Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

• Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ellen DeGeneres all dropped out of college, yet they became leaders in their fields. Their secret? Self-directed learning.
• Self-directed learning can help people expand their knowledge, gain new skills, and improve upon their liberal education.
• Following habits like Benjamin Franklin's five-hour rule, the 80/20 rule, and SMART goals can help self-directed learners succeed in their pursuits.

By 2020, around 65 per cent of university graduates will work in jobs that don’t yet exist. Automation, driven by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, is also destroying repetitive, low-skill jobs, and changing the nature of most others.

Yet, as with all “creative destruction”, for every 20 jobs that will be lost from 2018-27, about 13 will be created, according to a 2016 research paper by Wilcocks and Laity. In India, the promised rich economic dividend that the country is demographically poised to reap depends deeply upon the quality of the future workforce. Therefore, the task of future-proofing the skills of our workforce assumes that much more import.

Teachers strive to help learners find their own answers by doing one thing—giving them the skills to do so. Although this seems like a tall order, in reality it’s simpler than you think. Part of it resides in ensuring students know they have options for this.

Exploring these options is the essence of philosophy of 3B4ME. If you haven’t heard of it, we discovered it on Adam Schoenbart’s blog. It’s an ingenious way to help learners find their own answers using simple paths to discovery.

I’ve been using the institutional partnership Coventry University has with Linkedin/Lynda.com and have been taking a few short, video-heavy courses to further my understanding in a few area. In light of this I took the opportunity to attend a ‘making the most of Lynda.com‘ course too, presided over by a LinkedIn representative and someone from the DMLL (Disruptive Media Learning Lab) here at Coventry.

When we talk about the lifelong learning mindset, we think about the cultivating of habits as opposed to just the achieving of goals. The lifelong learning mindset is more than just about the need to learn; it’s about a desire to learn that lasts—you guessed it—a lifetime. What does it mean for students to adopt such habits, and more importantly, how can we help them do it?

This presentation was delivered at ALT-C 2015 Conference in Manchester, UK.