How will Education 4.0 influence learning in higher education?

Higher education at the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2015) is undergoing unprecedented change because of the opportunities revealed for using digital technology, referred to as Education 4.0 (Feldman, 2018). Although societies throughout time have undergone seismic change, it is the speed and magnitude of Education 4.0 that is challenging higher education to respond. Changes include access to knowledge, ways that knowledge is shared, and the increasing demand by students for their voices to be heard and to be integral to the design of their learning. However, the opportunities revealed for using digital technology must be carefully managed; it is essential academics and higher education institutions investigate the design of learning objects and ensure an authentic student voice is integral to those resources in the Education 4.0 landscape.

. Industrial Revolutions. 1 Figure 1 represents the four industrial revolutions described by Schwab (2015), with an indication of when they occurred and their impact on society. Compulsory education has had to rapidly adapt to an increasingly technological world over a very compressed time period, compared to education over the millennia. The use of information and communication technology is seen as a part of everyday life (Clarke, 2011). and higher education also has to rapidly comprehend Education 4.0, adopting artificial intelligence such as chatbots and redesigning the campus learning environment (Jisc, 2019;THE, no date). Tierney (2016) considers the role universities play in the 21 st century to be based on Cardinal Newman's view that a liberal education was of more benefit than training individuals for specific disciplines. However, in more recent times, some universities have focussed on fostering individuals with the necessary knowledge, skill and abilities to enter a specific profession such as nursing or allied health professions, public service, and surveying because of societal demands, perhaps just as in Ancient Greece.
The generations since World War II have been categorised as Baby Boomers (born 1946), Generation X (1965), followed by Generation Y/Millennials (1977), and those born from 1995 are referred to as Generation Z/Gen Z/ post-Millennials/the iGeneration (Schenarts, 2020). It is Generation Z who have no experience of the world before the web, and who have experienced compulsory education primarily in an online environment; although their teachers educated in an offline world are delivering education in an online world. Although there is no definitive view that categorises individuals as belonging to a specific generation, Strauss and Howe's (1997) discourse on generations and historical events (admittedly with an American focus), provides a starting point to understand the student in higher education today.  (WHO, 2020) has forced compulsory and higher education to embrace many forms of technology in order to deliver education during the pandemic and beyond, and has brought into sharp focus why attention to the design of learning resources is essential.
A binary division categorising students accessing higher education as digital natives or digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001) may be too simplistic, as Sharpe et al. (2005) identify in their report for JISC, and an editorial by Rachel Leaver suggests that natives might be 'more comfortable with the technology but not necessarily having the skills to use it' (Leaver, 2012, p.97). It may be that natives know how to use technology but may not fully appreciate how Education 4.0 tools can enhance their learning and opportunities for education.
Because of the changes in society as a result of Education 4.0 and the learner in the 21 st century, it is incumbent on academics and institutions to work with students to design 2 The age range ascribed to each generation is an approximation based on literature from Gordon (2010) Framework. Digital technology is a dominant force for change and is transforming society over a much shorter time than in previous industrial revolutions (Kahng, 2012;Rodriguez et al., 2015). However, this rapid progress has not allowed time for pedagogical practice to adapt in the way other industries have had to. Education must investigate, understand and adapt to this new environment if learners are to gain the most from these changes in society. It is incumbent on academics and higher education to exploit the opportunities revealed by Education 4.0; those individuals and organisations who do not will be left behind.

The learning environment
With over half of the world's population online (Kemp, 2018) Education 4.0 has influenced and revealed opportunities to enhance learning in higher education. Education must embrace the opportunities revealed whilst avoiding Gartner's Hype Cycle (Gartner, 2017), which indicates how the actual usefulness of a specific technology can be over played before longer term gains are identified and established.
Nevertheless, the changes in society as a consequence of this technological revolution have meant the integration of digital technology in education is an expectation for the majority of learners within higher education (Brown, 2015) and in particular for Generation Z, who have matured alongside the technology. Expectation drives demand, but if not carefully planned can also lead to poorly designed or delivered educational resources.

Learning design and learning objects
The Criticism persisted as to what actually defined a learning object (Friesen, 2003) and Metros (2005, p.12) suggested that a learning object 'must include or link to 1) a learning objective, 2) practice activity, and 3) an assessment', although this definition focusses more on institutional requirements than a student-centred approach. Oliver (2007) described an education ecosystem in which learning objects are an essential building block of a university's overarching digital education structure. Jisc (2014) define a learning object as 'an aggregation of one or more digital assets which represents an educationally meaningful stand-alone unit', although only by designing and developing pedagogically useful resources will Education 4.0 provide benefits to all.
Peter Goodyear highlights the need for learning design to assume a greater role in higher education whatever teaching and learning methods are used (Goodyear, 2015) and goes on to explain how 'traditional teaching' in higher education is not fit for purpose because students use the technology they have to hand (laptops, tablets and smart phones) to access learning within and outside traditionally accepted structures. Most importantly 'teaching approaches that may have been the norm 20 or even 10 years ago no longer Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 17: May 2020 7 look affordable or appealing' (Goodyear, 2015, p.37), supporting an approach that makes the student central to the design of their learning resources.

Students
Formal education theories have been developed since the late 19 th century with three distinct, although to some degree overlapping, schools of thought referred to as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism (Ertmer and Newby, 1993;Woollard, 2011;Harasim, 2017). Disciplines develop and adapt their own brand of educational theory, but, as we are far from understanding how the human brain functions, no one theory can be definitively accepted (Dennick, 2015). However, the democratisation of access to knowledge is also influenced by more active student engagement in learning, reflecting a social constructivist approach to learning and the importance of learning design as identified by Conole (2014)  In 2013/2014 there were 1.7 million undergraduate students in higher education in England alone (Higher Education Statistics Authority, no date), and Lord Browne reported that 45% of 18-30-year-olds in England entered higher education in 2010, an increase from 39% ten years previously (Browne, 2010). In addition to promoting access to, and participation in, higher education, focus is now turning to graduate success and the cited are student evaluation of teaching and a case report from a university in the Midlands suggesting there is work to do before the student contribution is central to and embedded in the learning design process. Furthermore, with access agreements and a widening participation agenda designed to open universities to underrepresented groups in society (McGettigan, 2013;Matheson and Woodward, 2015), the university student population is more diverse, and educators must consider how learning objects can be designed to meet all students' needs.
More importantly, Generation Z students embarking on higher education study in the first decades of the 21 st century have grown up with digital technologies (Hutchinson et al., 2012;Lippencott, 2012;Chung and Fitzsimons, 2013) and will be critical of poorly designed resources. It is important to investigate how this technology can be utilised to achieve more effective learning environments. Grainne Conole suggests that technology is 'central to how they organise and orientate their learning' (Conole, 2008, p.138), and educational practice must accommodate how students learn in order to enable them to reach their full potential. A report for DEMOS that investigated a child's learning in the digital age identified the dominant role technology played in their life and a proportion of these individuals have or are about to enter post-compulsory education (Green and Hanlon, 2007).

Student voice
With higher education now part of a market economy, Jones-Devitt and LeBihan (2018) suggest that the term 'student voice' can have different interpretations, one being feedback from students on universities and academics, as seen in the United Kingdom in the National Student Survey (NSS, no date). However, the involvement of students in the design of their learning represents a deeper student voice and true partnership because it 1) values their contribution 2) reflects a social constructivist approach to education and 3) is congruent with national policy in the United Kingdom that places the student at the centre of their education.
Williams et al.
How will Education 4.0 influence learning in higher education?
Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 17: May 2020 9 Campbell et al. (2009) promote the importance of respecting the student contribution and embedding it in learning and curriculum design, with descriptive evidence of the advantages and challenges ahead. Campbell et al. (2009) report how students can be integral to the design of curricula in law and science (Brooman et al., 2015;Woolmer et al., 2016), although the challenges to enabling a sufficiently loud student voice include 1) ensuring the physical learning environment facilitates students' centrality to their learning and 2) the active engagement of academics, administrators and institutions. Healey et al.

Conclusion
At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that brought about Education 4.0, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y experienced the same changes in technology − albeit at different stages of their lives − as Generation Z, who know little else.
Consequently, Generation Z students undertaking higher education in the first decades of the 21 st century expect the use of technology in education, and because the previous generations were in their early to mid-adulthood at the dawn of this technological age, they also expect this also to be the norm (Rosen and Nelson, 2008). After all, as Norm Friesen points out, writing and texts have existed for 4,500 years or '150 generational cohorts' (Friesen, 2017, p.151), and we are at the beginning of a new era in education and adapting to how we use these established resources.
Essentially students should not be considered a homogenous group who are au fait with technology; they require support to navigate their learning journey. However, they can make a significant contribution when involved from the start in the design and development of learning objects. Academics must investigate how learning objects are designed and what pedagogical features of a design appear most conducive to the acquisition of knowledge if higher education is to embrace the opportunities of Education 4.0.