What do you like about your role?

The opportunity to meet entrepreneurs from around the world who are passionate about transforming the way the world learns. As part of a global learning organisation, we have teams in over 50 cities around the world and we are constantly hearing stories that inspire and reassure me that the Global EdTech community is only at the beginning of a long overdue re-imagining of education.

Share three predictions on the future of Edtech.

a. Employers will start by re-engineering the hiring process. Not long after, we will re-think secondary school and undergraduate degrees and fundamentally redesign the structure, timing, and content of both.

b. Credentialing will mature, assessment and skills verification technology will become more sophisticated and this will challenge how students think about ROI. Learners will not invest in education experiences without strong tangible evidence of rapid skills acquisition.

c. Online education will quietly but progressively improve, under the radar from many who dismissed the last decade as a failure to deliver outcomes rather than highly valuable experimentation and testing. Aided by AI, the potential for personalised and mobile led learning is enormous.

What technologies do you believe have the potential to transform the education industry?

We are intrigued by these questions; ‘what is the future of education’ and ‘which technologies will dominate’, so we decided to take a completely fresh approach and map the global innovation and technology landscape. We called it Project Landscape, and so far, we have unearthed 5,000 companies, which represents about $40b in investment over eight stages of the learning lifecycle.

As we are celebrating out 5th anniversary of EdTechXEurope, we are looking at the key trends over the past 5 years in edtech. What would you say have been the key areas of change that are impacting edtech today? Anything unexpected that surprised you? Trends that were overhyped and never met their expected potential?

5 years ago EdTech was thought of as ‘vendor technology’ or new ‘tools’, but today we can see lots of examples that are characterised by new business models and challenge the ‘current system’ on learning outcomes.

Why is it important for all players in the edtech ecosystem to continuously connect, network and learn from each other?

Being part a global learning organisation allows us to fully appreciate the complexity, but also the importance of being constantly connected to others in different parts of the world. There is incredible value in discovering insights and receiving intelligence from someone in a completely different geographic location and the impact that can bring to your product, your market or your strategy. All of us – whether you’re a founder, educator or investor – can contribute to next-generation education in a more meaningful way if we are to learn and help each other along the way.

When you think about joining EdTechXEurope this year, what are you looking forward to? What makes you excited about our event in London?

I’m really excited to be a part of the future of education in Europe and expect to continue to see many of the world’s most powerful education innovations coming from this region.

Join Patrick and our 100+ thought leader speakers at EdTechXEurope 2017 on 20 - 21st June 2017 - reserve your place now >> 

Explore the agenda and see all of our confirmed 2017 EdTechXEurope speakers - go to agenda >>