We're going to begin shortly. I would like to welcome you to the seventh International Conference on Future Education. I would like to invite the panelists on stage: Professor Dr. Uran Iish, the director of EIA University; Professor Turker Kilik, the president of the World Academy of Art and Science; Gary Jacobs, the former director-general of UNESCO; Arina Bova, the founder and former president of the Quality Assurance Committee; and Ralph Wolf.

Welcome to everyone here today and watching online via Zoom. We have an audience being streamed to right now. I would like to thank Professor Dr. Iish for having us at this prestigious event at your beautiful contemporary university. Thank you for having us.

We have more than 100 speakers over the next three days who are going to be addressing the future of education in around 25 different panels. This is the opening plenary, and by Thursday, we hope to have some really good insights and in-depth analysis around the future of education, and hopefully some great ideas that we can all learn from here. We will compile these in a report that will be put out by the World Academy to inform policy on education around the world.

We have around 300 people in the audience, and for the people that are watching online, who are streaming with us today, I was wondering—we're not going to be taking questions from the audience today. So if you'd please like to scan the QR code with your phone, you will then join the Zoom call. Please keep your phone on mute, and you're welcome to ask questions in the chat of your Zoom during the conference. We will address some of those questions in the course of the week, so please feel free to ask any questions that arise from the panel today.

I would now like to ask Professor Dr. Iish, who would like to do a presentation to kick off proceedings. Thank you. Yes, at the podium.

Thank you, dear members of the World Academy of Art and Science, dear colleagues, dear students, dear guests, dear participants. I would like to say welcome to the International Conference on Future Education organized by the W and our Medical School.

Dear participants, especially in the last quarter, we are in a big change. We are living in changing topics, perceptions, targets, technologies, and applications. There is very fast change in our life. It may be funny for me, but I feel like everything changed from evening to morning. This is actually my perception too. I think you feel something like that.

We need to keep up with changes and bring their positive outcomes to our lives, education system, and social structure to reduce possible risks and move forward quickly. It is necessary to make a correct prediction, planning, and new action plans for higher education.

For this purpose, a couple of years ago, UNESCO published a paper that predicts the future of higher education to 2050. It says that higher education institutions should prepare an agreement for the restructure and take responsibilities on many topics for the future.

I would like to read some of them because those are so important for today and also for our future:

- To create higher education on the basis of quality, culture, justice, equality, ethics, respect, empathy, human rights, diversity, gender equality, democratic participation, freedom, and peace issues.

- To create a higher education model for a viable world, economic development, social welfare, and sustainability.

- To conduct joint studies against challenges such as climate crisis, biodiversity loss, democratic regression, destructive technologies, and social and economic inequality.

- To prepare students for life, humanity, environment, and social responsibility.

- To create global communities and generations that consider digitalization, information, collaboration, innovation, and technology as essential.

Dear participants, there are important speeches and discussions on many topics in line with UNESCO's vision at this conference. If I look at the program, I can see some topics, for example: education for future vision, education for peace, diplomacy and human security, education for women in leadership, education for climate challenge, education for sustainability, education for intercultural understanding, transdisciplinary and values-based education, and more.

I would like to thank everyone who supported and contributed to us, especially the valuable speakers, members, deans, and university staff. I know that my time is limited, but I would like to say some words about our university.

EIA University is a comprehensive university. We are working in the fields of engineering, art, basic and social sciences. We have nine faculties and programs, totaling 177,000 students, approximately 4,000 students from other countries. We are progressing and rising rapidly.

Just to give you a couple of numbers: from Times Higher Education Ranking this year, we ranked 1071 in the world. Next year, we estimate that we will be around 800. After next year, we guess I wish we will be around 600.

We are giving big importance to some goals. I would like to mention some of them: to care about productivity, sustainability, visibility, internationalization, innovation, and reputation is so important for us.

To accept ethical values and humanities as fundamental for us to be a university not only of science, education, and research but also culture and art.

To have qualified graduates with analytical minds, intellectual and entrepreneurship skills to contribute to society and the world.

At the end of my speech, I would like to express my special thanks to everybody who supported and contributed to such a nice conference. Also, thanks to everyone who participated in this conference. Thanks to WAA and EIA University for giving this chance to us. I wish the conference is successful. Hope you enjoy the conference.

With my best regards, thank you very much.

Professor Dr. Iish, I would like to ask Gary Jacobs, the president of the World Academy of Art and Science, to maybe introduce Professor Turker Kilik, who is also a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and explain how this conference came about and what we hope to achieve over the next couple of days.

If you could use the microphone over there. I have several slides. Sure, may I have the first slide, please?

I would like to welcome you all. This meeting is one of the most important academic meetings in our country this year, probably. This is the human brain, and I am a neuroscientist and brain surgeon. This is the most beautiful thing in life for me.

Around a decade ago, we started to work on how the brain creates the mind, and unexpectedly, we also faced information relevant to the model of life and our understanding of life.

So how the brain thinks is related to how life creates reality. Probably these two models are working according to similar mathematics. We came up with the interaction between the nerve cells, maybe something related to what life is.

Initially, we were thinking that the most accomplished, most sophisticated processor of information is the human brain. But then we understood that the most sophisticated or most accomplished information processor is life itself.

This important change came up with this important experiment. Here you see the processing of a rat brain, the process of information in the rat brain.

We came up with the idea that information itself is the main thing in life. Life is not based on atoms as we previously regarded, but information itself is the base of life.

This, of course, is something related to education. Here, the Nobel Prize was received in 2021, and after this important accomplishment, information and mathematics came up with something related to the understanding of what life is.

From now on, we are dealing with the main concept of information as the forming material of life itself.

Now we are at the age of a new methodology of science, and our new concept is not deduction, not induction, but in fact, this interconnectedness between the basis of life, which is information itself.

This important meeting is related to how this new science creates our new understanding of education. The main aim of why we are here is this main question: how can we create a better and more beautiful world?

This is something related to the new methodology of science, and this important meeting is related to how the understanding of the base of life, which is information, is related to the new methodology of education for the future.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Professor. Gary, would you like to use the microphone over there? Okay, perfect.

Good afternoon. I'd like to thank Rector Iish for inviting us here, inviting the World Academy of Art and Science and our colleagues and partner organizations to address this audience and spend three days at your beautiful university.

I'd also like to thank our good friend Turker Kilik, who is a fellow of the academy, and I'm very grateful to him for introducing us here so that we could spend this time with you.

In our regard, education is the single most powerful institution, or if you want to say invention, that humanity has ever created. Why would I say that?

Education is the organization we have created to take the cumulative experience of all past generations of humanity, going back thousands of years to the extent that we know it and we have recorded it or we have recovered it, and pass it on to the next generation.

So we need not reinvent all the discoveries of the past. We need not reinvent the wheel or discover fire again or even the computer or even the internet. We can pass on to the next generation all that our forefathers and foremothers have given us so that the next generation can start off from where we left off and hopefully not have to repeat all of the mistakes that we've made in the past, all of the errors, or reinvent things that we've already invented.

But you can start and blaze a greater future for humanity. I think this fair meets the description of a remarkable invention that impacts all the people in the world, at least all who have access to this wonderful gift that our forefathers have left for us.

But education also poses an extraordinary challenge to us. It's a great opportunity but an extraordinary challenge. You, the younger generation today, face greater challenges in a sense than any generation before, simply because of the pace of our social change, the pace of our technological change, and the pace of our knowledge generation.

The multiplication of knowledge and data is growing so quickly. There's more and more to know, and it's changing more and more rapidly. So the challenges for youth today are how we are to cope with, absorb, and have access to and learn all that we need to live a better future in a world that's changing so rapidly.

I think you can probably all identify with this just from what we've seen in the last couple of years with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. Because those who have not gone through the system, those who have not learned the powers of AI and how to utilize it properly, are left behind, or they must quickly now try to catch up, whether they're age 25, 30, 40, or 50, because the world is changing, and we need to keep pace with those changes.

So education is not just the most powerful instrument we have, but it faces the greatest challenges. Those challenges are of many types. One of them for our mathematicians is a quantitative challenge because not only is the volume of knowledge increasing very rapidly, but the population of the world is growing rapidly.

That means our capacity to educate quantitatively everybody who wants it has to grow very rapidly as well. Today, about 40-42% of the world's college-age population, say 18 to 23 or 18 to 24, about 42% of the world's population in this age group, in the age group of most of you in the room, have access to higher education.

In some countries, in a few countries like the United States, it's 80% or more, a few in Scandinavia as well. The average in Europe among all the EU countries is about 60%. The average in the world is only 42%.

I'm living in South India, where the average is 27%, and there are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where it's only about 10 or 12%. What does that mean? If we want every youth in the world to have the same opportunities as those who are in the most advanced countries, it means we would need to double, at a minimum, the global capacity of our higher educational system to meet the needs of this and future generations.

And those future generations are growing, and that means we need more capacity than before. We not only need more capacity, but we need more quality of education. By that, I mean if we can credit the world, it has developed remarkably in the last 200 years, even more so in the last 50 years, and even more so at a faster rate in the last 10 years.

We would normally attribute much of this to advances in science and technology, whether it's in healthcare, computing power, telecommunications power, or productivity. Whatever it is, we would attribute it to the rising levels of education and knowledge in the world. Fair enough.

But if that's the case, then we must also ask how come, with all of this growth of knowledge, how come, with all of this growth of technology, that everything is not marvelous, improved? How come we still have violence in the world, wars in the world, poverty in the world, unemployment in the world, people who feel afraid of the future, rising insecurity instead of greater security than before?

Not everywhere, but in many places, that's true, even in the most prosperous countries. So we have to also say if knowledge and education have helped us advance so much, it must also be somehow contributing to our problems.

There must be something wrong with or limited to the kind of education that we have all received, that we've not been able to solve all our problems and make them all disappear.

So the challenge for education today, and all those who study and do research in all fields and all disciplines, is what don't we know? What do we not know that we need to know? What's wrong with the way we're thinking?

Einstein was very famed for his statement, a founder of the academy, that you can't solve problems by the same way of thinking that you created the problems. Well then, we seem to be creating problems as fast as we're solving them.

So we need not only more education, but we need a higher level of education, a higher level of knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.

So education is not just a great power; it's undergoing great challenges. If we want to meet the needs and aspirations of every young person on Earth, just a little information to put in place to expand our educational capacity by 100 million youth, we would need to spend about $2.5 trillion just to build the facilities.

We need to spend about $3 trillion a year on the operating of those new youth. If we have to do that every year, we're talking about, in five years, a fabulous amount that we need to spend to expand educational quality even at this level.

So something needs to change if we're going to meet all our needs. It's not just a matter of expanding the system; we have to be upgrading the system. Also, whatever we learn in the institution today or next year is not going to be fully sufficient three years, five years, or ten years from now.

The idea when I graduated from the university was, okay, you finish your education, and now you live your life. But life today is unrecognizably different than it was at that time.

How are we going to keep pace with the rapid changes, continued changes in education today, with the growing speed of knowledge? I'm raising these issues because that's the reason for this conference.

That's the reason we're so grateful to the university for inviting us and for all your scholars contributing with us and for many from other parts of the world.

The purpose of this conference is to ask the question: if we want to create a global system of education that would make it available to everybody, everybody who wants it, who really aspires to learn more knowledge, and to make it available means it must not only be available locally, but it must be affordable.

It must be accessible to everybody in the world, and that would mean it should be available in many languages because not everybody can take it in English or in Turkish or whatever else it is.

So how could we do it? How would we do it? That's the question that the World Academy has posed to its colleagues, its members, and its partners, and that's what we've come here to discuss and explore with you.

To hear the views of experts from many different fields, asking a very difficult question that I don't think anybody has answered up until now. But I'm not trying to discourage you in any way by posing it this way because we also believe, as great as the challenges are, that the opportunities for a radical revolution in higher education are now possible for the first time.

We have the possibility of extending the greatest knowledge to future generations at a much lower cost, a fraction of the cost of doing it now, so that it can be ongoing and accessible to people everywhere in the world and in any language, and to interact with them in a responsive way that we've not seen before.

It is a great pleasure to be here. I thank again the university for hosting this meeting. I look forward to working with all of you, hearing your questions, hearing your ideas, and trying to emerge with some answers to these questions.

Thank you.

Thank you, Gary. I'd like to ask Arina Bova to give us her opening thoughts on the future of education. Just to mention as well, Arina Bova is the first female director-general of UNESCO back in the day, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on where the future takes us on education.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Grant, and such a pleasure, Mr. President, to be here in this university in an audience which is young. I think this is most inspirational for all of us.

If I may pick up from really such a passionate and inspirational plea, I would say, of the president of WAA, Gary Jacobs, about the importance of education. I was just thinking, based on my experience at UNESCO and as somebody who was working for the sustainable development agenda for the formulation of the new ideas at those times some ten years ago about education, I was thinking how important it was, of course, the contribution of the intellectual thinking of WAA and other partners at UNESCO.

Picking up on what Gary just said, how we actually frame all these very important ideas, how we put them into some kind of policy decisions, into guidance to governments, to civil society, to academia, of course.

We should not forget, and I just want to state what is the current stage. We should not forget that there are still unfinished business in all our initial ideas. There are 800 million people illiterate in this world. There are 2.2 billion people that do not have access to the internet.

Because we speak about technology, we speak about equity, we speak about equal opportunities, so there are definitely some gaps. Girls are less fortunate in many instances to go to school or to follow their careers in science or in some other instances.

So there is a lot of unfinished business. And then, of course, we come to this kind of framework, and I think we need to reconfirm goal number four of the sustainable development agenda.

As the Summit of the Future, which was convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations last September, made a dire assessment: only 177% of the targets of the sustainable development agenda have been achieved, and we just have six years—less than six years—and many of them also in education.

The goal number four, which is about equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all, and each one of these, I would like to point out, has great relevance to the debate today.

We have, of course, the equity question, which is so much needed nowadays, and Gary once again made a fantastic plea and reasoning why we need it. The quality of education—we know that there was a lot of spending and a lot of programs on equity in education and opportunities, but we did not care about the quality of education.

At the end of the day, the outcomes were that young people were getting out of schooling, out of education, without being functionally literate. We know nowadays that there are millions, hundreds of millions of young people who are functionally illiterate.

Then, of course, we come to the question of lifelong learning, and this is where I believe this kind of holistic vision of education is important and the relevance of universities and higher education.

Now, there are many firsts in goal number four. There is early childhood care and development going up to universities because education is an ecosystem. Education is holistic. You cannot just look at one stage without looking at the others.

When I say lifelong learning, I come, of course, to technology because with AI, with technology, and now with AI, of course, we know that economies are so rapidly changing and skills are so rapidly changing, and education should also change in order to pace with this change.

Because we know nowadays what skills are needed now, but we don't know about tomorrow. The reskilling of people is where lifelong learning comes in, and it is a very important task, I believe, of universities now.

Universities, for the first time, were included in goal number four exactly because they are one of the greatest societal, and I insist on the word societal, inventions in the Middle Ages.

I think nowadays we have to look once again at the universities with their societal responsibilities of educating young people, giving back to societies, also with lifelong learning and training and reskilling because this is how life will be for the future.

I believe this responsibility, of course, following the path of sustainability, social inclusion, and diversity, which is very important, is even more relevant today with technology and artificial intelligence.

I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss more the contributions and how artificial intelligence poses enormous opportunities, but also, I believe, some risks if we are not careful of how we implement it from the ethical point of view, from the point of view of diversity and inclusiveness.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for those insights. Ralph, I'd like you just to close off the session today with your thoughts on the future of education, please.

Thank you. Delighted to be here, and a pleasure to be before all of you instead of a Zoom screen. The World Academy of Art and Science was created in 1960, so it's 64-plus years old, and one of the activities is to create something called the World University Consortium, which is co-sponsoring this conference with the university.

I'd like to focus on what that may mean for the consortium as we focus on the future of education and to say, as other speakers have talked about, the enormous gaps in the delivery of education. Technology, the internet, extends education to those who have access to it, but there are tremendous gaps.

The idea of a world university has always been part of the World Academy and the consortium, which was created about 11 years ago. I'd like to focus just a moment on artificial intelligence. There are a number of sessions on that.

I have a question for you: raise your hand if you have used artificial intelligence. Those in the audience? A good number of you. I say within a year, probably all of you are going to be using it. It has become increasingly part of our culture, and the capacities of artificial intelligence are accelerating beyond our imagination.

That's an amazing opportunity to improve the quality and access to education. At the same time, it's being commercialized, so it may be for cost, and we have to be careful that that access is available even to areas that do not have the capacity to afford it.

I'd like to focus on four dimensions of where we think artificial intelligence can make a tremendous difference and improve the quality, access, and outcomes of education at all levels.

First, we'll be on the pedagogy itself—what is being taught. A lot of teachers and faculty have great knowledge but are not trained in how to teach or how to teach for the future.

Artificial intelligence is now being trained to fill the gaps in teaching and to become adaptive and personalized to improve learning. Then there is curricular content. We have to keep current as the amount of knowledge and the currency of knowledge is tremendously changing.

A lot of my work has been on not only learning how to change and allow new learning to come in but how to unlearn what we learned that's not accurate or no longer relevant.

A third dimension is delivery systems. It is now possible to deliver artificial intelligence or curricula not only through technology but even where there is, or increasingly I think we'll be, where there is no internet access.

Though that's really important for a lot of the interactive elements of artificial intelligence. Also, an area where I spent a great deal of my life is around assessing learning and certifying learning.

Artificial intelligence, I think, will be able to standardize or improve the level of quality. A number of the sessions in this conference are around each of these four levels or dimensions of artificial intelligence, and we'll have breakout sessions. Questions can be asked, and I hope you all will follow up with that.

What we'll be doing at the consortium, the World University Consortium, is thinking both at the grand level of what kind of university systems are needed and also at the operational level.

We've already been hearing about this morning where some activities are done at all levels of education, focusing on human security, sustainability, and how to use artificial intelligence in the most responsible way.

So we look forward to this conference, and I will say that, as a professor indicated, learning is about connections. One of the reasons why it's called a consortium is we want to build connections across the globe with multiple schools and universities, students, and faculty to improve the quality of learning.

So we're delighted to be here and look forward to our time together.

[Applause]

Thank you very much, Ralph. We've reached the top of the hour, which is the end of the session. We hope to see you back here on Thursday, where we will hopefully have some solutions and further insights into the future of education.

I'd like to thank our host at EIA University again for having us. We have another 12 sessions this afternoon in three different rooms. If you haven't already, at the front desk, there's a brochure that will give you the names of the rooms and the sessions.

If you'd like to stay for the next session in this room, it's going to be education for women in leadership that will be held here. So you can stay where you are. Otherwise, we have two other rooms for two other sessions this afternoon.

Thank you very much to all the panelists, and we hope you enjoy your week on the future of education. Thank you.

Thank you so much for your speech.

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7. Uluslararası Geleceğin Eğitimi Konferansı

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