Rethinking our education infrastructure using open technologies of the future

As the founder of Moodle, the most-widely used learning management system in the world, over 20 years ago, I've seen a lot of things change in the higher education sector as well as a lot of things not changing.

One of those changes is towards using commercial cloud infrastructure to handle more and more of the computing and information technology needs of operating a university. Often this extends into content and teaching processes too. Along with the ease of choosing commercial solutions comes restrictions and risk.

Another big change is the spread of networking and devices enabling almost anything to be done from anywhere, and this is only going to increase with the rise of AR technologies and wearables in the future. Education will be ever more distributed in time and space.

Lastly, we have the rise of powerful AI that is poised to change every industry, and especially education, as for the first time we will have readily-available (and even privately-owned) machines that can out-perform us intellectually in all the activities we do at University.

I will talk about my vision for the future of a global open infrastructure that could be owned and directed by Universities as a platform for the world's education, that takes into account all these new technologies and could take us into a future where Universities are once again thought leaders in education technology, coordinated by a new association called Open EdTech that we are just creating.