Universities need to radically rethink the way they view education, according to Peter Cochrane, a futurist who spoke at DCU’s Shaping the Future event last Wednesday.
At the event hosted in the Helix, Cochrane said that recalling facts, figures, processes and methods is not a measure of intelligence as machines can already outperform us.
“Education has to change. It was created during the industrial revolution to churn out fodder for the machines and we now need a different way of doing it.”
Cochrane used the example of a newly qualified doctor to illustrate one of the problems with textbook learning. 40,000 people in the U.S die each year from misdiagnosis, which he attributed to misinformation from textbooks.
“We need to move into a space that robots are pushing us into by changing our whole model of education.”
He said that the most pressing challenge facing DCU was keeping ahead of the wave of technological change. Speaking after his address he said: “While the thinking was certainly right, I have no means of judging the teaching.”
Conor Sheehan
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