Many jobs require additional and very human qualities like communication, empathy, creativity, strategic thinking, questioning, and dreaming. Collectively, we often refer to these qualities as "soft skills," but don't let the name fool you; these soft skills are going to be hard currency in the job market as AI and technology take over some of the jobs that can be performed without people.
One potential solution to a work environment in which, according to research from the World Economic Forum (2018), by 2025, machines will perform more current work tasks than humans (compared to 71% being performed by humans today), is to teach new skills to existing workers. The World Economic Forum's report, The Future of Jobs 2018, covering 12 industries and 20 developed and emerging economies (which collectively account for 70% of global GDP), however, finds that while 54% of employees of large companies "would need significant re- and up-skilling in order to fully harness the growth opportunities offered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution . . . just over half of the companies surveyed said they planned to reskill only those employees that are in key roles while only one third planned to reskill at-risk workers." One way to cover this gap, of course, is to ensure that a future workforce emerges from institutions of higher learning already in possession of the "soft" skills necessary to reap the benefits of this continuing trend where some skills become obsolete while others become even more highly valued. The more on-target higher education becomes with teaching these "robot-proof" skills, the more immune graduates in the workforce become to the vagaries of this environment where employers might or might not take on the responsibilities for "reskilling" their employees.
This forthcoming transformation of employment calls for a different approach to higher education that emphasizes these sorts of higher-order skills in order to prepare students for what awaits them after graduation. This QEP, “Learning that Works,” is designed to institute what has been termed “21st-Century Learning”:
The latest reform movement in education, known as 21st-Century Learning, is in response to the transition from a primarily industrial-based economy to a knowledge-based one. 21st-Century Learning demands that educational organizations become more receptive to societal changes and provide educational services that can make the contributions needed to sustain our economic position in the world. (de Campos, 2014)
So Aoun offers a way to think about de Campos' call for an educational approach that is more responsive to today's needs (and those of the near future) than a more traditional approach is. Given the quickly expanding technologies of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation, as noted above, Aoun calls upon colleges and universities to shift attention away from old habits of silo-based thinking to consider the skills that will prove "robot-proof." He organizes these under a field he calls "humanics," which includes human literacy, technological literacy, and data literacy. According to Aoun's theories, the "learning ecosystem" has four components: human literacy, cultural agility, critical thinking and creativity. At the course level, a curriculum which follows Auon's theories would feature: