Sunday Posts

Investing in education is the rage. Given that there is a really big problem globally - of educational access as well as educational relevance - investing to create solutions that can scale is naturally attractive. At the same time, however, education does not scale very well, given the regulation, cultural barriers and deeply held conservatism that come with it. The current models of education, the ideal of personalised instruction, models of exclusive privilege, the idea of deep thinking away from the humdrum of daily life, the connotation of cultural development as a slow process, are all anti-scale. In fact, many people will privately deride any goals of scaling education, the idea that education is only for a privileged few is so entrenched. The investors in new educational models put their faith on technology. Technology can help scale the classroom and beat the cost disease of education, as conceptualised by economists William Baumol and William Bowen. The point is to r...

Could there possibly be a Global Solution for the Education-to-Employment problem? The question can be answered at two levels. First is to see the contrast between the national and the global. A solution shaped around the local labour markets, sensitive to cultural nuances and regulatory quirks, can be contrasted with the ideas of some kind of universal solution, something that works everywhere. This latter view of the world is, in many ways, increasingly common and incredibly arrogant. This is the view from the top, in which the world is just a poor version of the West, all waiting for some kind of redemption. This proselytising view has two incompatible assumptions at its heart. First, it works on the basis that the Western education models are broken, because they do not deliver the desired outcome, namely, employment (or more broadly, occupation) at the right level. Next, it makes a further assumption that some kind of universal model, based on what has been done in the W...

Are we ready for Micro-degrees or not? The jury is still out.  On one hand, the combination of open courses taught by some of the best professors in the world and employer led Capstone project, all organised around a certain area of knowledge, looks irresistible. For a start, it bypasses the regulatory structures, which is the source of most problems in Higher Ed. It also addresses the problem of cost of education, and present a scalable solution. With right employers and projects, these can make education relevant in a way it is not in its current form. On the other, however, degrees are part of our furniture and it is difficult to get away from its allure. To become a global solution for the problems of Higher Ed, this new idea should be workable in developing countries. However, the employers in developing countries, where societies are organised around a certain division of power, mostly inherited from colonial days or pre-modern cultures (such as tribal hierarchi...

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...

The big question for Higher Ed is how does it remain relevant when almost half of those pursuing it do not get what they pursue it for, a job. The Higher Ed expansion since the 70s, and in developing countries in more recent years, was based on a middle class dream which has now disappeared, and with it, the legitimacy of the present structure. Besides, the withering of the Welfare State, and the coming of modern corporate statism, undermined the mandate Higher Education institutions had of delivering a middle class economy (a term Obama resurrected, but perhaps past its sale-by date). Everyone is trying to answer this, and not least, the global network of investors, who sees Higher Education as an essential ingredient of hope in the future, a key element of expansion of credit and a driver of consumption like no other. Higher Ed, from their vantage point, is crucial for sustenance of the modern economic vision, the dynamic status quo that they bet, literally, on. They have a sol...

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...

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...

The term '21st Century Education' is quite common: At least it is common in certain circles. The underlying assumption is that education is at a fundamental point of discontinuity. The way we educated ourselves in the last - twentieth - century, and before that, wouldn't work anymore. We, therefore, need a different approach to education - and the institutions that can offer us that. The claims are clear and unambiguous, and there is some justification behind them. Life feels so different now, not just because of the millennial turning point, but changes in the material, social and financial realities around us. We may still be operating with the assumptions that a middle class kid should go to college and get a job, but at our hearts, we fear that this is no longer true. Despite the mass of information we collect on colleges - it is an elaborate ritual for the parents of college-going students - we seem increasingly confused which college or course offer us the b...

I wrote about the futility of the much-loved 'demand-led' approach to education ( see here ): The essential argument is that no one really knows, and can't know, what the demand will look like even over a short time horizon. This is indeed due to globalisation, which has exposed even the most localised of the economies to the ups and downs of the global economy. And, globalisation wouldn't mandate that all economies follow a predictable path to industrial revolution and beyond: Rather, it only stands for constant churn, ordering and reordering of economies, with movements of global finance, which is affected by zillions of factors outside anyone's control, including unfettered greed of some individuals as well as callous fraud (as we saw in Libor or Foreign exchange scandals). I argued that project-based approach to education, where the learners are exposed to real life work, is an alternative, and a better approach, than 'demand led'. This is the free...

I wrote about universities as user networks earlier ( see post ). Since then, I have engaged into several projects attempting to challenge the existing models of Higher Education, and it is worthwhile to clarify the concept farther. The key argument that the universities of the future will look different from those today because their business model is likely to change remains intact. The framework of this argument draws upon Clayton Chistensen's work, and view organisations through the prism of three distinct business models: Solution Shops, Value Chain and User Networks. Solution Shop business models are employed by Professional Service firms, which, as in a Law Firm, assemble a team of experts to solve each individual problem. Their business model is to create value through providing solutions to complex problems, and the key value determinant remains the expertise of the individuals involved. Value Chain business models, in contrast, create value through a process...

I often talk about creation of a brick-and-mortar college as a part of my future plans. However, my current work is all about online, as was most of my past engagements. Therefore, the question that I often face is why I think Brick-and-Mortar college is a good idea: In fact, whether I think brick-and-mortar colleges have any future at all, in this age of dramatically improving education technology. The starting point for me is that I see a college as a community, first and foremost. It is a community of teachers and of learners. We have systematically undermined this community aspect over the years, as we promoted individual success over collective goals and reduced the education proposition to the mere degrees and college brand names. The community of teachers was undermined by increasing managerial domination over academic life, as well as by disconnecting academic life from the life on the main street. What was left - as many of the proponents of the online college point out ...

One key insight about the process of innovation, provided by Amar Bhide of Tufts University, is that we tend to focus too much on the supply side of innovation, and less on the demand side of it. When we talk about the rise of Silicon Valley, or any such innovation success story, the stories focus usually on the great innovators and entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, incubators and other aspects of the innovation ecosystem: We tend to play down, however, the consumers who tried out those innovations, those early people who ordered on Amazon, tried out Webvan, embraced eBay and Google. The central point of Professor Bhide's argument is that we should go beyond the usual narrow view of the innovation ecosystem. And, this is not about consumer co-creation, or open innovation, which, despite their appeal in management literature, remain quite rare; the point is whether the wider economy is ready to embrace innovation.  As we prepare for the London event on Education Innovation (...

Elizabeth Losh of University of California San Diego contends that it is a mistake to view education as a product and not as a process. But even this is stopping short, because the question, process towards what, also must be asked. Burying ourselves in the process paradigm, powerful as it is, may obscure our inability to find a purpose. Many of today's debates centre around the question - education for what - and not answering this adequately may inevitably lead to this idea of education-as-a-pill. Indeed, the purpose question can be limiting too. The proposition, education is for an employment, is presented as a self-evident and universal truth all too commonly. While an education-for-employment must undoubtedly have its place in a modern economy, in many ways, this also serves as the key rationale for stripping education from its all other functions, that of joy, discovery and of being, and this is the process element Professor Losh is concerned about. Besides, this is the...

One of the projects I started, and then abandoned, is the creation of an e-School, an enterprise school. This was a concept defined in opposition to the B-School, a place where one is trained to solve problems and learn how to communicate: The e-School, as conceptualised, was about finding problems, connecting with people, discovering opportunities, creating and leading. This is not about being entrepreneurs, though: Enterprise is for everyone, though entrepreneurship may need particular financial, social and opportunity setting. Besides, entrepreneurship, as it is defined today, is quite a narrow concept related only to a way of making money. In my conception, the e-School was about seizing the initiative in one's own life, and defining the agenda, rather than leading one dependent on other people's agenda. I started and abandoned this project at some point in 2011. This was the direction I wanted to drive the college I was then involved in to go. However, the strategy w...

How to design an institution where students learn how to learn? One would hope there may an easy formula somewhere, but the 'institution' gets in the way: Within an institutional setting, learning is often about how to master the institutional system and not about opening up to other possibilities. Within an institution, the rhetorical often trumps the philosophical.  Yet this dependence on rhetoric is perhaps a fatal flaw when social changes dislocate the institutional position. A rhetoric-bound institution, one that champions the skills of mastering its own system, can quickly become out of sync with everything else: No wonder employers today complain that the universities don't speak their language! Learning to learn, in more ways than one, is a philosophical exercise. It is a dialogue with oneself, rather than pursuit of intellectual superiority, and often achieved through learning things one would later discard (like understanding Newtonian physics at the ...

Universities seemed to have lost the plot when it replaced its sense of purpose - whether theological or nationalistic - with the vacuous pursuit of quality, which really stands for nothing. The term we all came to love, 'quality education', is actually a pathetic postmodern posturing, a surrender to the consumer ethic and an abandonment of any grander project of shaping human futures. And, this framework of valuelessness, one could argue, leads directly to the current state of crisis in the university ranks: We may not need them anymore if only we need a conveyor belt of making consumers. But, then, this is only one conception of the future ahead of us. This is a powerful conception, reinforced by all things we live by, and it seems there is no escape. And, as it happens, we can already glimpse into the brave new world of technologically enabled societies built around a few superstars and lots of indebted consumers: The whole story seemed incongruous with our middle clas...

As I work on implementing project-based learning in different countries in Asia, one objection, that this 'idea' is not Asian, comes up all too frequently. Citing anecdotal evidence, my correspondents tell me that the Asian students are taught not to challenge and to ask, and that this approach to learning, built around a passive and respectful learner-teacher relationship, is too Asian to be swept away anytime soon. Correctly, they point out that the Asian students often behave the same way when they study abroad, at least initially, attending the lectures and displaying unquestioning respect for the teacher, trying to photograph every slide, note down every word.  The usual argument is that the same students will start learning differently, if exposed to a different system of learning, should be investigated in the background of these observations. Because, this discussion is not just about teaching methods, but learning: A Different approach to inquiry may lead to a di...