Sunday Posts

The excitement about AI made it urgent, but it is not about AI. Education systems, in general, and tertiary education systems, in particular, have been operating within a specific environment of ideas since the 1990s, which has now undergone a change. In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced. Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus ...

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here.  The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me.  In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped! On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic instit...

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change. This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course. How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...

I am scaling back my ambitions. No longer boiling the ocean, no longer trying to transform higher education globally! I tried and failed, but don't regret it. How else would I know what I know now?  I know many things. Higher Education is indeed in crisis, but the people inside the system do not know that. Professionalisation has many good aspects, but being perceptive about changes in the world is not one among these. There will be no revolution in higher ed, just decay. The private higher ed is already everywhere and it has changed everything - from the relationship with the students to what scholarship meant - but most people in public universities don't even know the difference. Higher Ed thinks critically about everything else but not its own practice. Some of it is wilful blindness. Things are going fine for most people: The usual cycle of conferences, papers, research grants - some years are better than others, but that is all. Students still come,...

  Let’s start with a broad definition of education technology: When Jan Comenius was using vernacular medium and illustrations to teach a foreign language in the Seventeenth century (his Gate of the Tongue unlocked came out in 1631) , he was using the new technology of print and an educational idea (learning through illustrated textbooks) to create a new form of education.   However, such a definition of technology would also narrow down what we could call Education Technology (Edtech, as it is fashionably called). C ontemporary Edtech is a catch-all phrase for any technology used within the educational context. Duolingo, which employs an app to offer a new, gamified, approach to language learning , will be clubbed together with some boring classroom management software in the same   category. Instead, it makes more sense to define education technology to include such applications of scientific knowledge to further educational goals, rather than any piece of machinery or...

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...

  To understand the state of new imagination in Higher Ed, it's best to look at the recent buzz around microcredentials. Touted to be the next big thing - after what? MOOCs? - this is one big non-event that everyone is talking about. Ask anyone in the academia why microcredentials is such a great thing, the answer will focus on the 'micro' part rather than the 'credential' part. That it is short - less than one course credit - is supposed to be the exciting part. It seems that the universities, until now, did not notice that people learned, whether there was a course credit for it or not. Therefore, this is like Columbus' 'discovery' of America: It did not matter that some people lived there already! Perhaps it indeed is like Columbus' discovery: It is not about creating a space but claiming it for oneself! It is a defensive rather than an innovative move for the academia. There is a growing chasm between what the people need to learn - primarily due...

I often ask myself this question: Why is it that when the world's best corporations are trying to set up 'campuses', many universities and colleges are so intent on running 'factories'? I know the obvious answer that the creativity and freedom are supposed to be for the gifted. Most of humanity are not creative, not aspirational and they crave for structure and command. I also know that this answer is wrong. Of course, we have met 'uncreative' people; many of them, possibly. People who would just follow, rather than finding a path. But should we stop to think that it is in their genes to not to be creative, an assumption we implicitly seem to be making, and allow the thought that they might have been encouraged not to think?  Is it that we are mixing up the cause and the effect - our education 'factories' are making people stupid, rather than the other way around? Of course, this is not about social classes, as the toffs would say: "Too many peo...

Unlike the Hollywood aliens, the future of Higher Education can not be expected to land in the United States alone. The American universities, of course, lead the world in academic prestige, cutting-edge research and endowments. They are, collectively, the best and the brightest, and attract the best researchers and best students from around the world. And they are not just intellectual world leaders but also represent the biggest education industry in the world, sprouting an ecosystem built around the success and prestige of the great universities. However, if higher education has to change and make sense in the future, this is exactly what needs to change. I write this as I am rather tired of reading literature coming out of the United States which portrays the future of higher education in the universalist terms. It seems that there is only one reality - that of higher education in America - and every other variation from around the world represents intermediate stages of a journey ...

As higher ed goes online, we must remember: The medium is the message. There is little point trying to do online what we do in campuses. This is what most online higher ed propositions are built on, and very quickly they become poor copies of the real thing. The screen reduces the whole web of personal interactions and relationships into just content delivery - and universities to diploma shops! It is not surprising that the students do not see the same value in online delivery as they do in the classrooms. But that format also underplays the key strengths that a distributed environment can bring. Flexibility in terms of time and space, for example, may not be that valuable if we are trying to replicate the same activities that happen in a classroom, but mightily important if we try to do what can't be done in a classroom. But there is more: This is not just about access but experience too. There was once a charm getting to know others across the barriers of time and space. Faceboo...