Sunday Posts

  When the campus is reduced to a screen, are Princeton and Phoenix the same? One may indeed think that higher ed going online create some sort of level-playing field, and in fact, may even give the challenger an advantage. This is based on what happened in Amazon-vs-B&N: When the rules of the game change, new and disruptive players can compete better. Technology can trump track record and endowment. But this belies a lack of understanding how higher education works. Education is NOT about the delivery of content: A lot of it is about signalling of value. Amazon could sell the same book as B&N using a different media and the customer could attain the same outcome - the reading experience! The outcome - in terms of expectation and outcome - from Princeton and Phoenix is quite different.  Besides, when something moves online, brands become more - not less - important. Metaphorically speaking, if Princeton to Phoenix was a 10:1 advantage offline, it is likely to be 100:1 ...

I must admit that I find the 21st Century part a cliche, an overused term which doesn't mean much. The conference circuit did it: They slapped the label everywhere, stretching it out all the way to 21st-century coffee, which looks and smells exactly like 20th-century coffee. But, then, we are in the 21st century, unless someone did indeed miss waking up the last twenty years. It's dramatic for someone like me. When I started my first start-up in the middle of the dotcom frenzy in 1998, a friend dished e-commerce, announcing that only when milk and potato would be delivered over the Internet, he would believe in e-commerce [I did tell him about Webvan but it did not carry any weight with him]. Things have surely changed. However, education hasn't changed much. As I have written earlier, online education hasn't yet changed the world the way Amazon.com (or eBay) has done. Most online provisions assumed, wrongly, that all that needs to be done is to put the clas...

Conversations about Education Innovation is often about entitlements, who gets what. The conversations about EdTech plays along these lines too - either you are for EdTech or you are against it. Indeed, the technology vendors claim that this is all win-win, but from the point of view of poor adjunct, whose private time is invaded and paid time is cut, this picture is more difficult to see. And, since the very people who are to implement the technology seems to lose out from its success, the gap between rhetoric and reality of EdTech remains quite wide. One could observe this tension in most technology debate. From taxi drivers chasing Uber cars out of airports and hotel owners lobbying for stricter regulations to keep AirBNB out, there is a battle going on in different sectors and professions. The usual narrative, one that plays out in mainstream media, is to shrug it off - isn't it inevitable that technology is going to eat the world - and carry on. There has always been win...

Remember the good old correspondence courses, which everyone hated but everyone else still  took? Something that became the pathway to easy qualifications - but were also notorious for poor education? Usually synonymous to scams, as stories such as Graham Greene's When Greek Meets Greek (1954) depict, correspondence education, in many ways, was the precursor of today's For-Profit institutions. And, in many cases, and notwithstanding the University of London's pioneering External Programme that started in the nineteenth century, established universities only caught up with it much later. Indeed, since then, correspondence education has really evolved - the innovation led by Britain's Open University is a case in example - but it has somehow never escaped the stigma attached to it. In India, one of the world's largest market for correspondence education, it is usually, and perhaps justifiably, treated as sub par (formally) - and often the programmes are badly design...

Ed-tech has come of age. Gone are those days of HTML scripted pages with two big Next and Back buttons, the databases merely reporting how many seconds someone looked at a page and document repositories to be downloaded and printed at convenience. But how this came about may be slightly more contested. One may think it was video, made possible by robust bandwidth and multimedia in everyday computers, that changed everything. Yet others will think, like everything else, it was mobility, the ability to hold in hand a powerful enough device with a screen that does not tire off the eyes, that facilitated a different level of engagement with all things electronic. Social is also a big thing, and its advocates will claim that connecting with others electronically is changing everything. And, yet others will point to the emergence of the cloud, or affirmation of what they used to say in older times, 'the Network is the Computer', that changed computer from a box on a desk to a space...

In my first job, back in 1993, I used to carry around a printed list (this was before PowerPoint) with me: Customers often asked why email may be better than fax, and I thought carrying around such a comparison with me would save a lot of time.  While that issue was satisfactorily resolved, I am still having to answer a similarly challenging question: Does online learning work? The comparison, this time, is with the classroom learning. I would accept that this is not exactly a rerun of fax-vs-email thing, nothing ever is: However, there are common elements in the conversation, particularly two. First, those who tell me that online learning doesn't work with most certainty have never done any, just as the skeptics eschewed emails in my previous experience. Second, my answer that it is better for certain kinds of activities while Fax may be needed for certain other kinds of things perhaps could be repeated - I usually say classroom training is very good for certain things that ...

What's the relationship between Education Technology and Teachers?  The most common sense answer is that education technology is the new mode and the teachers are the old mode, linked somewhat in an asymmetric relationship like the one between the weavers and textile factories. The former is just an inefficient form of doing things which technology can do much better, or at least, be able to do much better when it becomes smarter eventually. Others take a kinder view of teachers and teaching. They actually contend ed-tech will be good for teachers. The advent of ed-tech, in this view, is the panacea for the 'cost disease' of education, because, as the economist William Baumol has affirmed, education is one of those trades where the 'productivity' of the Professor does not go up much, though their salaries keep going up. This problem is at the heart of the runaway costs of education in the developed world, particularly in the US, where college fees beat inf...

We have no choice but to turn to technology if we have to solve the problems of mass Higher Education. In Higher Education, we have so far taken a model that was designed to serve a few, and tried to expand this to service the needs of an exponentially larger population. By doing so, we have worked ourselves into the twin problems of soaring cost and declining quality, alongside other attendant problems like creeping irrelevance of Higher Education and degree inflation. In this setting, the only way to create and run a High Quality Higher Education offering is to maintain selectivity, but the social value of it is highly questionable: One could argue Cambridge is a great institution because it only admits great students, not because it does a greatly superior job in teaching.  This presents a number of problems. First, this is neither consistent with social expectations, a selective system is seen as elitist and a target of regular attacks by politicians and policy-makers, nor...

Universitas Global 21, or U21, an online project for international education, changes ownership, with University of Melbourne, its principal backer stopping to fund the project. U21, which made profits first time this year after seven years of losses, will be taken over by Manipal Education, a big private education group in India, which has universities, colleges and corporate training interests. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/09/u21#Comments : "Another One Bites the Dust" The article cited here explains why, possibly, the U21 project failed. However, I do find the analysis quite one-sided, almost as if written by academics of the concerned universities, and would strongly recommend the comments to be taken into account to have a full perspective. I have followed other online education projects and would make some general comments why these projects tend to fail. First, the universities do not have the nimbleness and customer focus necessary to run e-busine...

I had an interesting conversation on the scope of e-Learning and how much it will replace the traditional classroom training in the next five years. Obviously, there were many sceptics in the group, and they were pushing the opinion that e-Learning is not nearly as good or effective as someone standing up to teach. However, it was heartening to note that most people saw the argument for what it is - a passionate plea for horse-drawn cars when automobile has started coming to the market - and the fact that usually it is comparing some basic e-learning efforts with some very good teachers. The general opinion, therefore, was that e-learning will continue to expand in scope and possibly replace most of what is done in classrooms today. The panel touched upon various media comparison studies, which proved, over a number of years [starting 1947, when such a study was first carried out, a comparison between video, paper-based and classroom training] that the learning outcomes do not vary sig...

I am as optimistic as ever that we shall emerge out of this recession soon. Whoever I tell this reminds me that the party is not going to start anytime soon, though, they agree, that the worst may be behind us. But, as long as we look forward rather than back, new things will happen and new possibilities will emerge. And, besides, after all this pain of the Great Recession, who wants to return to partying as usual. This recession, however, will have two long term impacts. While this crisis undermined the moral force of the theory that the market gets it right all the time, it has also severely undermined the governments' ability to bail us out of any future crisis. The pendulum seems to have run its full course, over thirty years, where we have moved from public spending to fiscal responsibility back to public spending again. So, in the coming years, we may go back to the old days of fighting inflation and high taxes and interest rates, as capital will become scarce in general. ...

Let's call this five forces of training, after the five forces of competitiveness. Any training programme today needs to address each of these forces - shall we call them dimensions - to be relevant and effective. But before we plunge into this discussion, a moment on my favourite topic - the training / education divide. The lines are surely getting blurred. The educational institutes are often judged by the starting salaries of their graduates, not unfairly, because most of these education courses have to be privately paid for. But, in my mind, education still remains distinctly different from training. Education is about broadening the perspective and preparing the learner with a wide variety of knowledge, so that s/he is prepared to meet the world half way and with an engaged mind. Training, on the other hand, needs to be narrower and deeper, focused on a specific skill, based on the assumption of certainty - we know what's needed - and the learner, in the end, should be equ...

A Linkedin group discussion pointed me to a new possibility - that Amazon actually targeting their new version of Kindle, which is supposed to come out with a bigger screen and better everything, to the textbook market. Yes, rather than the newspaper market. I have not seen a Kindle yet - this has not been released in the UK - but read about this on readwriteweb . I know of the talk, mostly on CNBC - that Amazon Kindle will do to books what iPod has done to Music - and I am waiting eagerly to lay my hands on one. However, targeting at the textbook market is an interesting shift of strategy, and this made me write about this immediately. Accordingly, this post is not about Amazon Kindle. I have not seen it yet, so I can not comment whether it is worth its $300 price tag. I did think the idea is novel, a new generation ebook reader which comes with wireless connectivity and newspaper subscriptions to download. I think the newspaper men also saw this as their deliverance. I read Wal...

Some time back, I wrote a post on the future of e-learning. Reading that, a learned reader referred me to read Disrupting Class , a study by Clayton M Christensen and others about how disruptive innovation will change education. The central premise of this book is simple. Citing Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, the authors point out that we all learn in different ways. They then go on to assert the current factory mode of learning, where one teacher has to teach a number of students together, does not allow the tutors to adjust to an individual student's learning preferences. Therefore, the current system leaves too many children behind - aggravating social problems and creating economic imbalances. However, the authors see the possible solution in technology. The technology can make learning asynchronous, and allow individual students to learn according to their own preference and style. This shift will of course impact the way the current education system ru...

E-Learning, whatever the term may mean, is still a relatively new subject in India. Indeed, the whole discipline of training in organizations got a new lease of life with the economic liberalization and mass mobilization in the service industries, particularly in telecoms , retail and insurance. This led to creation of a significant training infrastructure, development of a sizable training cadre and new ideas and experiments in the field of training. The existing training companies, predominated by IT training giants like NIIT and Aptech , quickly re-engineered themselves to take advantage of this emerging, shall we say exploding, market, and a number of new companies emerged. Demand peaked for trainers, and the salaries reached stratospheric levels. This party now seems to be over. I have previously written about the contraction in the employee training market and the plight of the training companies. The larger companies are fast running out of ideas and trying to reinvent themse...

A friend asked me a question : What are my views about where e-Learning is heading in the next five years. I, as always, chose to give a fairly public reply through this blog. But, before I comment, I must also remind myself that this is indeed curious timing to talk about e-learning into five years in future. Nero playing violin while Rome was burning probably would have been an apt analogy, but I am no Nero and can not do much to stop the mayhem. But, one thing for sure, there is very little certainty in the economic climate right now, and it is hard to see much ahead at this time. Having said that, one can safely project a significant change in e-learning usage, in Academia as well as in Businesses, over next few years. There are a number of reasons behind such assertion : (a) The business climate is not going to improve any time soon and there will be increased pressure of cost cutting across businesses. Training usually bears the brunt of cost cutting very severely. However, tough...