The future of learning is experiential and social
- Florence Robson
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
“By reorienting our systems around high-quality social and experiential learning, we do not just produce better graduates or more effective employees. We empower a generation of citizens capable of navigating the uncertainties and shaping the direction of this century.”
By Prof. Jason Blackstock and Florence Robson
There is a convergence happening on a global scale: of changing societal and business needs; with technology and knowledge trends; and with our understanding of how we, as humans, learn most effectively. This convergence is already reshaping the face of formal education – and, even more importantly, it is set to reshape how we think of workforce and lifelong learning.
Across our latest series of global, high-level roundtable discussions in 2025, we explored various aspects of this convergence and its impact on education, learning and work. In this article, we pull together the core themes that emerged from this latest series of roundtables and build out the foundations that underpin our perspective that the future of learning must be experiential and social. We conclude with a synopsis of why we believe that reorienting formal education – and workforce and lifelong learning – is so important as we enter the era of AI.
A (very) brief history of higher education
The traditional model of higher education is familiar. Students are sequestered on stunning campuses for multiple years (usually three or four) to live and study together while they accumulate knowledge, think deeply and build lifelong relationships. They are then released (aka graduated) to apply their knowledge in the workforce and world.
For multiple centuries, this model served societies incredibly well, underpinning incredible social, economic and technological progress. Which is why, across the last 75 years, this traditional model has been scaled globally such that today over 250 million people around the world are enrolled in higher education.
Of course, this traditional model of higher education operates on a simple assumption: that the shelf-life of the knowledge gained during a degree at (before) the start of a career would last a lifetime.
Unfortunately, that assumption has not just been eroded by the progress of modern societies and technologies; it has been entirely obliterated.
Throughout our latest series of high-level roundtables, dozens of leaders from academia, industry and policy from across the world came together virtually to share ideas, concerns and possible solutions to the significant – some would say existential – challenges facing educators and educational institutions today. From these discussions emerged a singular, uncomfortable truth: the graduate profile the world now requires is increasingly incompatible with the “factory settings” of scaled-up traditional higher education. We are standing at a precipice where the costs of traditional education have been rising enormously (and continue to rise), while the value of traditional degrees in the world is increasingly called into question — especially as the economy becomes defined by the lightning-fast evolution of AI and a fractured global landscape.
If we are to prepare citizens and societies to navigate the 100-year life that is now not only possible but realistic, we must stop viewing formal education as an end of adolescence inoculation for adulthood. We need to start viewing learning as a lifelong, continuous and social process of continuous growth and transformation – and educational institutions as porous hubs of learning that individuals engage with continuously throughout life (engagement that goes far beyond calls with the donations team in alumni relations).
From “content-bloat” to human agency
The most profound shift identified in our discussions is the transition from content delivery to human transformation. Ironically, this is what the traditional model of higher education was designed to do: to provide a life transforming experience for students across their campus years. In reality, the traditional model did this incredibly well — or at least it did when it was serving roughly 1% of the population until the early-1900s.
Across the last century, higher education in modern economies has scaled to serve well beyond 50% of the population. The way this has been achieved, however, is to expand aspects of the traditional model like lectures that are easily scaled (see the evolution of lecture halls in the images below). Harder-to-scale things like small tutorials directly with faculty – things that underpinned the transformation success of the traditional model – have fallen by the wayside. The result is that the majority of scaled-up traditional higher education has become simply content provision at scale.
Across the second half of the 20th century, this meant the modern university evolved into a gatekeeper of information. Yet across the first quarter of this century, information has become a commodity, available at the click of a button — or today, the prompt of an AI.
When content is everywhere, the professing Professor (aka the "sage on the stage") becomes a bottleneck rather than a bridge. As was discussed in one of our roundtables, we are currently suffering from “content-bloat.” Curricula are stuffed with technical specifications that are often obsolete by the time a student reaches their junior year. And when students can find free content from institutions like MIT available at their fingertips – with AI coaching for their personal learning preferences and needs – why would they attend traditional lectures? (Indeed, the precipitous fall of attendance at lectures across the last several years is a repeated theme we find in both roundtables and our discussions with our higher education partners around the world.)
Added to this, as the same roundtable explored, the graduate profile is changing. The new graduate profile isn't defined just by what a student knows (i.e. the technical knowledge), but rather by their capacity for self-driven and collaborative work and learning – meaning human agency (the ability to make decisions and act independently). In an era of profound change, the most valuable currency is the ability to walk into a room full of ambiguity, identify a wicked problem, and work with (even mobilise) a diverse team of colleagues to address it – and have the resilience to keep iterating and learning through the inevitable messiness of that process.
Too often the core elements of this profile are mislabelled “soft skills”when the reality is that they are competencies that are essential to thrive in the modern workplace. Critical thinking, ethical grounding, a growth mindset and resilience aren’t buzzwords. They are critical career and life skills for adapting to the rate of change of the modern world. To develop learners’ capacity with these skills we must move away from the learning-to-know model and toward learning-to-learn in complex and ambiguous contexts.
Inverting the model – putting authentic problems at the heart of learning
To develop learners’ agency, we have to address the pedagogical cliff. Traditionally, students learn theoretical concepts for multiple years and are then expected to apply them in a capstone project or an internship. This is fundamentally backwards. It ignores how the human brain — and the modern economy — actually functions.
High-quality learning is experiential and social. That means “inverting the model” in a way discussed in another of our roundtables focusing on reinvention. Starting with the real world problems to be tackled — the messy, friction-filled reality of a climate crisis, a supply chain collapse or a community health deficit — allows the authentic experience of seeking solutions to drive learners to explore different concepts that help them first understand and then tackle the problem. And, of course, none of these messy problems can be solved by a single person or with a single (disciplinary) perspective. This process requires social collaboration to be truly authentic and effective.
This mirrors the “learning hospital” model, where learning is necessarily experiential and social. A medical student doesn't sit in a dark room for four years before seeing a patient. They are immersed in the clinical environment where both the interactions and the stakes are real – and the feedback is immediate. This seems obvious in medicine; but yet why don't we apply this to engineering, business, sciences or the humanities? By moving from conceptual learning and simulated problems to authentic challenges, we shift learners from being passive critics to active participants. This is how agency and resilience are built — through experience. Not in lectures or textbooks, but in the discomfort of tackling projects that don’t have '‘back of the book” answers.
This model of experiential and social learning must grow to permeate not just higher education, but the full spectrum of lifelong learning and workforce development. This was a foundational insight that emerged from our roundtable on disrupting higher education for the 100-year life. Dissolving siloes between education and the workforce is no longer a ‘nice to have’ addition to academic programs. It is an imperative for businesses and societies to ensure their workforces and citizens are able to thrive in a world defined by rapid technological and social change.
Experiential learning is more than “learning from experience” (or simulations)
Of course, if learning to tackle wicked problems and building critical thinking requires experience, then isn’t on the job experience sufficient? The simple answer is, unfortunately, no. Simply throwing individuals into the deep end is not sufficient. Immersion into authentic problems without structure risks overwhelming individuals rather than empowering them to learn and grow.
To enable individuals – whether current students or current working professionals – to learn how to manage the dynamic complexities of the modern world, we must exchange low-quality “learning from experience” for high-quality experiential learning. The cornerstones that define experiential learning are clear learning outcomes at the heart of experience design, coupled with the necessary guidance and tools — termed "educational scaffolding" — to ensure that all learners gain effective outcomes while navigating the experience.
Well-designed experiences, with clear learning outcomes and effective scaffolding, can and should focus on messy, authentic problems. This combination is where the greatest opportunity for deep individual and collective learning emerges.
While simulations and historic case studies have their place, they cannot replicate the friction of reality. Only real-world projects possess the inherent "messiness" of conflicting stakeholder opinions, dynamic organisational constraints, and the uncomfortable reality that there is rarely a single "right" answer. By engaging with this level of ambiguity, learners develop genuine problem-solving and communication skills. Crucially, they cultivate the resilience, confidence, and continuous learning habits — underpinned by a growth mindset — required to tackle the unstructured challenges they will face throughout their careers and lives.
The road ahead
The convergence we identified at the outset — of shifting societal needs, technological acceleration and learning science — is not a distant forecast. It is our current reality.
As we enter an era where artificial intelligence increasingly commoditises technical knowledge and information processing, the unique value contribution of human intelligence is shifting. It is moving away from retention and towards connection; away from calculation and towards complex, collaborative problem-solving.
If we fail to adapt, we risk widening the gap between the outputs of our formal education systems and the fluid, high-stakes demands of the modern world. To prepare learners of all ages to thrive throughout a 100-year life, educational institutions must do more than simply digitise their lectures or add a couple of “soft skills” modules. They must fundamentally restructure their programs to provide authentic experiential and social learning opportunities.
As our latest series of roundtables demonstrated, however, we have some way to go to build the educational infrastructure needed to make this type of learning available around the world. The road ahead requires us to dismantle the remaining walls between the classroom and the community. It demands that we embrace the "messiness" of authentic challenges not as a distraction from learning, but as the very source of it. By reorienting our systems around high-quality social and experiential learning, we do not just produce better graduates or more effective employees. We empower a generation of citizens capable of navigating the uncertainties and shaping the direction of this century.
Many thanks to everyone who contributed to our 2025 roundtable series. You deserve the credit for so many of the valuable insights and ideas in this article. We look forward to continuing – and widening – this important discussion.
Thank you to our roundtable partners: the Global Business School Network, International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure, ABET, Lenovo 360, Instructure, Engineering for One Planet and Tyton Partners.