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Today's disruptive shifts call for a revolution in educational objectives to accommodate six decades of employment requiring a lifetime of learning.
Profound changes in underlying technology (digitization), in combination with root and branch organizational adaptation (reengineering, or what is often called "digitalization"), have altered the global, socioeconomic environment, according to John Richards, Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies, Technology, Innovation, and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
These forces of change and adaptation have produced what we are calling "the synergistic digital economy." Students and workers in the synergistic digital economy no longer expect that their jobs will represent a progression through a single career during a lifetime. They instead expect that their current job or career will, at some point, disappear or evolve, forcing them to prepare for novel jobs in several new careers at unpredictable points throughout their lives. The requirement to prepare for a lifetime of changing employment is not optional.
After decades of procrastination, higher education has finally been spurred, by the necessity of the COVID-19 pandemic, to enter the 21st century and offer online courses tailored to the needs of the synergistic digital economy for nontraditional students across a spectrum of ages and career stages. However, we worry that the forced migration to online education could end up as a threat to further progress unless change-resistant nostalgia for the historic model is replaced by a strategic response geared toward and welcoming future evolution.
In our recent book The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy, we argue that these disruptive shifts in higher education and in working lives require a revolution in educational objectives. Our book title comes from a term first coined by Gary Matlin, dean of the Division of Continuing Education and vice provost of the Division of Career Pathways at the University of California, Irvine...
Conclusion
Whatever models emerge, they must include strategies that help those involved in education—both providers and students—to transformatively change their behaviors. In our opinion, the biggest barrier we face in this process of reinventing our current methods, models, and organizations for these activities is unlearning. All of us have to let go of deeply held, emotionally valued identities in service of transformational change to a different, more effective set of behaviors.14 This is both individual (an instructor transforming presentation and assimilation practices to active, collaborative learning by students) and institutional (a higher education institution transforming degrees certified by seat time and standardized tests to credentials certified by proficiency or competency-based measures).
Unlearning requires not only novel intellectual insights and approaches but also individual and collective emotional and social support for shifting our identities—not necessarily in terms of fundamental character and capabilities but, rather, in terms of how character and capabilities are expressed as our context shifts over time. We believe the success of any transformative model for education will rest on its inclusion of powerful methods for unlearning and capacity building in the people who will implement this new approach.
Recommended Reading
Source: EDUCAUSE Review 
The 60-Year Curriculum:
New Models for Lifelong Learning
in the Digital Economy
