Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions. This 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning presents a critical dilemma facing these institutions: how to reconcile bottom-up developments in education with the traditional top-down hierarchy that is currently in place. Such peripheral innovation will redefine how learning is organized, who comprises the broad “school community,” and what the actual experiences of learners will be like in the future. The validity and role of formal institutions of education will be challenged by key forces of change and will be reconsidered by an expanding group of stakeholders. Together, the pressures of change and new stakeholder demands will create a new future for learning.

Each of us can take action today to create this future. As the KnowledgeWorks Foundation 2020 Forecast reveals, many of our fundamental relationships – with ourselves, within our organizations, and with systems, societies, and economies – are being re-imagined and recreated.

This website will help you explore how these different dimensions of our world are changing and how we can shape the future of learning. KnowledgeWorks' Institute for Creative Collaboration can help you explore further and apply the 2020 Forecast to your context through strategic learning experiences.

How to Use This Forecast

This 2020 Forecast is a tool for thinking about, preparing for, and shaping the future. It outlines key forces of change that will shape the landscape of learning over the next decade. The forecast does not predict what will happen, but rather serves as a guide to the as-yet-unwritten future. It is designed to help you see connections among things that once seemed unrelated and to help you consider the changes and challenges that you are facing today within the context of wider patterns of change.

Ultimately, the 2020 Forecast aims to provoke your own thinking about what role you want to play in creating the future of learning.

The forecast contains four major types of information:

Drivers of Change are major forces of transformation that will shape our efforts to remake learning. They represent the convergence of several trends into emerging ideas and phenomena that will disrupt traditional narratives and assumptions about learning. The questions under each driver serve as useful starting points for discussion.

Trends are distinct directions of change that point to new concepts or new patterns of behavior that will shape the future of learning.

Signals are examples, or early indicators, of the changes described by the trends and the drivers of change. By providing analogies, data, and explicit stories, signals help make the future seem more concrete.

Learning agents suggest new roles and functions that might emerge in the future ecosystem of learning. They appear next to the drivers of change to which they seem most relevant. However, those included here are only examples, and their placement is by no means comprehensive. The learning agents depicted in this forecast might also manifest in conjunction with the other drivers of change.