New Objectives for Smart Classrooms from Industry 4.0

This paper provides theoretical reflections and recommendations for implementing smart learning spaces in schools. Learning resource networks are enlarging students’ opportunities for exploring alternative formal, non-formal and informal education, in physical and virtual learning spaces, inside and outside traditional classrooms. Smart Pedagogy needs to include a shared conceptual understanding of what is knowledge and what is learning, and a deeper theoretical consideration of how humans learn, how they think, and why they interact. It should offer practical proposals around who should teach in a hybrid human–machine society, for what purpose, and why. Smart classrooms will be made up of several smart learning spaces, eventually employing some type of artificial intelligence. Such platforms will require a well-conceived pedagogical framework, and the integration of such artificial intelligence tools with other tools in the pedagogical matrix. They must be ethically developed to offer both personalised self-access, and interconnections that facilitate interaction with other students. Information 4.0 is a communicational framework that provides a useful basis to extend into elements of a holistic smart pedagogy that is a necessary precondition for implementing smart learning spaces.