The rise of the fourth industrial revolution has normalised our current, fast paced, ‘always on’ lifestyles. We are overloaded with content daily, which impacts cognitive load, and attention spans are shrinking. As such, it is vital that our education system evolves so that learners can easily retain information.
Changing the future of education starts with changing mindsets. The schooling and education has typically been linked to reading, writing and arithmetic and existed in a delivery model that would push information on or at the learner. Now with the digital era, the classroom is no longer a place, but rather a space. With this in mind, a solution could lie in microlearning and in a model where the learner can pull content when it suits them and tailor-make their learning journey.
“It is for this reason that top tech startup, People Solutions, decided to partner with Digemy to incorporate their award-winning learning platform within our Future Skills digital academy” said Natasha Terlecki, GM: Emerging Markets and Digital Transformation at leading training provider People Solutions.
“We are rolling out a massive transformative purpose within our company to take skills development to the last person, in the last town in South Africa, Africa and beyond, and we needed a solution that could provide the latest technology, at scale and with an exponential impact. A solution backed by data and enhanced by machine learning,” she said.
Kobus Louw, Managing Director at Digemy explained that Digemy decided to partner with People Solutions on the FutureSkills.Africa platform, not only to develop relevant, future-fit content that addresses the identified Future Skills curriculum, set out by the World Economic Forum and Global Business Services Sector, but also to accelerate skills development by using a platform that has proven to deliver results, in a continent in dire need of skills development.
“When we learn, the process of understanding what we know and how often to repeat it is still very manual, stealing time from the learner to do something that can actually be done by an intelligent system. By automating this process, we are able to increase the knowledge of a learner while decreasing the time spent learning,” he explained.
The platform continuously measures the knowledge of the learner on key concepts, and by placing each learner on a specific knowledge level for each key concept, knows what concepts to repeat to each learner at what frequency, to enable the translation of information into their long-term memory. The concept converts studying for “passery” to studying for mastery and ensures the optimal retention of information.
The platform launched with the Life-Long Learning and Financial Literacy series, followed by the demand-led pathways of work readiness skills, digital literacy, future skills, business process outsourcing (BPO) functional skills, BPO specialist skills such as customer service, sales and collections.
Phase two will incorporate agility skills with a focus on soft skills, reskilling, future skilling and upskilling the current labour force to be future-fit and remain relevant, followed by deeper digital skills, with an introduction to AI, Blockchain, data analytics and various specialised coding pathways from development, analytics, cloud computing to cybersecurity and risk.
The platform is accessible and affordable to all. A data-light, environment that offers an interactive user experience and is linked to a gamified rewards and recognition dashboard. The learning is on-demand, accessible at any time, on any device. Knowledge retention occurs without massive impact on productivity or cognitive load.
“The impact that we can have on the lives of our unemployed youth, as well as women and persons with disabilities and their extended families and dependents is what drives us to develop solutions that aid learners in their journey to employability. We understand the importance of instilling skills for application in the workplace, but also the need for mentorship and support of entrepreneurs. As such, plans to develop bespoke content that results in new venture creation and links unemployed persons to the formal economy are already underway. We are in constant discussion with Industry Bodies such as BPESA (Business Process Enablement South Africa), various NPO’s along with Government Organisations such as the DTI, Harambee, Yes4Youth and several corporate partners on various special projects that will support the National Skills Framework Strategy and provide collaborative contributions to the future ecosystem,” concluded Nita Goodhall, CEO at People Solutions.
