Author: Marina Shulga is a Chief Product Officer specializing in AI-driven education and gaming-tech ecosystems across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
Discussions about the future of education center inevitably on the same basic topics: technology vs. no technology, automation vs. instructors, certification vs. skill. The discussion consumes the lion’s share of interest and resources while avoiding the one question that makes it all possible or worthwhile in the first place. It may help to know the purpose of education before deciding how best to deliver it.
Over the past few years, I have helped localize education programs into more than thirty languages, managed an international academy built through collaborations with national governments, and worked at the product level on the design and delivery of learning processes. In developing that academy, our team researched the potential across thirty-six countries. Through this experience, I learned one lesson that is often lost in the discourse on technology and education. The value-creation process in education is also the least visible, most difficult to measure, and most easily forgotten aspect when optimization takes over the entire educational system.
Information was never the point
Education has never really been about the transfer of information, even when it looked that way. Information today is abundant and effectively low-cost to access in most contexts. The internet largely solved the problem of access to knowledge, and recent advances in AI have further expanded that access. Anyone with a connection can reach more material in an afternoon than a nineteenth-century scholar saw in a lifetime.
What education produces is context. It gives a person a framework for making sense of information, a community to think alongside, and a set of shared references that enable collaboration with others. Someone who studied at a British university has acquired something well beyond the contents of the syllabus. They understand how that particular environment operates, including its norms, its expectations, and the rules nobody writes down. Someone educated in an entirely different system carries an equivalent fluency in how the institutions and social life of that world function. The knowledge on the transcript counts for less than the fluency in an environment that the years of study quietly build.
I’m currently enrolled in a continuing education program for entrepreneurs, and a good deal of the material repeats what I studied more than a decade ago. I am finishing it for the credential, and I am honest with myself about that. The genuine value lies elsewhere — in absorbing the British context and its way of interpreting things, in gaining another picture of the world, another dimension through which to see it. That was true of my earlier education as well: its worth was never the information it contained, but learning how a world worked from the inside, in a way no reading list could have.
The function nobody measures
Education, being social and organized, has one feature that is hard to replicate in an asynchronous system. This is the concept of integration.
Here, integration refers to the ability to operate effectively within a new social, institutional, or cultural environment — while also forming the relationships and shared understanding required to work with others inside it.
When a student decides to travel abroad to study, they discover the workings of a new environment from within, form connections across different cultural traditions, and gain experience that broadens their horizons considerably. This scenario applies not only to traveling abroad but also to moving within the country. One travels from a provincial area to a regional city or even the capital, learns there, and returns as someone who has gained additional knowledge and skills, making them part of the society to which they now belong.
The mechanism lies beneath every major wave of social mobility, from industrialization to digitalization. The people who moved, studied somewhere new, and came back changed were the ones who built bridges between two worlds, and their education was what let them cross.
It was through managing teams comprising more than twenty different nationalities at a global gaming-fintech company that I realized the challenges of integration. At first, our processes moved slowly because the team spent much of its time reaching agreement and making decisions across cultural and linguistic differences. The only thing that allowed the team members to operate almost was common ground, not location. These people, who eventually became effective collaborators, were living in various corners of the world, speaking at least two or three languages each; However, what united them was a shared working language and a shared set of assumptions about how to solve problems. Location didn’t matter here, but common ground did; once it was established, people who had previously found it hard to make progress started collaborating effectively. After all, my conclusions from this experience were that the ability to operate in an unfamiliar setting is a special competence that can be developed through education.
What erodes when the function disappears
With the increasing trend towards asynchronous and personalized learning, the task of integration becomes all the more difficult. In a time when the situation changes rapidly, the ability to enter an unknown world and adapt to it might be more valuable than any particular set of information, and this is arguably one of the capabilities that educational technology struggles to reproduce at scale today.
The platform excels at handling content. It can tailor the journey to an individual takes through the content and award them a certification at the end. It will never be able to reliably put an individual in a room with others who have nothing in common with them and ask them to come up with a way to collaborate.
However, there is an aspect of this tendency that must be mentioned explicitly. While education tends to become more isolated and confined to the computer, a broader trend toward social fragmentation and reduced shared institutional experience may also emerge as society slowly atomizes despite the long period of integration preceding it. As a result of making the bulk of education available on digital platforms and rendering live human instruction rare – something accessible only to those who can afford it – the role of integration becomes a prerogative of the few. At the same time, everyone else is offered decontextualized information. The social implications of such a divide are potentially significant and warrant careful attention as education systems evolve.
Depending on what we consider the purposes of human development, the answer to all this could point in any number of directions. When information transfer is the aim, the job is almost done, and the remaining effort is merely engineering. But when the purpose also includes considerations of context, integration, and complex problem-solving, the challenge increases, and the implications follow. This particular model of education cannot easily be automated and requires conscious design by those who understand what they are defending.
What this means for leaders building education-based products
For executives, founders, and the directors behind corporate learning programs, the effects are concrete.
Assess the effectiveness of your integration efforts rather than completion rates and test scores. A program that focuses on tracking those metrics has assessed what comes easily and neglected the harder but more valuable aspect of corporate education. Cohort programs, shared initiatives, and cross-departmental interaction create something measurable, such as the ability of employees to learn to function within the company rather than merely pass through it.
Retain the friction that creates value. The natural tendency of organizations to iron out all wrinkles in the educational process often removes the friction necessary to create growth. Creating teams composed of individuals with different viewpoints on the same problem is a slow process that sometimes results in conflict, and that kind of tension teaches in ways a smooth module cannot.
Understand that automation reaches a ceiling in this environment. Hand over delivery, localization, and analytics to machines while reserving human attention for context-building, trust-building, and community facilitation. Organizations that automate delivery and assume community formation as a foregone conclusion risk underinvesting in the social infrastructure that makes learning durable and transferable.
The person making decisions about how their company will educate itself needs to ask a single question of each project before endorsing it: does this project create context or only transmit content? A company that does not think carefully about the answer to this question may gradually find that it has optimized away the very conditions that made its learning systems effective in the first place.
