Future Higher Education in New Zealand: Creating a Universal Learning Community for Future Skills

Skills challenges for the future embody major challenges for a national system of education. One is the ability of skills-development mechanisms to scale well beyond the limits of the existing models while also reducing dramatically the associated costs of development and operation for providers, and the costs of participation and achievement demonstration for learners. A second is that of being responsive to a rapidly changing environment, evolving existing structures to meet new needs. This chapter explores the New Zealand context for these challenges. A future-facing model, responding to these challenges and using inspiration from the New Zealand MāoriMāori Education (\“Ako\”) concept of ‘Ako’, is presented. Described as ‘microlearningLearningMicrolearning’, this model is proposed as an alternative for Future Skills developmentFuture SkillsFuture Skills Development that avoids the pitfalls of credentialised approaches. The potential for microlearning for Future Skills development in regulated professionals is suggested as a starting point for initial exploration of this new model.