Machine v human skills: what do we teach now?

With artificial intelligence (AI) able to analyse, learn and even make decisions – and as it accelerates the automation of routine tasks – long-held assumptions about what it means to educate and be educated are being disrupted. Educators now face urgent questions: what should we teach? What is left that machines cannot do?  

Historian Yuval Noah Harari warns about the jobs that machines will replace entirely: “Just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.”

So, having a degree does not guarantee employment. Instead, having the right skills that leverage human strengths to outperform machines will. As an educator navigating this transformation, I posed these burning questions to myself:

1. What am I educating my students for?
2. In a world where self-taught skills, digital portfolios and entrepreneurial experiences are accessible, is a degree still essential for employability?  
3. If we can no longer predict future careers, how can we equip our students with the skills and mindsets that will serve them well?
4. How do I unlock my students’ full potential?

Developing human strengths as the new curriculum 

The late Sir Ken Robinson argued that uniformity over individual potential in the classroom kills creativity. In an AI era, education needs to unlock, not limit, individuals’ strengths. To help students thrive alongside intelligent machines, the curriculum needs to prioritise what machines and AI cannot do well: be human. 

One approach is to cultivate a mindset of curiosity, adaptability, cultural awareness and digital literacy that will enable students to tackle complex, multidisciplinary problems with agility, confidence and resourcefulness. Industry collaborations give opportunities for students to develop resilience in response to workplace challenges. 

Figure 1 (below) shows tasks that I encounter as an educator, sorted into quadrants according to importance and urgency. The top right-hand corner lists tasks that score highly in both: the learning outcomes for my course Channel Value Creation. My focus is on human strengths: empathy, curiosity, communication, collaboration, and critical and creative thinking. This aligns to Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, which machines cannot emulate. It also lines up with the most in-demand skills identified in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report: analytical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and creativity.

Educators can also look to shifting their role from delivering content to probing and facilitating deeper learning, enabling students to take ownership of their thinking and discovery. To achieve my targeted learning outcomes, the IDEAS pedagogy was developed and adopted in my class (Table 1). The acronym comes from its five spaces: identify key observations; develop ideas and learning issues; enrich with research and new knowledge; assess the accuracy of new knowledge and skills first, then apply; and seek feedback to improve.

Reshaping content for authentic learning 

As most students will transition directly into the workforce after university, authentic learning that mirrors the realities of the professional world has become essential in preparing them for employment. Reshaping content through real-world challenges, to serve as meaningful frames for learning, became a winning move for effective teaching and learning (Figure 1).

Moving away from siloed, one-size-fits-all content, I designed multidisciplinary and application-driven learning experiences that reflected the complexity and dynamism of the workplace. At the workplace, there are problems waiting to be identified and solved. Each one is a learning opportunity in disguise. These opportunities are relevant, dynamic, never outdated.

Together with beauty retailer Sephora, we identified real-world challenges that resonated with students’ prior knowledge. By starting with familiar concepts, students were better able to engage what they already knew and construct deeper learning.

Sephora hosted an onboarding session and a store tour, helping to familiarise students with the business context and challenges. These experiences sparked students’ curiosity as they asked questions at the start of the lesson.

Iterating through mid-project review and final presentation

Authentic learning is non-linear. In navigating uncertainty and ambiguity, students have to rethink and explore alternative perspectives. Central to this process is the principle of “failing early, cheaply, and forward” by seeking timely feedback to refine ideas before investing heavily in final solutions. 

A three-hour mid-project review gave students a chance to present their progress, seek clarifications and gather constructive feedback to plan their next steps. Then, for the final presentation, a panel of Sephora leaders served as assessors, offering insights on the feasibility and viability of the students’ proposed solutions. Their industry perspectives helped ground students’ ideas in real-world expectations and challenges, further reinforcing the authenticity of the learning experience.

The future of education should not focus on outlearning the machines in efficiency. Neither are we educating for predictable careers. Instead, education can focus on honing the complex, adaptive and ethical human superpower to empower students to make meaning, build relationships and shape a better world. 

Lynda Wee is adjunct associate professor in the division of marketing at Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

This is an edited version of the blog post “Teaching what machines can’t: designing a human-centred curriculum for the future”, which was first published by NTU’s Institute for Pedagogical Innovation, Research and Excellence.

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