'Education needs to be changed in design and delivery'

Unless the present education set-up changes and evolves, there could be a skills crisis, noted young innovators at the WISE Summit 2021.“I personally feel that education needs to evolve. It needs to change both the way it is designed and delivered. We should be making technology a priority in education,” said Tanmay Bakshi, advisory software engineer, IBM, and Google Developer expert for Machine Learning, Canada.Eighteen-year-old Bakshi is also a TED and global keynote speaker, visiting professor at the University in Tokyo, bestselling author, media personality and YouTuber. He builds the technology for tomorrow and dreams of empowering at least 100,000 people in his lifetime with the technology they need to change the world.Augmenting songwriters, recognising people by their heartbeat, decoding mental states from EEG are just a few of the ways he has applied next-generation technology.Speaking at a plenary session at the summit, Bakshi said the education transition from the present system is not going to be easy. “We are headed to a skills crisis unless we change. It is important that we evolve, adapt and overcome the fear of change so that we can prevent the impending skills crisis," explained Bakshi.He said 72% of machine learning organisations have the most disruptive technologies. “Technology acts as the infrastructure for every other industry, every other domain. It means that technology and machine learning are universally applicable,” he said. “Human progress is growing exponentially. We can no longer rely on the old way of teaching somebody skills and they will apply it for the rest of their lives. This will no more work. People need to continuously adapt because by the time they have learned a skill, it will probably become obsolete,” he continued. He noted that the Covid-19 pandemic has proven that education can change. “Our education basically changed into a virtual mode in a matter of two weeks in the pandemic. It took a public health crisis to force us the change. If we are not proactive, we are headed to a skill crisis. We need to have a fundamental rethinking of education. What we need to do is to leverage this unique symbiotic relationship between technology and education to enable new capabilities,” he noted. “It is also important that students are all taught differently as we are all different. For that, we need human teachers and machines can work together in the classrooms,” he added. Describing his personal goals, he said: “Whenever I help the people and help them solve their problems, I feel that I have had an impact on their lives using the power of technology. It all started as a five-year-old watching my father programming. I started using various technologies and when I was nine years old, I developed my first application accepted into the Apple App Store,” he concluded.