The traditional university model should be shaken up because it does not effectively train students to apply their knowledge and skills across contexts, said the founder of an American school that has reinvented the college experience.
The model should be replaced by one that truly develops critical and creative thinking, said Mr Ben Nelson, chief executive officer of the Minerva Project.
"The way in which universities teach is proven scientifically to be broken," he said.
"When you have an individual who learns certain habits within a context... no matter how good of a critical thinker they are in their field, they are not able to transfer that knowledge to anything else.
"The nature of work and society... is to be able to translate what we learn from various aspects of our lives into new contexts," said Mr Nelson.
The 43-year-old entrepreneur was speaking yesterday at a forum, Disruptions in Education (DisruptED). It was co-organised by The Straits Times and the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM). About 400 people attended the forum at the SIM Global Education campus.
Founded in 2012, Minerva - whose headquarters is in San Francisco - offers a four-year tertiary education. Instead of classroom lessons, seminars of up to 20 students are conducted online.
BUILD RESILIENCE, ADAPTABILITY
We need to prepare our students for a different kind of world. We need to build in them resilience and adaptability... If you need to try something and fail, then try something different, that's OK.
DR JANIL PUTHUCHEARY, Senior Minister of State for Education, and Communications and Information, on learning in the face of disruptions.
Students spend the first year studying foundational concepts that make up critical and creative thinking - such as logic - through problem-solving tasks.
For instance, they could be tasked to think of solutions to high school attrition in a city.
In the next three years, they apply these elements to different majors such as computational science or arts and humanities.
The university requires students to live and study in up to seven cities in a bid to immerse them in different cultures.
Mr Nelson said the students scored the highest in the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardised test that evaluates skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving.
Another speaker, Ms Kristina Kaihari, counsellor of education at the Finnish National Agency for Education, said Finland has broken moulds in its education system by focusing on learning through play in the first six years of a child's life.
Children also learn about history, science and mathematics from their natural surroundings such as forests, said Ms Kaihari. This is to help them "understand, not just remember, things", she added.
Guest of honour Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State for Education, and Communications and Information, said the Education Ministry is encouraging new models of teaching and learning in the face of disruptions.
But there are downsides, such as a less efficient system.
"There's not going to be a guarantee that every experiment, every disruptive innovation that we try in the education service may work perfectly the first time," said Dr Janil.
"We need to prepare our students for a different kind of world. We need to build in them resilience and adaptability... If you need to try something and fail, then try something different, that's OK."
Newsrooms are also changing the way they work, said Mr Warren Fernandez, editor-in-chief of Singapore Press Holdings' English/ Malay/Tamil Media group and editor of The Straits Times.
"We have transformed the way we operate, the way we think, into being a fully multimedia operation," he said.
Disruption has brought with it both challenges and opportunities, he said, from having to chase digital advertising, to people realising the value of quality journalism with the spread of fake news.
