Sunday Posts

With EdX's announcement that they have finally decided to search for sustainability by limiting the access to their online courses, the much awaited moment of normalisation of MOOCs has arrived. The euphoria that accompanied the launch of Coursera and EdX - that these 'free' lectures from professors of world's best institutions would completely transform learning in mediocre institutions and particularly in developing countries - is finally and truly over.  Its contemporaries have long abandoned the road: Udacity turned itself into a paid platform of profitable ambition long time ago, and Coursera, the most popular, have limited graded assessment to paying students (along with verified certificates) almost three years ago. Futurelearn, the late-coming British counterpart, in keeping with 'shop-keeping' culture of British universities, never indulged much in world-changing rhetoric, but rather kept itself to the promotion of 'brand Britain' with...

It's part of the romance of the college: The learner leaves home to join a community of fellow learners, to begin a new stage of life. The imaginary is integral to middle-class life, shaping lifecycles of parents as much as it does for the learner. It is the staple of the popular culture, all those college romance stories, movies and TV series. These expectations also shape how colleges operate, as they battle to restrict tenure but upgrade student accommodation at the same time. In fact, the most profitable part of the whole real estate market is student accommodation, offering better yields than any other segment. But it's also the part which makes the least sense when Higher Education is so expensive. Surely, the romantic notions of college life as a calm commitment to learning are just romantic notions. Envisioning this as a prolonged coming of age party is closer to the truth, at least in most cases. Costs of living outside the home are at least as significant as the...

At the heart of the modern education system, there are assumptions about a global division of labour. The education system that we have today, came about in the nineteenth century, arising from Liberalism, Industrialism and Empire. The modern Education system was a great Liberal project, above all. Its ideals were different from that of the Eighteenth century: Productivity, rather than Civility, was its stated purpose; Consumption, rather than self-restraint, was its point; and at a time when the aristocratic privileges could no longer be taken for granted, it promoted the Jeffersonian 'natural aristocracy of men'. Not all Eighteenth Century ideas were dead and gone, however. One distinction, between Liberal and Servile education, very much shaped the educational imagination in the Nineteenth. The idea of distinct education systems for intellectual and practical pursuits were now formalised: The great century of invention extended the chasm between intellectual and man...

At some point in 2006, the nature of the Higher Education changed. Many developing countries, led by China and India, embraced the idea that a college educated population is the key to escape poverty and develop the country. So began a great experiment - of opening new institutions, mainly by granting approvals to private entrepreneurs to do so. In doing so, China more or less doubled its college-going population; India's numbers, less spectacular, still grew rapidly between 2006 and 2014, with 10 new colleges, on average, being opened a day. And, this was not just China and India: Many African and Middle Eastern countries had done the same, following similar strategies - granting approval to private entrepreneurs - and ushering in an all-new 'mass Higher Education', the likes of which we have not known before. This phenomenon is now entering a mature phase, and we should be able to analyse what happened. The growth, both of college population and growth of jobs in Hi...

Even when the limitations of an education system are quite obvious, innovations are hard to come by. This is a lesson many well-meaning investors and hard-charging entrepreneurs have learnt at great cost, yours truly included, but why this is so has evaded them completely.  Usually, one finds soul-comforting explanation in bureaucracy or in institutional politics. But this do not explain why there is so little demand for all these 'innovative' offerings and why, unlike other sectors, the customer preferences - employer demands and students' desires - do not overwhelm the traditional sectors and ease the path of innovation. And, even where swelling demography and broken education seem to be hurtling towards certain disaster - like in Asia and Africa - new ways of educating appears more, and not less, difficult.  For example, India, faced with the task of educating a huge workforce at a time when automation and reversal of globalisation threaten most jobs and indust...

There is not much we agree upon these days, except that more and more people should go to college. This has become the self-evident truth of the late Twentieth century, and achieved the status of a divine revealation in the twentyfirst. Contrarian views, voiced from time to time by a few elitist conservatives, who believe college, along with the privileges to govern in perpetuity, should be preserved for a small group of people, look dated and out of place even among the political right. Countries speak of knowledge economy and equate it to the size of college-educated population. Technologists speak of automation and artificial intelligence and see college education essential for producing, consuming and living in the world they wish to make. Economists speak of productivity and equate it to the level of education. Everyone everywhere seems to think more college would mean more progress and well-being. This, without any real evidence! College, historically, has been a system of ...

The work and careers are changing. As most process-based jobs get automated, it seems the winners will be those with greater intellectual skills. In the meantime, the salary premium for college graduates have risen dramatically - mainly as a result of non-graduates falling precipitously. This is taken as evidence of centrality of college education: Everyone should be able to go to college, has become the political mantra. This is good for colleges themselves and hence, they have promoted the idea. And, as the educated usually takes upon themselves the role of society's critic-in-chief, the conclusion has not really be questioned. However, while the poor countries followed the cue and started expansion of college education - and, because the state does not have money, this means a poorer public education and enormous expansion of terribly bad private education - it is worth looking at the phenomena closely and exploring its wisdom. At one level, work has become more comple...

India is the fastest growing major economy, is the persistent claim. There may be some statistical truth (which some may consider an oxymoron) in the statement, Indians are definitely one of the most optimistic lot in the planet. For most of them, lives have got better within a lifetime, and they look out to the world - at least an world without Pakistan - with confidence. And, this dominates the political conversation in India - hope trumps fear, with pun intended - and the message of better days transcend political sloganeering to turn into everyday faith. Being the doubter, therefore, is to fall out of step. Questioning the great achievements of the country is quickly pounced upon, and even reasonable discussions can get one branded as an enemy of the people. And, indeed, in this - the unquestioning faith in the India - the intractable regional differences that dogged India for most of its modern existence seem, for the first time perhaps, wither away. For once, the unquestion...

One promise of EdTech that gets talked about is about its ability to reduce the cost of education delivery, and thereby, expanding access. This is a powerful notion that drives many business plans and policy decisions. Information Technology has changed a lot of things, but changing the lives of the poor is where it becomes truly transformational. The quest for efficiency and better management have impacted healthcare significantly, and enhanced its impact and extended its reach. We have seen similar transformational change in Banking and Retail. This is the model we now expect EdTech to follow. Already, we know something about its impact. When I was with NIIT, I saw first-hand the impact of The Hole-in-the-Wall experiment that Professor Sugata Mitra, now a TED fellow, carried out. One big outcome of this was to put an end to the patronising notions about the intellectual capacities of the poor that we all secretly held. This idea of making a computer available, unsupervised,...

If the title of the post sounds cheesy, it was meant to be that way. I am about to complete an intense year of working on a project to introduce a new kind of Higher Education model, one that brings the educators and employers closely together, and this experience has allowed me new insights and ideas, apart from all the airmiles, a permanent state of jetlag and a number of new friends and correspondents. So, there must be an afterword, which I intend to write now, which captures both the journey and a sense of arriving somewhere, only if to embark on another journey. To tell the story, I must start with the assumptions that I had. The most crucial one perhaps is that India is ripe for education innovation. The rationale is simple - India has a growing young population buzzing with aspiration, an education system which is struggling to catch up and a large services sector which needs millions of workers but can not find them - and therefore, there is space for new educational mod...

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...

I did write about developing countries and western education before (see What's Wrong with Western Education , and its Part 2 and Part 3 ). But it is also interesting to see how far this agenda can be carried forward, and how this argument about an indigenous education plays out in the face of globalised politics. These are exactly the issues on the table in India, where the newly elected government wants to push through a neo-liberal economic agenda along with social conservatism. India is hardly unique in this, it must be mentioned, many governments, including United Kingdom's, is doing the same. But the debate in India warrants some consideration, given that this is predominantly young country setting off in a quest for a past. Usually, the conversation about foreign education, as I noted earlier, is painted in black and white - either you like it or you don't. That this may be a far more nuanced issue than just liking or disliking it, is usually ignored, because ...

The education problem is obvious. There are more than 550 million school-age children who don't have access to school. There are more than 400 million adults, most of them in South Asia, who can't read or write. In some countries, majority of children coming out of primary school, over 90% in some cases, can't read or write. Bad Higher Education is wasting whole generations in countries like India, affecting close to 100 million people. Graduates can't get jobs in Europe because their education isn't good enough, and they are not paying back their loans. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa note that they are not doing much in college either. It looks pretty bad all round. This looks so bad is because we talk about it. In fact, we are talking about it more and more, even more than things like safe drinking water, which affects more people, because of two reasons.  First, the wider economy is feeling the impact of the education problem. The fact that someone does ...

The writing is on the wall: The next 10 years will not be like the last 10 years for jobs and work in the emerging markets. In an insightful article in Foreign Affairs, Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Spence argue that the current convergence of globalisation and automation is fundamentally reshaping the world economy and altering the patterns created by the last wave of IT and globalisation. With the advent of World Wide Web, cheap intercontinental communication and expansion of global trade, there was a wave of 'outsourcing' which benefitted the low-cost countries and created a new middle class. However, with intelligent machines and an altered dynamic of globalisation after the Great Recession, this pattern is altering. Labour is no longer the biggest cost for a manufacturer, for example: Transportation is. So, manufacturing is coming where the consumption is (iPhones in Texas) and even China, despite its great success in manufacturing, has been quietly l...

I wrote a note on Western Education yesterday. The immediate context was this film - Schooling The World - which puts many of the issues to the fore. While I mentioned two distinct objections to Western Education, its association with decline of the traditional societies and ways of life and the recognition of the imposition of a power structure implicit in such education, the film's argument is essentially that it is not one or the other, and the destruction of the ways of life is indeed because of the imposition of the power structures. In a way, I do what the film is against - try spreading Western education. However, I don't think if I stop taking Western university courses to India and elsewhere, and choose to take courses from the universities in India instead, anyone will be better off. Because the 'Western' is no longer just where the system of education comes from, but a way of thinking, deeply embedded in universities in India as well. The points made b...

Institute of International Education's (IIE) Rajika Bhandari writes about the roles Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) can play in education of developing nations ( see here ) and highlights five key questions regarding infrastructure availability, relevance in the context of non-formal education, impact on gender gap, impact on the role of the teacher and local relevance. I feel these questions are extremely relevant, but ones that the MOOC enthusiasts often lose sight of. In fact, the biggest danger for the MOOCs is not that it may not work, but rather one puts expectations on it that can't be satisfied, and this becomes another bubble that bursts in time. The questions, as raised here, can help focus the discussion and understand what the MOOCs can and can not do in the developing countries. 1. The Infrastructure Gap Most MOOC advocates have a limited view of the developing country higher education infrastructure. The reason for such limited perspective is this: ...