Universities may be going online temporarily, or perhaps permanently, but the curriculum does not seem to have changed. What should be taught at university is how to learn once out of university. In 2013, Jane Hart and I worked with Bangor University in Wales to incorporate personal knowledge mastery into the Psychology curriculum.

We started by working with the faculty:

• Strategies for using social tools for personal and professional learning
• Understanding the seek > sense > share framework
• Personal network mapping
• Where and how to build your professional network

The PKM framework was then incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum, which had its initial challenges, as many students only understood the traditional paradigm of formal education.

“We actually faced a few challenges in helping the students warm to PKM. It seemed that many could not see the reason why they had to do PKM, and also that many struggled to catch the vision of how to do it. A lot of students had expected higher education to involve memorising information to pass exams, as they had previously done in school. PKM did not have that same type of measurable outcome and many students would ask me what exactly it was they needed to do to pass the class.” —Chris James Barker

Chris goes on to remark, “Perhaps PKM is the difference between higher education and that of the typical high school.” Now that many university programs have been exposed online — and their weaknesses made transparent — is it not time to look at the foundations of the curriculum? Our society is currently addressing its first major pandemic in a century and an impending Great Reset of the economy. Collectively we need to improve our sensemaking skills. Mastering a single field is not enough. PKM helps to integrate various fields by encouraging connections outside our specialties.

“For research and knowledge based economies to work, they need to be more than just transferring information. It is the intrinsic passion and ingenuity that transforms information in to actions or solutions to problems. It comes from within, and that is why (beyond teaching the PKM framework) it can’t be forced. Some will do it and change the world, others won’t.” —Chris James Barker

It’s time to change the world.

Learn more about — personal knowledge mastery.