Sunday Posts

  The limits of experiential learning     Guilty as charged , we evangelised experiential learning as the most appropriate education format to meet the demands of rapidly changing workplaces.   Dismayed by over-reliance on uninteresting lectures with hundreds of slides, we emphasised practical enga gement. Our point was that the solitary content consumption, whether from books or from videos, does not allow anyone to prepare for rapid shifts in technology or workplace practices. Instead, the lear ners need to work with other people, as most work today is done in teams, and they should solve real-life problems, as only by application are thin gs really learnt.   But there must be more than this if one is  to create a learning experience in the twenty-first century. That application is a better way of learning than reading textbooks is rather well known. No one denies that experiential learning works better in preparing for practical work. Rather, it ...

It has been repeated so many times, it is now a cliché: Our next thirty years will not look like the last three decades! If anything, ever since the end of the Cold War, it was mostly peaceful, mostly prosperous for most of the world. However, One can clearly see that some of the building blocks of that world are shifting now and a new ideas environment is emerging. We don't have to be pessimists to know that the lives of our students would be very different from ours. If we are to design a higher education system today, many things must change. Particularly, there are five foundational assumptions behind how we think about Higher Education, which need rethinking. First, the idea of SMART - a version of the idea of general intelligence ('g')! We may talk about diversity and inclusion, but fundamentally, higher education and the idea of merit are closely linked. This comes from how we organise the school system, which attempts to separate students into academic and vocationa...

My work is in international education. So my mantra is that education must be global! If we are not preparing our students for the global workplace, we are doing them a disservice, I say!  However, an interesting conversation with an young colleague made me pause and think. Her point, on reading India's new National Education Policy, was that the policy talks a lot about being Indian while promising to prepare Indian graduates for the global workplace. She saw this as an anomaly and hoped I would agree!  But here is my own confusion perhaps. I do think Indian education should be more Indian. I actually find the educated Indians disdain for their own countrymen disconcerting and believe that this is a crucial weakness of the Indian society. It weakens India as the Indian middle classes are increasingly disconnected from the real problems of their own country and try out various Made-in-America solutions rather than thinking on their own. And, I believe education, and particular...

India is where the future of higher education is being decided right now. Of course, the literature on the subject paints a different picture: This is mostly about the future of American Higher Education! The funding follows the same logic - funding technologies and enterprises based on the conversations in the United States.  Implicit in this is the assumption that the United States, the world-dominating civilisation of the moment, represents the peak civilisation, and all the other countries are on a journey - and are at different points - to become more like the United States. Therefore, the future of the future of anything is being more like America.  On the ground, the reality is very different. China has powered its way to global economic top table - and increasingly the academic one too - pragmatically picking and choosing elements of the American model, but steadfastly sticking to its own path. Now India comes to the party, belatedly acknowledging its vast waste of hum...

As they scramble emergency measures together, the university leaders are gradually coming to the conclusion that the changes will be long-term. If only reluctantly, they are accepting that remote learning is here to stay, if only because the students' direct experience of it makes it far less intimidating. But this is only a part of the change. The economic and political after-effects of the massively stretched state finances are bound to mean accelerating changes in the public-private balance in higher education. Coming together with the expansion of remote learning, shift to digital work and changing geopolitical alignment reconfiguring international education, this is a perfect storm moment for higher education. As with remote learning, the balance has already been changing in public-private higher ed. In fact, this 'new normal' creates new opportunities for private higher education. With their focus on efficiencies, private Higher Ed institutions were ahead in the appli...

Once upon a time, I was a believer. I believed that the wonderful possibility of online higher education will make available affordable, high quality higher education for the aspiring middle-class students everywhere. Of all the vistas opened up by the Internet, this was the most transformative. This would have made a truly flat world; this would have resulted in a convergence of values and ideas, desires and languages.  That was then, the late nineties. Before the dot-com bust, before 9/11, before Facebook conquered the world. Most importantly, before I did a day's work for the online universities and met the first students who enrolled in them. Before the wonderful rhetoric met the real world and billions of dollars of venture capital was poured into online universities! And, before various failed schemes to improve higher education in the 'third world' came full-circle. In between, I was in the frontline. I have this odd enthusiasm about what I do. Though I...

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...

Last year, I went in search of serendipity. It was part recovery - my previous stab at entrepreneurship not having worked out - and part exploration - of living unexpectedly. So, I took on something quite contrary to my nature: I bottled my natural inclinations to experiment and took on a process-oriented role. I decided to live on the other side of the fence, right in the middle of employer-land. As I gradually near the end of this year-long 'experiment', I am, perhaps quite naturally, in a reflective mood. The experience has been very rewarding in more than one way.  The project I ran was successful, achieving its mandate in time and within budget, and I am sure I shall look back at this year with some satisfaction. My role was to introduce a completely new way of doing things within the bounds of a conservative organisation in a conservative and risk-averse sector. Therefore, the appreciation that the work received is really remarkable. It is truly gratifying to s...

International education provides the angle of vision to understand how higher education has changed over the last few decades: It neatly layers the usual academic rhetoric - that of research, widening participation and equity - behind the commercial realities of higher education, of money, ranking and legitimised migration. Discussion of the Higher Education 'business' may be blasphemy within the faculty common rooms, but it's the mantra of the field: It is indeed just another global business which has grown rapidly in the WTO world.  And, because it is so, it is now changing. The prospects of International Education has been intricately linked with the fortunes of the 'global middle class'. That specific expression stands for a new middle class in Asia and Africa (and to a smaller extent, in Latin America) which came into existence because of post-nineties globalisation. Their existence is crucially dependent on global trade and global capital, and their as...

The statement that India's Higher Education sector is in crisis and needs a 90s style liberalization draws the riposte: Education is not commerce. But instrumentality is at the core of India's Higher Education system and 'liberal' education, an education without the immediacy of objective and specificity of purpose hasn't taken roots in India. Even after Independence, no Indian D'Annunzio called for making Indians after India has been made. There is no hiding away from the reality that Higher Education is a significant sector of economic activity, which is a major employer with a long-term impact on productivity and prosperity. The situation in Higher Education is rather like Indian commerce prior to liberalisation, when even car-making was done on ‘national interest’ and the Indian government protected different industrial sectors for the sake of shielding well-connected business groups from global competition. The question of education is more urgen...