TEACHER 4.0: REQUIREMENTS OF THE TEACHER OF THE FUTURE IN CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The recent jump of digitalization of our lives, surroundings and working environments, represents one of the major drivers of change in the new century. In 2012, the government of Germany introduced the term “Industry 4.0” to indicate the potential fourth industrial revolution which is known worldwide with the term “Industrial Internet”. Industry 4.0 will introduce intelligent software and systems to all stages of production in the industry resulting in an increase of production availability and reliability. The term is extending to cover wider areas other than just the industry. Hence, terms such as “Cities 4.0” and “Language 4.0” started to be introduced within the same context of the technological revolution as researchers started to investigate what effect this revelation can leave on different life sectors.

In our concern, this concept is enlarged to cover higher education and its current teaching methods. In this context, education has to adapt to new methods to follow up with the changes happening with technology. Therefore, a new concept of teaching and being a teacher has to be considered. This is what is called: “Teacher 4.0”.

In the near future, along with more adaption of the Teacher 4.0 concept, it will be usual for teachers to stand in front of the classroom or a virtual audience presenting a concept while - for instance - wearing smart augmented reality devices. In another setup, a combination of sensing devices and audience response systems, teachers will be able get a direct feedback on the status of the students (i.e. their activity level, focusing level and tension level), and what is attracting their attention from the taught content. Teachers will be able to get a self-feedback on their own status with a smart notification system. Messages can appear directly on an augmented reality device which provides information to the teacher such as: “Increase your voice volume”, or “Make a wider eye contact with more students”, etc.

The Teacher 4.0 sees the evolution and the speed of the development of these technologies. Furthermore, it looks at the need of establishing a concept to handle the technological complexity that it brings for connecting all of different technologies together in a didactical teaching scenario. Based on that, this paper gives a first definition of the Teacher 4.0 and extend the discussion to the challenges and requirements that are facing it.

In this paper, different teaching scenarios are derived to cope with the current technological revolution in context of industry 4.0. Within these scenarios, innovative technologies were used introducing new teaching methods. The presented scenarios of Teacher 4.0 are analyzed in comparison with traditional teaching methods in a form of "scenario thinking" or as known as "scenario analysis" method aiming at identifying key challenges and requirements for the future teachers.

The paper presents the challenges and requirements for applying the Teacher 4.0 concept in four categories: human-based, didactical, technological and organizational. The paper closes with a short summary and gives an outlook of further required steps for teachers in order to adapt new technologies in higher education.