Sunday Posts

Employability is now serious business. Governments ask about employability outcomes and rankings depend upon it. 'Disruptive' start-ups raise millions of dollars to fix student employability. The assumption is because employability should be measurable, measuring it is the best way to understand if education has been effective. That assumption is wrong. This is simply because there are many dimensions of employability outside the educators' control. The assumption of a flat-world job market, with skills and wages working as a pricing mechanism, is wrong. Wages are almost always inflexible, even in a non-unionised workplace; there is always minimum wage, but more importantly, organisational structures limit the level of flexibility. Employability is also shaped by implicit bias, of the employer or the society at large, which sets expectations based on race, gender, age, sexuality, physical appearance or accent. Students are also not completely mobile: They may prefer...

If I summarise what I wish to do going forward, it will be this: I want to work in New Education and stop working in Old Education.  This stands on a fundamental assumption that education is at a point of disjuncture, when the old ways of doing things must change. This idea, being proclaimed by educational thinkers, economic historians and technologists alike, bears out in my personal experience. My experiences in private and public education in UK and elsewhere tell me that we have built an elaborate and extensive system of education aimed at doing nothing: All the 'quality' talk that the Western countries take great pride of is actually a triumph of emptiness, as Mats Alvesson calls it. Bill Readings, in his book on Universities, did point out to the pointlessness of quality talk - that quality by itself means nothing - and this has now become an all-pervasive disease, quality assurance becoming the excuse for status quo. The problem with this is that we are just fo...

We barely started, but already experienced a pivot point: In the last couple of months we are at it, our idea of the kind of college we want to build has evolved already. We learnt, as we liberated ourselves from the constraints of practise, that there is a bigger opportunity out there in connecting, rather than recreating the wheel and trying to deliver, educational experiences. The metaphor for what we are creating is no longer a college - we shall work with colleges rather than create a new one and compete with them - but a global network based on shared values and commonly agreed frameworks. This is so much closer to what we believe adult education should be, an enabling mechanism to connect with the world and collaborate with the like-minded, and our technology tools and business model are fast evolving in line with this education ideal. Initially, when we imagined the learning environment, we imagined the students will come to a portal offering various services, just like a ...

“Students At the Heart of Higher Education” At the time of writing, the Higher Education system in the UK is at the cusp of a revolutionary change. The change, brought about by a mixture of financial necessity and ideological persuasion of the government in power, is designed to ensure ‘substantially more money will flow via students and less via HEFCE’ (Willetts, 2011). The Ministers claim that this will ‘reduce central political control, put more power in the hands of consumers and promote innovative delivery methods’ (Willetts, 2011). This market-based and consumption-driven system has been presented with the claim that this will put ‘students at the heart of Higher Education’. Whether or not the new system will create a better Higher Education system is still being debated. However, highlighting students as the primary beneficiary of the Higher Education system, rather than the communities or the nation, imply a shift of emphasis and has called for new discussions ...

Background This essay intends to explore the issue of educational quality in the context of a For-Profit Business School based in London. This is a privately owned business, which offers a Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme validated by a British university, and caters to mostly students coming from overseas. The school has no degree awarding power and has to follow the academic regulations of the validating university. The MBA degree is awarded by the validating university after the students successfully complete 8 taught modules and a dissertation. The Business School had to undergo an extensive review of its financial and academic capabilities to achieve validation to deliver the MBA programme. The validation was achieved following a well-defined university process. The university took great care to look at the financial records and management practices of the institution, as part of their initial vetting visit, and following this, the course, pro...