Posts

Showing posts from May, 2023

Rethinking Higher Education: Five building blocks

Image
It has been repeated so many times, it is now a cliché: Our next thirty years will not look like the last three decades! If anything, ever since the end of the Cold War, it was mostly peaceful, mostly prosperous for most of the world. However, One can clearly see that some of the building blocks of that world are shifting now and a new ideas environment is emerging. We don't have to be pessimists to know that the lives of our students would be very different from ours. If we are to design a higher education system today, many things must change. Particularly, there are five foundational assumptions behind how we think about Higher Education, which need rethinking. First, the idea of SMART - a version of the idea of general intelligence ('g')! We may talk about diversity and inclusion, but fundamentally, higher education and the idea of merit are closely linked. This comes from how we organise the school system, which attempts to separate students into academic and vocationa

The AI turn in education

Image
  An AI turn In conversations about education these days, something about ChatGPT must be mentioned. Otherwise, the speaker appears out-of-date. Like the MOOCs a decade ago, everyone seems to have an opinion about it. Everyone thinks that this is going to change education beyond recognition. One can guess what happens next. This is what we saw with MOOCs; It was changing all education; shortly after that, it was not. Initially, everyone wanted to show off that they have heard about Coursera; in a few months, everyone wanted to sound smart by expressing concerns about the MOOC's low completion rates. There were even reasonable-sounding debates about whether completion is the right parameter to look at in the MOOC world. However, all this is ancient history. Today, if anyone brings up MOOCs, the eyes will roll and dropping pins will be heard. Its moment has come to pass! ChatGPT brings us to a similar moment, though it was adopted faster and therefore, opinions about it are more nume

Creative Commons License

AddThis