current developments

Section 3.2 showed that there is not yet a clear future vision for the educational system. Pilots are being done, some more successful than others. One clear development however can be seen: life-long learning and ‘adaptive education’, facilitated by online learning. As complexity of societal problems grows, there is an ever growing need for people to keep on learning during their whole lifetime. Also, due to the digitalisation, educational institutions are looking how to use this trend to facilitate this life-long learning and ‘adaptive education’ trend and improve the overall quality of education. Now we know the developments, we can look at our sustainability criteria.

As sustainability criteria, the following was determined. As a goal, or design challenge we defined ‘How can we establish a high quality life-long learning system in Texel supported by new educational and technological trends (such as distance working and/or learning) which promotes production and diffusion of knowledge enhancing local population identity and sustainability?’.

As criteria, we defined:

1) 100% of youngsters (until 18 years old) study in a high school inside the island

2) 80% return rate of university students in the mainland, who come back to live at Texel.

Digitalisation can be an opportunity to give students from high schools the possibility to get education from the mainland, while staying at the island. In this way, it can be said that the identity/connection with island will be maintained, while addressing the adaptive learning trend. A negative development of this adaptive learning can be that the threat that many student choose for schools at the mainland. This will have to be watched.