Sunday Posts

 For a long time now, I have been promoting 'blended learning'.  The reasons are various. I have done enough online learning myself to know that the solitary, individualistic learning experience can be a poor alternative to what one may experience in a campus. Besides, most of EdTech is still focused on delivering educational content, but ask anyone about their college days a few years after the fact, all they would remember is the people they met and the experiences they had. Artificial Intelligence, if it ever matches the claims its evangelists make, may perfect educational content delivery but it may never deliver this, the most memorable aspects of an educational experience. But then, I went to school in India and apart from a few truly inspiring encounters, my educational experience mostly consisted of boring lectures and oppressive examinations. One could indeed say that those magical moments made all the drudgery worth it, but I wouldn't really ever want to go back t...

I am back in International Education again. I had a three-year break from international education. Part of the reason was my own work preference: In 2016, fatigued from years of constant travel, erratic habits and living out of a suitcase, I requested a change of role into a more home-bound one. I always enjoyed travelling but perhaps I did too much of it. After years of boasting about Airline tiers and the quality of food at airport lounges, I was, at that point, keen on a new life of office work and daily routines. But that was only part of the reason. The other part was that I became all too aware of the limitations of 'global education'. I wholeheartedly believed in what I did: That project-based education would represent a great step-change in education. I engaged with all my heart to bring employers ever closer to the learning process. But, as I did that, I saw that any universal formula really doesn't work - the tension between the specificity of the empl...

International education is growing, in spite of all the barriers various nations put up to stem the flow. I have written earlier about the limitations of how the universities treat international students. There is also much to be said about how success should be defined in International Education and how best to measure and balance the benefits of the host society and the nations where the students come from. However, a critical part of this discussion is also to identify who is ready for international education, which builds the foundation of successful engagement and meaningful outcomes even if the universities are prepared to meet the students half-way.  For this, the current practice of defining the international student 'competencies' just in terms of how much money s/he has in the bank and how well s/he speaks the language of the host society (when the immigration authorities demand so) is plainly inadequate. The money part is usually treated as a proxy for social c...

Sometime in 2011, the conversation about Higher Education changed. It may have been 2009, or it may even be that no one noticed until 2012. But there was a transformation, even if it may have appeared on different horizons at different times. This is the time when 'Global' higher education became global.  More specifically, this is a time when private equity, flush with cash with all those easy QE money in the middle of the ruin of most asset classes in the wake of 2008 recession, discovered Higher Ed. That's the time when education conferences started everywhere and Gurus burst into the world stage. Suddenly, entrepreneurs, who would have made a dating site or an e-commerce app at another time, were discovering the global allure of education. To track this transformation (and to put a date, if one likes), it is worth listing the key changes in the conversation, such as: We had the MOOC word. These Massive Open Online Courses were supposed to transfo...

I am working on developing a certification programme for professionals who have to work outside their countries, or, in an industry which needs constant global interaction, with customers, colleagues or investors. In a way, this is U-Aspire 2.0. We did develop something like this, Global Business Professional programme, which was built around global business strategy and intercultural competence. This time around though, I am looking at a slightly different audience. This would be less about strategy and more about everyday competence. Besides, this would have more focus on practise and interaction and less on 'knowledge'.  When I worked on this last time, the programme was designed to be blended, with a component delivered face to face. Because of this, and because we wanted to fit this around certification frameworks, we went on to define learning hours and outcomes etc. I now understand, with the work I have done since then, that while all of these things sound lik...

I wrote about the origin story of the Indian Education system (See An 'Indian' Education ) to argue that 'Indianness' of Education does not necessarily have to be regressive, ritualistic or religious. The current tendency of relegating any discussion about an Indian Education to obscurantism cedes the space to Hindu Fundamentalists, who are left free to promote their particular, limited and historically inaccurate ideas. However, a culturally congruent education is much needed at a time when Indian society is at a crossroad, the pains of globalisation is hurting and the crisis of identity is real and urgent. This post is a rejoinder to the earlier one. Here, I intend to expand my argument that the Indian system of education did not break out from its earlier, imperial, mode. This is a familiar argument that the cultural nationalists make all the time, but, since I didn't think that British imperial education was necessarily English-only (rather, it promoted ...

Should Education become more local, or global? This was a question posed to me in a conversation: As in these cases, I improvised an answer. But, as usual, the obvious answer is not necessarily the right one, and is indeed worth interrogating. Most education, at the present time, is locally focused. This is because Education, at least mostly, is a part of the State, that funds its existence and direct its agenda. Many educators around the world work for the State, or at least, their wages are subsidised by the State. Even in cases where a global institution sponsors education - Church is the most prominent example - the State controls it tightly, through curriculum and credential.  The dynamic of work and commerce, however, has been global. The WTO-inspired globalisation touched far corners of the world over the last few decades, as did the crumbling of the cold war politics. English as a language has gained currency, even in China, and the Internet and the Worldwide Web ...

B-Schools had their day. There was a time when we thought we knew how to do it - capture the future in a web of models and processes - and created the big, successful institutions charging top dollars for educating business leaders.  Then, a few things happened. We overdid it. There were just too many B-Schools and too many business 'leaders'. We also lost faith in big businesses. According to a recent Pew survey, only 40% of Americans have a positive image of big businesses, down from 75% a couple of decades earlier. And, big businesses stopped creating jobs, as they continued to automate and spread their global supply chains. And, then, came the Great Recession, sweeping away the dreams of middle class life of the most, and what emerged is a completely different future. No wonder that only a small fraction of MBAs now find appropriate employment, and all but the top B-Schools are able to fill their seats today. The truth is, today, not the company men but those wi...

It is important to recognise that the form and the vector of globalisation is changing. The expression 'deglobalisation' is in vogue, and provides a handy framework to explain outlier events such as the Brexit, rise of Trump and the ascendance of various politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. One way to look at it is compare it with the inflection of 1914, when, after half a century of expansion of global trade and movement of people, globalisation came to a sudden halt and went into a long decline, with the Great War, collapse of the Gold Standard and the general breakdown of the global system. This is the idea that underpin the idea of 'de-globalisation', and many claim that what we see is the beginning of a long process, one that would end in separate countries pursuing policies aimed at national prosperity rather than global connectivity and commerce. However, this view, and the coining of the expression, betray a kind of historical determinism ...

Global Higher Education is good business. Over the last five years or so, billions of dollars worth of investment has gone into it, and it has become, if not the next thing, at least one of the next big 'things'. This euphoria may be a fall-out of the bust in For-Profit Education in the United States; or, it may have arisen out of the unique demographic opportunity in Asia, and with a generation-lag, in Africa. However, it is still a relatively new business, stumbling through its way - figuring out its business model as it goes along. So, here is the question we should start with: Is Global Higher Education business a solution in search of a problem? One must start with Education as a business and the debate surrounding that. However, Public Higher Education in the form that we know is a relatively recent thing, and education businesses stretch back in time much longer than we think. Education businesses often took the lead in the time of great social and technological ch...

This was an old idea that I keep coming back to - that of a Global Enterprise School. Indeed, the shortening to E-School is deliberate to contrast it with B-School. A Forbes article in 2011 first used the term (see my earlier post ) and I have been exploring it ever since. This was the idea I pursued in the transformation, which remained incomplete, of London School of Accountancy and Management that I was running at the time, and afterwards, as I set up U-Aspire to offer pathway education globally. While I may have been doing something else for several months now, and U-Aspire, in its China-only format, became more focused on qualifications that lead to English degrees, I have never abandoned the idea. However, the intervening months of experience was valuable and helped me develop the concept further, and perhaps to a point when I am ready to give it a shape. The idea may have started as a contra-B-School, particularly attractive as the limitations of B-School teaching is all b...

To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best and the worst of the times for Global Higher Education. There has never been a time of greater demand and greater desire for it. As millions join the ranks of middle classes in Asia and Africa, the West, its lifestyle, income levels and culture define the shape of the dream - and global higher education represents the pathway to it. On the other hand, these students were never less welcome in the metropolitan centres of Europe, Australia and the United States. For all its high-minded rhetoric of borderless knowledge, the West feels overcome with migration, the modern-era exodus through the heart of Europe being its most visible manifestation. It is under an intellectual seizure, with extremist rhetoric and isolationist tendencies on the ascendance across the continent. Global education, in the form we came to know it, has never been more difficult to attain or costlier. One crucial factor that widens this chasm is the nature of the ...

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 have posted about Global Workforce Crisis and Education as its only plausible solution . However, the question remains: If the problem is so obvious, and everyone more or less agrees that good education is the solution, and, more importantly, as everyone seems to talk about it too, why do we have so little done? Indeed, one could say that there has been a surge in private investment in education - in fact, education, and particularly technology-led solutions to education, has been one of hottest sector for venture investment since 2011 - but the impact of it, particularly in improving access and quality of education for poorer people, has been very limited. In fact, apart from the eye-watering amounts that some of the MOOC companies raised (and one could argue that MOOCs are not for everyone, but just the well-educated), most of the education investment has gone into creating top-end schools and colleges, improving the quality and opportunity for the top 5% - 10% of the population...

Talking global is easy. In fact, it is not easy NOT to talk global. In this age of Internet, Facebook, Venture Capital, WTO, scale is the mantra: And, global is the only scale that really matters.  When I started working in England in 2004, I worked for a couple of interesting E-Learning companies for the first few years. They had good products and good people. I was greatly impressed by what they did, and with the sophistication of their technology and approach. They had large projects covering their cash flows, and were strategically poised to expand. But when I brought up the question of going global, given that I had first hand experience globally and thought these services would be quite compelling, the answer I got was "No Thanks!" These companies did not want to go global but rather service the small e-learning market in the UK that they knew well. They did not see the benefit of taking on the extra complexity and was afraid of 'global'. At that time, new...