Drive education towards technology: Pearson boss

The chief executive of the Australian branch of multinational private education firm Pearson will warn an audience of educators that they risk becoming irrelevant in the hot-topic education debate. In his speech to next week’s EduTECH conference in Brisbane, David Barnett, chief executive of Pearson Australia, will say those who work in education will have their voices drowned out in the economic and political debate about their own industry. “Right now, some Australian educators are in danger of descending into irrelevance, by allowing economists to lead the debate about the future skills and jobs of Australians,” Barnett’s speech reads. “This should be the domain of educators.” An advance copy of the speech was provided by Pearson Australia to Campus Review. And where does Barnett want educators to focus the debate? The answer is technology. More specifically, education “should wrap our arms around technology just as tight as business does”, and acknowledge that automation will take away jobs. This is as inevitable as the implications of the car were for the horse and carriage.” This line is part of a framework for the major part of Barnett’s promotion of artificial intelligence-assisted learning, the new business push for Pearson. The company released a report earlier this year, Intelligence Unleashed: an argument for AI in Education – in collaboration with experts from the UK’s University College London – promoting the case for unleashing AI in education. AI has great potential, Barnett argues, from learning analytics in higher education, to online education games in schools. Barnett believes that by embracing technology, teachers can remove “distractors” to education. “One day soon, we'll look back on a past limited by what John Hattie [Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership chair and University of Melbourne education academic] calls ‘distractors’, like student-teacher ratios, and marvel not at how much has changed, but at how long we clung to the past,” Barnett’s speech reads.