The need exists to coordinate a seamless integration of this lifelong education in information age skills. This would mean not just training people for existing jobs. Education needs to allow people to adapt to changing times and prosper. This is a daunting task but an opportunity to share learnings from across the Appalachian Region. These four areas are factors in how successful the region will be in the information age.
Cooperative ventures offer hope of providing education within each community.
The institutions will need to pool resources across traditional turf boundaries to meet this challenge. Access to learning for this field must be as decentralized as the field itself. This will mean that distance learning will be the norm and that home is as likely a classroom as not. Students, workers and teachers will need to develop new paradigms for how one acquires needed skills and knowledge. This has implications not just for pre-service at regional universities but also for teachers on the job now.