Deeper Learning - How can it revolutionize African education and prepare students for the future workforce?

The term 'Deep learning' is widespread today from the name of machine learning. On the contrary, another term 'Deeper Learning' from the area of education was prevalent a decade ago, but now it is becoming a fashionable phrase for educationists. It is not just a buzz word, but it also has a power to change the status quo of education and revamp it to the next level. Though, it has the potential to transform teaching and learning, it is still unsure how to a new students


INTRODUCTION
There is a soaring low enrollment rate of children, adolescents and youth specifically in Sub-Saharan part of Africa where 1/5th of the children between the age 6 and 11 do not go to school, whereas 1/3rd of students between 12 and 14 years of age do not opt for school. On the other hand, 60% of the youth between the age range 15 and 17 do not prefer school (UNESCO, 2018). Besides Africa, 236 million of children and youth are out of school in a world. The director of UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UNESCO, 2018) states there is a crisis in the learning as well. She insisted we need to have the effective monitoring system to make sure that students stay in school and they are learning what they need to know. It indicates there is a problem in learning also as children or youth are not learning what they need to know. So, they do not possess skills required to work for the companies, and thus, not prepared for the future workforce.

What is a future workforce?
The future work is more about working and creating together; millions of people access Wikipedia on a regular basis, they collaborate and create with a full freedom, working through collective wisdom, and become lifelong learners. Earlier, educators focused on imbibing reading, writing, and arithmetic, but nowadays, companies are looking for four C's (collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity). The National Network of Business and We need a clear roadmap to prepare students for deeper learning: 1. Imbibe deeper learning skills required to work in a 21st century.
3. Use of digital technology.
The first thing comes to mind for inculcating deeper learning skills is to change mindset of students from fixed to a growing one. As per Dweck

Digital Knowledge Association and Integration:
The fundamental aim of every educator or learner is to learn something meaningfully, understand it to a deeper level. Besides, it has always been echoed by researchers that concepts do no exit individually, but they make associations with the related concepts, and that's how humans learn. We make connections of the interrelated concepts, and it helps us to learn and comprehend it. To learn meaningfully, we need to associate knowledge with our past experiences, and Semantic networks may help a lot in this regard. There are many ways and strategies employed to improve the process of learning, and one of them is to link new information with the existing one to help learners in acquiring a new concept.
The existing information indicates, a knowledge, learner has earned from one's past experiences whether in school, with teachers, peers or family.
Learning and personal experience has a positive relation, and David Ausubel, an American psychologist, stressed upon the link of past experiences with the learning and implied that people learn from experiences because they are stored in the memory, and there is a link between past and new knowledge we gain. Owing to the fact, we have our own personal experiences, hence, each one of us possess distinct cognitive structure and therefore, we follow different learning path or process for receiving any information. Everyone has a different capacity to organize relationship between ideas in their memory, and organization or representation of these ideas form a network termed as Semantic Network. Each learner need to know his or her semantic network for the concept and teachers can match their semantic network with them to determine the level of knowledge learners hold in their possession. Relating new knowledge with the past one strengthens one's cognitive structure, and it becomes easy for a learner to grasp new concepts which improves their learning process, and it leads to meaningful learning.
Semantic network is a technique which helps in knowledge representation and engross learners in analyzing the structure of knowledge they have and organize existing ideas with the new ones to represent knowledge, which in turn enhances critical thinking and higher order learning skill of learners. Semantic 8 networking processes knowledge to the deeper level, and thus helps in reorganizing knowledge by mapping the content knowledge onto the cognitive structure of learners (Gulmans, 2004).
2. Digital Knowledge Connection and Creation: After understanding the concept to the deeper level, and associating it with the past experiences, learners create new knowledge. They connect with other learners not only from the same class or course, but from other courses, schools, and universities.
Knowledge creation pedagogy is best to prepare students for 21st century.
How this knowledge creation pedagogy is applied?
Learners connect with their peers, teachers, and then collaborate through computer supported collaborative learning to create a knowledge on the topic or recent problem associated with the topic. Innovation cluster may be formed by engaging students with students from the same course, global students of the same course, educators, researchers and entrepreneurs. This innovation cluster is based upon knowledge creation pedagogy where creation and then innovation happens. This pedagogy echoes that knowledge is created, but not discovered; what students contribute to the society or community is primarily focused than what at an individual level they know or what's in their mind.
Hence, it goes from knowledge creation or building a knowledge creation society to the one which is innovation driven.
This new framework, a concoction of new pedagogy and digital technology improves many global 21st century skills of students: personalized learning and semantic networks assist students in providing a meaningful learning where critical thinking and learning leadership skills of students are developed. It helps them to explore their personal process or path of learning; makes a strong academic foundation (academic mindset) for students and make them capable to lead towards knowledge creation. Also, it improves their initiative and self-direction capability. Besides, innovation cluster, and computer supported collaboration improves their interpersonal skill, collaboration, critical thinking, social and cross-cultural interaction and prepare them to work in diverse teams and turn them into a global or digital citizen.

Conclusion
This paper has echoed from the perspective of deeper learning as it is considered as a fourth educational revolution. Everyone is talking about preparing students for the fourth industrial revolution whether educational technology companies or education researchers, but the need of an hour is to build a new pedagogy where co-creation and application is more emphasized than recalling the facts. Author has brought the focus on associating and integrating knowledge with the previous experience and making a network of concepts before creation and application. Application means transferring knowledge to another situation, however, to transfer it, one needs to have a meaningful learning. Meaningful learning stresses more on association of facts than recalling them which improves understanding. The new scale of pedagogy begins from associating and integrating concepts with the past experiences and help students to make their thinking and knowledge more visual and explicit.
Semantic network can be utilized to achieve it. After understanding one's own individual learning pathway or a process through semantic network, students connect with other peer and experts, then co-create and co-innovate by utilizing collaborative computer supported learning and innovation cluster.