Telagogic Learning in Deep Cyberspaces: Innovating Higher Education in the Cognitive Age

1. Introduction

Beyond 2030, higher education realities would be materially different from current conceptions of higher education. A shift from operational efficiency [1] and an all-administrative institution [2] to digitally interconnected cyberspaces marked by cosmopolitanism [3] and strong universal cultural heuristics drawn from diverse cultures across the globe [4] would become inevitable. The digitally interconnected cyberspaces would locate higher learning into virtual realities as mediated through the Internet and advanced digital information systems. These technological capabilities would enable higher learning to stream like Netflix and allow students to curate their own personal curriculum along the lines of a playlist [5]. The learning interactions would mainly be between students and learning materials with instructors becoming mostly supplementary and accessed on demand basis as equals in the enterprise of learning. Students would access these digital educational materials and programmes at their own time, learn at their own pace, anywhere and anytime as well as take online assessments as and when the student is ready eliminating entirely panics in learning. There will also be strong flexibility in terms of accessing learning with no specific time schedules set for such purposes. Learning interactions would then be asynchronous and totally under the control of students even from the undergraduate level leading to self-determined, heutagogic learning [6]. There will be an exponential increase in online peer, paragogic learning and e-collaborative ventures amongst students across the globe. Learning interactions would then be determined by students who function on a global scale and in real time. Given that the global society is entering the cognitive age marked by clear demands of highly intelligent and ingenious people who are technologically savvy to thrive in cyberspaces, the intention of telagogic learning is to cultivate these new skills amongst students and shift learning goals away from behaviourist traditions of predetermined learning outcomes to scientific discoveries and innovations as critical pursuits of telagogy. Telagogy refers to the use of advanced technologies and digital platforms to facilitate web-based, asynchronous streaming learning that seeks a domination-free, just society whose learning starts with triggering knowledge from within and then supplementing it with others’ knowledge. It involves creating an inner space of greater awareness of issues of truth, equality and restorative justice that leads to recognition and appreciation of difference as a source of strength and not domination leading to a domination-free, just global society. The three constructs that define learning—location, interaction and intention—come for intense scrutiny in the next sections of this chapter. Students would also become social justice pioneers committed to contributing to material improvement of their regional ontological realities by contributing to real, practical problems of their immediate communities and striving for a domination-free, just society. The target of higher learning would be to eliminate the dominant, economic neo-liberalism that enables avaricious oligarchy and epistemic injustice as well as all other forms of domination.

2. Into the cognitive age: defining new societal spaces

Humanity is entering a new societal order. The Japanese government coined it Society 5.0 in 2016, and other scholars prefer to refer to it as the cognitive age [7, 8, 9]. It seeks an alternative global society that shuns more than 200 years of deliberate devastation of the Earth based on ancient narratives drawn from some religious puffery that the Earth was so bestowed on humanity for unbridled exploitation and pursuit of avaricious greed [4]. Furthermore, at the heart of Western Civilisation are the notions of domination at economic, social, religious, political and philosophical levels in the service of narrowness packaged as coloniality, neo-liberalism, white supremacy, menticide and mendaciloquence. Global systems and infrastructure have been designed to serve oligarchic interests and higher education has been motivated to serve the gods of economic operational efficiency and function similar to businesses such as Mcdonald’s Food Franchises with the focus on quantity (throughput rates) and meeting demands of a Mcdonaldised society characterised by efficiency, control, predictability and calculability, all key aspects of the Taylorism scientific management approach [10]. This approach was set to influence all aspects of society. At the university level, operational efficiency is achieved via Academic Workloads, Research Excellence and Teaching Excellence awards that reduce such critical aspects of a university to calculability along the lines: if you cannot measure it, then you cannot predict and control it [11]. University work is essentially epiphantic, and it cannot be outlined in advance. The outcomes of university endeavours are not straightforward. Production of Mcdonald’s burgers and operational efficiency as organisational systems are thus inimical to university activities, particularly in light of the emerging cognitive age which makes new demands for a new societal dispensation based on higher intelligence and ingenuity. Pitso et al. [12] had shown how this new societal dispensation would impact university environments and compel new learning (Figure 1).

In Figure 1, the societal dispensation represents the macrolevel analysis. At this level of analysis, societal transitions and their impact on university environments become critical tools for the better understanding of what type of learning becomes relevant to each societal dispensation. The societal dispensation that had a greater impact on a global scale is Society 3.0. It marked the onset of technology and machinery in the economic production line, mass production and labour division. Division of labour was premised on the idea of cheap labour where the majority of workers required very little education, and only a few highly qualified technicians and engineers would break the production lines to a point where it was relatively easy to be operated by an illiterate worker. This later also marked the beginning of automation where the human hand was substantially reduced in the production line. This led to a substantial number of workers especially in the textile industry rebelling against technology and were referred to as the Luddites, those opposed to technology and its production automation. The nineteenth to twentieth century societal dispensation not only brought these economic advancements but also entrenched neoliberal and religious thought in societies across the globe leading to a world of domination and the rise of the oligarch, the few superrich and avaricious humans. There was also the rise of the colonial ideology which imposed white supremacy across the globe. This state of global society persisted over the years and is only now being challenged.

The onset of Society 5.0 around 2016 not only marked the migration of humanity into deep cyberspaces regulated by advanced technologies and artificial intelligence but also posed critical questions about the type of society we seek.

3. New learning environments

In light of the demands of a new society that affects all aspects of our lives, this chapter looks closely at the implications of these Society 5.0 demands on higher learning. There is however a history of higher education that we cannot ignore as it defines current higher education practices. In 859, the first university in the world was established by an African woman in Morocco. Her name was Fatima Al-Fahri, and this university is called University of Al-Qarawiyyin. There is an even earlier version of education that was established in North Africa by Egyptians. It provides the basis of understanding current educational practices and why a new learning practice is necessary to break with ancient notions of a university. As is the case with current university structures, ancient universities had a strong relationship between polis and university structures. The influence of business models in education and its narrow focus on the labour market is as ancient as it is outmoded. Through the use of the Goal and Specification Model and Resource-Input Model, Fahim and Zoair [13] elucidate how quality became the cornerstone of formal education in ancient times and persisted to this day. Quality in formal education is problematic because of its strong links with administrative bureaucracy that has tended to insidiously usurp the powers of educators and set up an all-administrative educational institution [2]. Formal education is about rigour and integrity which, under no circumstances, ought to be compromised. Researchers and scholars have their own mechanisms of rigour called the peer review mechanisms that ensure the integrity of their work and have no need for quality assurance, an economic conception that vitiates ideals of science and knowledge. Anomalies such as teaching excellence and research excellence have no place in formal education. How can education or research have some levels of superiority or greatness, and how are these distinctions relevant to formal education? Education is about gaining in cognitive content and developing into a responsible adult and how do these constructs develop some kind of hierarchy with its acme as the basis of an educational goal to be achieved. This is a misdirection of education from its ideals of preparing society to be functional. Education cannot be reduced to base economic interests. From primary to university, education has to be free, easily accessible and mostly online. It cannot be a commodity as it has been a critical factor in the formation of a society since time immemorial. Even worse is when research is reduced to quality issues. The ideal of science is to discover, integrate and apply knowledge gained. How do you place these research outcomes in some kind of hierarchy? When Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in the tenth century discovered that objects remain at rest unless an external object is applied on them to effect movement, and Friedrich Miescher identified DNA, each of these researchers contributed immensely to society and its functionality so how do you measure their excellence? The absurdity of excellence and its quality calculability in formal education is extraordinary. In shaping new learning in Society 5.0, the emphasis is on intelligence and ingenuity. Intelligence, in this sense, has nothing to do with measuring intelligence quotient but refers to behaviours and activities designed to benefit the greater good. Narrow definitions of intelligence unrelated to human behaviour stunted over time by behavioural psychologists such as Skinner who sought to reduce complex human behaviour into stimulus-response animal behaviour (ratomorphism) have no place in the new society. As an exercise of mea culpa, behavioural psychologists have to come up with theories and practices that reverse the dehumanising traditions of conditioning human behaviour that birthed quality, excellence and operational efficiency.

4. Understanding entrenched ways of higher learning

5. Results

6. Critical discussions

At the heart of higher learning in the cognitive age is the development of students’ intelligence and ingenuity within the framework of nature’s sustainability. New learning in Society 5.0 thus would have to consider the following factors as critical in the Environmental Forceful Factor Formation 2 that undergird it, so students’ learning could drive scientific endeavours with no preset goals to allow serendipitous discoveries and Eureka! moments.

• The inalienable human right of each person to choose freely and from anywhere, educational programmes that suit and meet a person’s needs, uniqueness and interest. The days of predetermined educational programmes and curricula that ignore individual needs and uniqueness are over.

• The creation of a universal accreditation system that would ratify individual students’ curated curriculum based on various educational programmes accessed from various universities across the globe.

• Render students’ absolute freedom to access learning from anywhere, anytime without strictures of timetable and stream at their own convenience as assessment is undertaken as and when students are ready.

• Total elimination of behaviourist traditions in learning including classical conditioning and ratomorphism. We are not animals and our behaviours are more complex than that anything less is infra dignitatem, below our dignity. We deal with issues of social contract and justice as critical values of any society. The unique perspectives of students have to be allowed to thrive unrestrained as possibilities of discovery or innovation are enhanced. Broad epistemes that include the Global South and other epistemes found across the globe are allowed to shape learning as that also increases the potential of students’ scientific discoveries and innovations.

• Total elimination of any form or vestiges of brainwashing in learning.

• Absolute respect and embedding of invitational conversations and their principles of equality of participation, immanent value and self-determination. Increasingly, students are taking control of their own learning and thus illuminating heutagogic learning where a student has full control of his/her learning.

• Use of various advanced technologies such as ChatGPT, metaverse, immersive technologies, cloud computing collaborations, Internet of Things and all other technologies that enhance the streaming of learning in an asynchronous way that is accessed at the convenience of individual students. This would enable students to swim in deep, virtual cyberspaces enabling telagogic learning. Telagogic learning is based on the online, streaming platform model similar to Netflix that allows students to curate their own personal curriculum drawn from multiple universities across the globe. In other words, a student’s personal curriculum could include an educational programme from MIT, another from Oxford University and the other from University of the Witwatersrand so that by the time he/she completes his/her degree, he/she has gained multiple perspectives from various universities. This is why a universal accreditation system is so crucial. Telagogic learning embraces invitational conversations and its principles of equality, immanent value and self-determination. It is on the basis of this sense of equality which Friedrich Kohlrausch (1840–1904) introduced to an undergraduate class of physics. Kohlrausch eliminated power relations between himself and his students so that a collaborative approach was assumed in his classrooms. Students in his class were empowered to interact with experts in the community of physics practice and shared ideas on ongoing research [17]. Students’ unique perspectives were critical in the exercise of research-based learning which Kohlrausch advocated leading to new scientific discoveries in physics. This self-determined learning leads to scientific discoveries and innovations. This is what telagogic learning means in its essence, and it is advanced as key in innovating higher education in the cognitive age of Society 5.0. Society 5.0 is a human-centred, data-informed society that combines physical and cyberspaces to transform our lives, learning and work.

There is also a need to gain greater awareness of the following:

• University learning will increasingly migrate into deep cyberspaces dislocating it from physical buildings and human hands as students gain greater control of their own learning beyond narrow frameworks of curriculum.

• Students would increasingly interact amongst themselves and on a global scale and in real time with human lecturers playing a supplementary role. This is because terabytes of information are made easily available by advanced technologies such as variants of ChatGPT so that learning driven by the epistemology of mimesis has no place in Society 5.0. Students learning would no longer be reduced to the strictures of university frameworks as students access educational programmes anywhere in the world and curate their own personal curriculum. The nature of interaction with knowledge would be guided by the need to trigger new scientific discoveries or innovations.

• The intention of telagogic learning would be scientific discoveries and developing innovative solutions. The current grip of educational learning outcomes would become relics of the past which is a good thing. The purpose of all learning at the university level is to advance science and innovation. Those seeking skills for labour market ought to go to TVET colleges focused on employability.