UNEVOC Connect

Education 4.0 is a technique of learning that is connected with the fourth industrial revolution and focuses on transforming the future of education through advanced technology and automation. Smart technology, artificial intelligence and robotics are part of this industrial revolution.

(view also Education 5.0)

Eight critical characteristics in learning content and experiences have been identified to define high-quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution — “Education 4.0”:

1. Global citizenship skills: Include content that focuses on building awareness about the wider world, sustainability and playing an active role in the global community.
2. Innovation and creativity skills: Include content that fosters skills required for innovation, including complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, creativity and systems analysis.
3. Technology skills: Include content that is based on developing digital skills, including programming, digital responsibility and the use of technology.
4. Interpersonal skills: Include content that focuses on interpersonal emotional intelligence, including empathy, cooperation, negotiation, leadership and social awareness.
5. Personalized and self-paced learning: Move from a system where learning is standardized, to one based on the diverse individual needs of each learner, and flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at their own pace.
6. Accessible and inclusive learning: Move from a system where learning is confined to those with access to school buildings to one in which everyone has access to learning and is therefore inclusive.
7. Problem-based and collaborative learning: Move from process-based to project- and problem-based content delivery, requiring peer collaboration and more closely mirroring the future of work.
8. Lifelong and student-driven learning: Move from a system where learning and skilling decrease over one’s lifespan to one where everyone continuously improves on existing skills and acquires new ones based on their individual needs.