The biggest challenge in higher education today is the ability of teaching to keep pace with real-world developments in AI and innovation, a Nobel laureate has said.
“What we teach students today in the classroom, I’m not sure if they can use it when they get to the workplace because the dynamics of the world are developing so fast and the big challenge is for us to keep up,” Konstantin Novoselov, professor at the National University of Singapore and Nobel laureate, told The PIE.
“It’s very difficult to prepare [students] and it’s not clear what you can expect in the future so in that sense I think we need to focus not on the knowledge but on the habits of gaining that knowledge,” he said.
According to Greek secretary general for higher education, Odysseas Zoras, there needs to be a change in model from the education of knowledge to the education of ability.
There is a large discrepancy in understanding between universities who think that 80% of graduates are ready for the workplace and industry employers who think that only 11% are ready, Zoras told delegates of THE’s Europe Universities summit in Bremen in April 2024.
Although universities cannot generally afford to pay AI researchers and engineers as much as start-ups and private companies, educational institutions are unrivalled sources of expertise and need to work out how they can leverage this, said Novoselov.
At his research lab at the National University of Singapore, Novoselov collaborates with researchers from companies including Amazon and TikTok.
“The reason they work with us is because they want to expand into new territories, and universities hold a lot of expertise in those subjects. You just need to realise it and figure out what kind of new expertise and new industries you can create with it,” Novoselov said.
At Constructor University in Bremen, researchers have changed their approach to AI to be more practical, including a research project that uses machine learning to solve transport challenges.
“It’s mainly in research rather than education, but I think it’s a similar story in education too,” said Novoselov.
“Everyone will have to leverage generative AI now. Universities are conservative and don’t act quickly but if you adopt a conservative approach to AI, you will die,” said chairman of the board at Constructor University, Serg Bell.
“People always say things which are quite stupid like, ‘I’m very old, I can’t do it.’ This is not true; you can learn at any age.
“People always say things which are quite stupid like, ‘I’m very old, I can’t do it.’ This is not true; you can learn at any age.”
“[Universities] are quite old school, but everyone can learn. Institutions can learn, they can look at AI, they can look at software, and they can figure it out and apply it. It’s just a matter of whether they can adopt it fast enough and in the right way,” said Bell.
Today, Europe accounts of 18% of the world’s innovative output, as compared to 25% some 15 years ago, according to Balázs Hankó, Hungarian minister of education.
The European Innovation Council, established in 2021 under the EU Horizon Europe program, has a budget of €10.1 billion to support “game changing innovations”, though this should be the “icing on the cake” of national and regional funding, policy makers were told.
“We need to rethink how we structure our education. For years, we’ve been teaching subjects quite rigidly, but in the real world we see so many cross collaborations,” said Novoselov.
“People in AI work with people in linguistics, people in mathematics work with people in physics, and chemists are working with biologists. Those regional borders are getting pushed out in technology and we need to adopt those changes in higher education.
“The moment we adopt it we will see huge progress, but I think it’s still to come.”
