Futurist Thomas Frey Predicts World’s Biggest Company Will Be Online School

February 7, 2017 5:00 am
WUERZBURG, BAVARIA, GERMANY - 2014/12/21: A blond three year old girl is sitting in front of a notebook, laptop, watching the screen and using the keyboard. (Photo by Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images)
WUERZBURG, BAVARIA, GERMANY - 2014/12/21: A blond three year old girl is sitting in front of a notebook, laptop, watching the screen and using the keyboard. (Photo by Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images)
WUERZBURG, BAVARIA, GERMANY - 2014/12/21: A blond three year old girl is sitting in front of a notebook, laptop, watching the screen and using the keyboard. (Photo by Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Are online schools going to revolutionize education and the business world by 2030? (Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images)

 

Thomas Frey is a man with an eye on the future. (We’d expect no less from a celebrated futurist from the DaVinci Institute.) And where he sees it going is online education. “I’ve been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet,” he declared to Business Insider.

This is a bold prediction. Twenty-thirty isn’t that far away and most of us think of education as requiring a personal/human touch. Yet while conceding that no one “has quite cracked the code for the future of education,” Frey insists the breakthrough is on the way and surprisingly near. Not only will students learn at their computer, but they’ll also learn from bots.

Frey feels this won’t be a setback for learning. Indeed, he believes that it can even be in the best interests of a student. Suddenly, pupils won’t have to share a teacher’s attention. Their instructor/bot can focus on them and customize a curriculum accordingly:

“It learns what your proclivities are, it learns what your idiosyncrasies are. It learns what your interests are, your reference points. And it figures out how to teach you in a faster and faster way over time.”

Frey feels this will ultimately let students learn at four to 10 times the current speed, so an undergraduate education will only require a semester. (Academics out there, don’t get too nervous at this point; even Frey believes this should be done as a supplement to human teachers, not a full replacement.) To read more about where education may be headed, click here. Watch Frey make a decidedly grimmer prediction for 2030 in the video below.

RealClearLife Staff

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