Sunday Posts

Graduate Employability is a big problem. Depending on who you ask, we are looking at 30% - 40% of the graduates not being employed within a reasonable period of time after leaving college. The problem is so bad that we are inventing ways to hide it. Instead of bring it to the fore, we club graduates who get a job and who go to post-graduate education together, and ignore the cases of underemployment, so that we get some respectable data. The granular data that we may really need to address the problem, such as how many of our graduates are working in fast food shops, may present us with a bigger problem, that of busting the myth of the college altogether. We would instead focus our attention to other soothing pieces of data, such as the existence of a college premium. It is soothing but problematic because, people going to college earns more than those who dont, the gap is widening only because people who dont go to college have seen their incomes collapse, while the premium has been...

My agenda in 2015 is to be able to build the kind of institution I keep talking about - a global, entrepreneurial, practical, creative school.  I know the idea but I dont know where I should eventually build it. One tempting answer is, everywhere, which was indeed at the heart of my earlier venture. The technology to reach out to people wherever they are exists today, and building an institution on them is a sort of no-brainer. But, having tried this, I want to build a more traditional institution enabled by those technologies, so that it can reach everyone, but at the core, it offers a rich experience and cohesive purpose for all its learners. One of the things I learned through all my ventures is that it is the purpose that defines an institution, rather than its physical locations, courses or technologies. Too many people think too much about everything else, but forget to ask the why question. My essential starting point is indeed the why question - I see that to be t...

Global E-School is Global and Entrepreneurial, but this is not an entrepreneur's school. It is for all those who need to be creative and imaginative at work, which is going to be everyone, really. I see this as a twenty-first century school responding to two big trends of the time, globalisation and automation. The idea is to build the school to prepare its students for the new workplace that's rapidly emerging. Some of this may be obvious but are immediately resisted. Education is supposed to be a forward-looking enterprise, but also the most tradition-bound. This is because education's function in our societies is perpetuation of privilege and not creation of possibilities. But this is also why the model of education that we have is under threat, because to change the society, and society is changing not in face of any revolution but under the weight of technological change that it itself is bringing about, one must change education. HG Wells' point that history...

My objective is to summarise the idea of '21st Century College' and understand the same in the context of education theory, developments in technology and media as well as economic history. This is one project I have taken on in 2015, and chose to turn this blog into a record of my explorations and conversations.  The first question that I deal with is not whether we should be changing with technology - I shall contend that answer is quite obvious and time-tested too - but what really needs to change. More specifically, while we may accept that the '21st Century College' may employ different methods and technologies to educate, should it have different objectives from that of 'traditional education'? Dewey, as usual, is useful here. Writing in 1938, about what he saw as a contest between 'traditional' and 'progressive' education, this was his stance:" The general philosophy of new education may be sound, and yet the difference in a...

Brookings commentators see rapid emergence of new Higher Education models in 2015. ( see here ) This is a reasonable expectation, given that so much money has gone into the sector since 2011, and some of the models should now start maturing - and VCs looking for exit - and delivering the goods. The change is already in the air. The College for America has somehow set the benchmark tuition fee rate at $10,000 for the entire undergraduate degree and there are a number of ventures seeking to replicate that. Udacity starts the year by launching an University by Industry, one by Silicon Valley for Silicon Valley, by breaking down the college credentials into 'nanodegrees' ( see here ). As predicted in the Brookings piece, new MOOCs are also emerging - more credit bearing programmes focused on fee-paying students - and a slew of innovative tech-enhanced models coming into the market. The big frontier of all the change is still the emerging markets. There is not much hap...