Innovative approaches from the pandemic highlight student engagement at scale, taking advantage of personalizing via rich datastreams, using AI-based instructional assistants and learning partners, and sustaining online interactions after formal instruction ends. Combined into online Communities of Inquiry, these advances can enable next-generation massive digital hybrid learning

A decade ago, massively open online courses (MOOCs) were heralded as the solution to universal, global access to higher education. While they failed to reach this vision, primarily because of presentational/assimilative instruction (a PDF of the residential classroom), MOOCs provided the foundational models and infrastructure for emergency remote learning in the pandemic. Reports of remote learning’s death post-pandemic are greatly exaggerated, since the world is now irre-versibly hybrid—and will stay that way because many people and organizations value the new opportunities this presents. From now on, when students leave the shelter of classrooms to interact with the world beyond schooling, they must have skills for adept performance both face-to-face and across distance. Colleges, universities, and regions that force all teaching and learning to be face-to-face are dooming their graduates to reduced agency in every other aspect of life. As dis-cussed in recent reports from Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, innovative approaches to digital learning were developed during the pandemic that are now improving campus-based learning. Insights from these approaches offer the opportunity for student engagement at scale, taking ad-vantage of strengths of online instruction such as collapsing time, bridging space, personalizing via rich datastreams, using AI-based instructional assistants and learning partners, delivering content and experience across universities, and sustaining online learning communities after formal instruction ends. Combined, these advances can enable next-generation massive digital hybrid learning, a means to achieve the aspirational vision of universal global access to higher education. A coalition of higher education institutions could begin to realize this vision, an essential step in enabling all learners to survive and thrive in our increasingly turbulent, disruptive global economy and civilization. While many forecasts chart an evolution of AI towards taking human jobs, more likely is a future where AI changes the division of labor in most jobs, driving a need for workforce development to shift towards uniquely human skills [22]. Specifically, AI is becoming increasingly proficient at calculation, computation, and prediction (“reckoning”) skills. As a result, we will see increased demand for human judgment skills such as decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, deliberation, ethics, and practical knowing. For example, In the Star Trek series, Captain Picard’s judgment, decision making, and deliberation skills are enhanced by the reckoning, computation, and calculation skills of Data, an android lacking human abilities. Together Captain Picard and Data complement one another; the synergistic combination of Picard’s judgment and Data’s reckoning provides better decision-making outcomes than the sum of their individual contributions. In light of this, the grand challenge for higher education is not merely to under-stand how remote learning and AI can scale present capabilities, but to also use this moment to reflect and reimagine the learning experiences of students. With the advent of the Internet and search engines, content knowledge has already largely become an on-demand commodity. With ever-improving telecommunication technologies, meetings with instructors and classmates can happen anytime from anywhere for little to no cost. Online collaboration tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 enable remote groups to co-create and share feedback synchronously and asynchronously. And with the increasing availability and sophistication of AI-driven tools, the capacity to automate the mechanics and minutiae of typical knowledge- and skill-based tasks is growing at an exponential rate. The college experience of tomorrow need not—and, indeed, should not—look and feel like the college experience of yesterday. These technologies have untethered both the minds and bodies of students, freeing them and their institutions to focus on higher-order thinking skills while better leveraging the world around them, but their collective potential is far from fully realized. Such a shift will require not only institutional learning, but also “unlearning” [23]. Faculty and leadership in higher/continuing education will have to let go of deeply held, emotionally valued identities in service of transformational change to a different, more effective set of behaviors. This is both individual (an instructor transforming instructional practices from presentation and assimilation to active, collaborative learn-ing by students) and institutional (a higher education institution transforming from degrees certified by seat time and standardized tests to credentials certified by proficiency on competency-based measures). Unlearning requires not only novel intellectual approaches, but also individual and collective emotional and social support for shifting our identities—not in terms of fundamental character and capabilities, but in terms of how those are expressed as our context shifts over time. Reports of remote learning’s death post-pandemic are greatly exaggerated, since the world is now irreversibly hybrid—and will stay that way because many people and organizations value the new opportunities this presents. From now on, when students leave the shelter of classrooms to interact with the world beyond schooling, they must have skills for adept performance both face-to-face and across distance. Colleges, uni-versities, and regions that force all teaching and learning to be face-to-face are dooming their graduates to reduced agency in every other aspect of life. Transformative models for next-generation hybrid learning are an important next step for higher and contin-uing education. Students must be prepared both with specific knowledge and skills for their first job and with cross-cutting capabilities for the multiple careers they will ex-perience in a half century of work [24]. A coalition of higher education institutions could begin to realize this vision, an essential step in enabling all learners to survive and thrive in our increasingly turbulent, disruptive global economy and civilization. The presentation will take place in short segments with turn-and-talk opportunities for the audience to share insights and examples.

Dr. Chris Dede

Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education

Chris Dede is a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was for 22 years its Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies. His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. From 2001-2004, he was Chair of the HGSE department of Teaching and Learning. In 2007, he was honored by Harvard University as an outstanding teacher, and in 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. In 2023 he was named a Fellow of the Online Learning Consortium. In 2024 he was named a Scholar of the Immersive Learning Research Network. In 2020 Chris co-founded the Silver Lining for Learning initiative (https://silverliningforlearning.org). He is currently an Advisor to the Alliance for the Future of Digital Learning, sponsored by the Mohammed bin Rashid Global Initiative (MBRGI). Also, Chris is a Co-Principal Investigator and Associate Director for Research of the NSF-funded National Artificial Intelligence Institute in Adult Learning and Online Education. His most recent co-edited books include: Teacher Learning in the Digital Age: Online Professional Development in STEM Education; Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities in Education; Learning engineering for online education: Theoretical contexts and design-based examples; and The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy.