Digital Twins for Personalized Education and Lifelong Learning

Abstract

This paper discusses a new model of digital twins suitable not only for industries but for personalized education and life-long learning. In the past, professional education lasted for a lifetime through all the industrial revolutions, including the third. During those revolutions, not only the pace of knowledge doubling has accelerated from a lifetime to months, but the half-life of pertinent knowledge has also shortened. Are we capable of adjusting to that pace? How can we learn all that is needed in the old Prussian model of education based on one-program-fits-all? Since professionals have to migrate through multiple job environments, we should revamp the educational system at the core. The new system must be personalized to match the diversity of individual abilities and styles of learning. The new system must also be based not only on the traditional body of knowledge (BoK), but also on the body of experience (BoX) and body of memetics (BoM). The new personalized system of learning must be sufficiently agile and interactive so that it would become evolving in its symbiosis with humans. For that to happen, we should consider coexisting with memetic symbiotic autonomous cognitive systems, specifically involving digital twins. This paper addresses some aspects of this view.