Developing a new international education product to align emergent learner needs with future global skills gaps

AUT Ventures

We created a new education product concept to align emergent learner needs with the skill gaps international research predicts the world needs in the decades ahead. We partnered with AUT Ventures to secure funding and help validate it through a pilot with international students.

Background & context

As New Zealand’s 4th largest export earner, evolving what and how the international education sector delivers its products is strategically critical for New Zealand’s economy.

Education New Zealand, New Zealand Government’s export focussed organisation, created a sector wide Innovation Fund to explore next-gen products and delivery modes with support from New Zealand Treasury. The fund would enable successful applicants to develop and validate new international education products and delivery methods to help meet predicated skill demand. Products would provide international learners with pathways that connect ‘career’ and ‘cause’ in alignment with their values, while accommodating increasingly diverse learning preferences moving away from the conventional, physical degree paradigm.

Fund applicants were required to submit proposals under one of several themed shifts. Our team focussed on demonstrating how the education sector could move from generalised learning to a cause-based paradigm. Globally, we knew that more people were searching for a career cause or industry they were passionate about, but found it challenging to identify learning pathways that met this need. We also knew that learners were (and still are) seeking purpose first and career second, leading us to recognise an opportunity to create an education pathway product that could meet these cause-based needs.

Our solution - the Blue Economy hypothesis

Collaborating with two widely-published subject-matter experts with international standing in environmental science,  we identified the blue economy as a strategic opportunity theme that could support ‘cause-led learning’ in export education, while also acting as a future catalyst for exponential growth within multiple sectors across New Zealand.

As the world shifts towards a sustainable blue economy supported by the World Bank, it is projected to double in size by 2030 generating over $3trillion USD per year globally and resulting in substantial job creation. For New Zealand, the blue economy opportunity could be what the tech sector was to Silicon Valley; New Zealand has the opportunity to generate a unique and world leading blue economy, making the most of one of largest marine estates in the world and  transforming our geographic isolation into a major competitive advantage.

Research and development into emerging technologies will continue at pace over the next decade, yielding advancements in AI, quantum computing and biotechnology, among other technologies.

For countries that can afford it, these technologies will provide partial solutions to a range of emerging crises, from addressing new health threats and a crunch in healthcare capacity to scaling food security and climate mitigation. For those that cannot, inequality and divergence will grow.

WEF’s Global Risks Report 2023

Partnering with AUT Ventures

Our team approached Auckland University of Technology’s (AUT) Ventures subsidiary with our blue economy hypothesis, inviting them to partner with us to secure funding from the Education New Zealand Innovation Fund.

Together, we conceptualised, designed, and validated a pioneering blue economy pilot education course, embedding the concept of connecting purpose and career. Named 'Blue Tomorrow,' the course was positioned to prospective learners as an opportunity to help them find an impactful and rewarding career in the biggest opportunity on the planet, the Blue Economy.

This visualisation depicts our initial thinking of how a Blue Tomorrow learner might start their journey, from passion, to learning, to career. A tool useful for communicating the idea to potential partners and key stakeholders.

To understand learners better, we conducted a survey to discover our audiences aspirations, particularly their inclination to align their careers with a sense of purpose. We had 141 respondents, 89 of which were interested in the Blue Tomorrow pilot.

Mock up pages of Blue Tomorrow - created during a week long sprint used to validate critical hypotheses and assumptions and tested in one-on-one moderated interviews with international and domestic learners.

Refined mock up pages of Blue Tomorrow, used to test refinements in unmoderated testing.

Launch of a pilot course

As partners, we identified key faculty strengths and how they could be aligned or modified to meet the skills the Blue Economy needed to boom. Viable, integrated pathways from study to work were validated by private sector enterprises already demonstrating world-leading work in these areas, and potential Government enablers that would support and accelerate a proposition in this space were approached, including New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).

Our efforts led to Moananui (Nelson Regions' Blue Economy Cluster created to develop New Zealand’s blue economy generate economic value, connect people, and improve ocean health), who supported our prototype by investing resources and expertise alongside Ghost and AUT Ventures to bring the ‘test’ to life.

An initial international research phase was commenced to validate the Blue Tomorrow concept in broad terms, with positive responses informing a subsequent pilot version of the Blue Tomorrow course launching across two learning platforms online.

Valuable learnings for future courses of this nature were informed from course data and feedback, including understanding uptake, how the course translated into value for learners, how New Zealand’s reputation influenced the course, and how it affected learner’s propensity to study further with or in New Zealand.

Thank you for providing a very informative learning experience. I hadn't really heard about the "Blue Economy" before enrolling in this course, so it has been very enlightening.

Future Learn Course Comment

Our team collated course data and summarised learnings into a report providing insights for future courses of this nature.

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