of work and learning. In Asia, however, there was more of a drive, especially among young people, to realise the potential of artificial intelligence and robotics for changing society, she said.
Dr. Khanna, co-founder of ADDO AI, a technology advisory firm based in Singapore, said that her employees in Asia often stay up late into nights to finish massive open online courses because they know it will help them advance their careers. “This is a great moment for Asia… we have never been so driven and never has opportunity come knocking on our door (so much) because of AI and robotics and technology,” she said. “I go to Sweden, to America, to the UK, to Italy, (and there I see) they are afraid of automation; but in Asia we are not afraid, we see this as an opportunity to leapfrog and to climb up that social mobility ladder that has been denied to some unjustly.”
Khanna added that it’s no coincidence that the Mooc platform Coursera wanted to raise more money from investors, it was because demand for its courses “was highest from Latin America, China and India”. She also said that campus-based universities simply cannot offer the type of technological education that people in these regions want because the pace of change in knowledge is too fast. Citing a course on the design of self-driving cars on the Udacity Mooc platform, she said “there is a good chance that you will struggle to find any university in the world that is so cutting-edge as to offer this course”.
However, Khanna also told the conference that the need for creative education from universities is greater than ever because of the technological revolution. “Never before have we needed creativity and imagination and the humanities as much as now, as machines do the routine work and we are really free” to focus on the creative side, she said.