By Rafael L. Bras, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine, Volume 93 No. 2 | 2017

The next generation college graduate is expected to have an average of 15 jobs over his or her lifetime. And, half of the available jobs on the market in the next five years don’t exist today. This reality is drastically different than my own professional career path and will look nothing like anything we have seen before. 

For more than a year, roughly 70 members of the Georgia Tech community—faculty, staff, students, and alumni—have been on a journey to discover what the future holds for higher education and institutions like Georgia Tech. Officially named the Commission on Creating the Next in Education, the group is seeking to discover what education will look like in five, 10, even 20 years into the future and beyond, but more than that, they are looking at what higher education should be for future learners. 

The needs of learners are changing. Workforce demands are evolving. More so than ever, higher education is expected to create graduates who get jobs, but also provide education that transcends along one’s career – preparing learners not just for their first job after graduation, but for their third or fourth. Institutions must create new knowledge for industry. They must be a place where new companies are born, and serve as an economic engine. Universities must also be an active citizen organization of their local community and of the world. 

So, how does Georgia Tech prepare itself to respond to those demands? 

To be an institution of that future, Georgia Tech must look forward and define what’s next. We must lead the way and push the boundaries of how we educate, who we educate and what we teach. Faced with different students, a changing socioeconomic climate, learning and teaching transformed by science, and the workforce demands for future skills, the goals of the Commission include exploration of new ideas in content delivery and nurturing a culture of lifelong learning for undergraduate, graduate, and professional education learners. 

As the Commission imagines possible futures, they launched an initiative called “GT2040,” an interactive tool designed to get ideas from our closest and best resource—our own community. The ideas have been varied, but have some common threads, including experiential and applications-based learning, collaborative educational experiences, blended and personalized learning, virtual experiences and building on artificial intelligence connections in the classroom, being connected to Georgia Tech from anywhere around the globe, and increasing diversity among the student body. 

We are excited about the possibilities and will develop pilots and projects from many of these ideas as the commission finishes its work later this year, emboldened by the ongoing success of transformational technology including use of virtual teaching assistants like Professor Ashok Goel’s Jill Watson (and others later) in the Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence course, and full programs like our Online Master’s in Computer Science (OMSCS) and the upcoming Online Master’s in Analytics starting this fall. These are just two examples of how the educational experience can be transformed, changing the way content is delivered and connecting learners all over the world.