Smart Learning for the Next Generation Education Environment

The global educational landscape is changing due to the advancement of technologies and services, some have termed it as the "climate change" in education. The students of today engage with the learning environment differently from the students of yesterday. The traditional landscape is often perceived as "formal", "passive", "direct", and "push" learning environment designed largely for the knowledge consumers, and the modern landscape is often perceived as "informal", "active", "collaborative", "social", and "pull" learning environment designed not only for the knowledge consumers but also for the knowledge creators. This paradigm shift in education is imminent and has gathered a lot of interests in the recent years to create and/or adapt the education environment for the 21st century. To facilitate this impending modern landscape, this paper would introduce a new radical construct, termed as self-organized and/or purposely-organized peer-to-peer learning, and its impacts towards both the formal and informal learning environment. An overview of some of the solutions, that have been developed under the holistic intelligent campus (iCampus) initiative, would also be delineated so as to address such aspectual issues and challenges pertaining to the next generation smart learning environment.