Sunday Posts

This has been the best and worst of the times for Higher and Professional Education. While people pursuing Higher and Professional Education has attained a new peak globally, new questions about its relevance and cost have arisen too. The expansion of formal education has crowded out the ecosystems of informal learning, in effect depriving societies with one of the tried-and-tested coping mechanisms for social and technical change ( see my earlier post on this ), but it has offered little in its space. Its claims on the territory, in various avatars of Lifelong Learning or Massive Open Online Courses, have underachieved, being too structured, too bureaucratic, too content driven and too top-down. Finally, its claims of being able to assess everything overshot its capability, and created dissonance with employers as they struggled to work out hard measures of the 'soft' skills.  However, among all these debates and questions, one that attracts maximum attention is the one ...

The problem of connecting educators and employers is not a new one. There are many organisations and institutions working at creating this interface, some more successfully than others. The field is full of well-meaning individuals and fascinating ideas, some more workable than others. However, one key lesson, a common one, has perhaps been ignored by most of the people: That no closed, proprietary solution may actually work. This should have been obvious in a field where the key problem arise because of the closed, proprietary approaches. The Educators mostly believe they are doing a great job - at least, the best possible one - and the degrees and grades they give out, under the full authority of the state and with the gravitas of their quality assurance, should be accepted at the face value by the employers. The employers, in turn, believe that the people they require should appear, with right skills and attitude, a perfect understanding of their cultures and customers, an...

In my work at the fault line between Education and Employment, it seems obvious that we have this problem in the first place because of the closed frameworks we have built. In Education, the accreditation has become an end in itself, and educators try to solve all the problems with a course, a big hammer no matter how tiny is the nail. Employers, on their part, are focused on identifying and attracting employees who have specific skills as required, another closed framework with a tiny opening.  At one level, everyone seems to be happy with the situation as it is. Educators are intent on building a complete person who does not need a job, and employers are happy with that perfect employee whose education does not matter. At another level, this is a big social problem, as politicians sell their middle class economics on the basis of education-to-employment transition. They usher in globalisation at will and hail technological progress, and promise the magic of education to mak...

There is an argument that the developing countries will not follow the path of developed nations setting up educational institutions and campuses, but rather leapfrog into universities built on modern technologies, such as 4G. The evidence of leapfrogging can be found quite easily. Indeed, none of the developing countries went step by step through the IT revolution, and many of them directly joined in at the mobile era. The fact that a quarter of Kenyan GNP flows through mobile transactions is one of the great examples of technology leapfrogging, and often cited to back the case that universities may do the same. In fact, some commentators see the emphasis on university campuses and infrastructure in developing countries as plainly wasteful. There are, however, two parts of this argument, which need to be examined separately. First, that the developing countries would not follow the evolutionary path traversed by developed countries is perhaps quite understandable. They are joini...

The hottest discussion in education is the development of Open Competency Frameworks. Gone are those days when a list of courses is the language educators would throw at rest of us. The conversation is now very much around what the education does, because that is what everyone involved in education, government, employers, community and students, want to know. Yes, indeed, there are far too many prospectuses around with endless lists of courses, but we are getting to a point when they need to be rewritten. However, while there is some kind of consensus emerging around the idea of competencies, there is no such agreement on what they should be. Many educators feel that competency is a corporate word, and education should not subject to employer interests alone. This is indeed a justifiable stance, given that employers are often focused on immediate opportunities and not on building capacity and future options, but the educators must offer a better alternative than a list of courses...

Raphael's painting of Plato teaching is a popular PowerPoint item for Higher Education conferences these days. This is to be seen in the context of today's classroom, somewhat like the MIT's in the other picture here. The point is not the architectural contrast and the drab predictability of today's windowless classrooms, but rather the similarities between the two - indeed, the speakers use these pictures to emphasise that education has changed very little - and the fact that it is still the students in conversation with each other and with the teacher that make education. That, announces the PowerPoint crusaders armed with incontrovertible visual evidence, needs to change. However, one may indeed be able to point out several differences in the two spaces, which directly points to the changes happening in education. To start with, the humble table must not be overlooked, as well as the pen and paper, all pointing to a writing culture to replace the Oral traditi...

The US Government's decision to stop Coursera (and presumably other MOOCs) from delivering the courses in Syria, Iran, Cuba and Sudan is astonishing, if not outright misdirected. Indeed, I come to know of this as I am doing a course 'Constitutional Struggles in The Islamic World' from University of Copenhagen, and the notification tells me that the students taking the course from the above-mentioned countries will be stopped from taking the course. The act of sanction, therefore, appears completely counter-productive in the context. The mail from Prof. Dr. Ebrahim Afsah that bore the notification states: "Let me reiterate that I am appalled at this decision. Please note that no-one at Coursera likely had a choice in this matter! At any rate, rest assured that these are not the values of the University of Copenhagen, of its Faculty of Law, and most assuredly not mine!" The point made in the notification, appended to Professor Afsah's mail, is th...

Last few weeks have been quite difficult for the MOOCs: After the initial flurry of change of the world rhetoric, suddenly some setbacks dampened the momentum. This started the usual I-told-you-so chatter, that MOOCs are just a passing fad. On the other end of the spectrum, the very usual optimism continues to persist: The balance has invariably tipped and will continue to tip, regardless of the fate of one or two companies. And, as in many other things in life, the sensible stance to take is somewhere in the middle, to consider the issues but not write off the phenomenon altogether. To be clear, what we are dealing with isn't any reversal of fortune, but slowness of progress. And, despite the slowness, new things did indeed happen. Coursera raised another, bigger, sum, and new services, like NovoEd , did indeed launch. Some of the older services, like Alison , got eyeballs and traction, somewhat because of the general media enthusiasm about the MOOCs. The balance did indeed s...

There are lots of people who think MOOCs are game-changer, and others who think it is just a passing fad: I just like the classes I am doing on Coursera and Udacity, and believe this is a good thing. But, lately, I have discovered that there is more than just access to great learning through these platforms: They represent a way to meet great people. And, more than ever, this community is global: I am doing a course on Small Business Growth, and the community has over 60,000 people from all over the world, including a handful in London and the Home counties. And, I would like to believe that this is indeed something unique, and need to be celebrated. If there is one defining thing about our generation, that is our faith in human progress. Everyone, right or left of the political spectrum, seem to have accepted that human history will move forward, and we would find our way out of even the most intractable problems, such as global warming and worldwide recession, through human inge...

Open Courses have arrived, with thousands joining in from all over the world, and that does not make everyone happy. Depending on who one speaks to, it is described as anything between a fad, soon to disappear into irrelevance, and a game-changer, something that will soon render our great universities useless: Both of these views are indeed extreme, and it is fair to assume that the truth is somewhere in the middle. However, the extremities of these positions indicate that the advent of open courses generate strong passion and heated arguments, and surely its enemies can match its adherents, if not by number, but certainly by strength. Open Courses are indeed upending an industry, though it is not higher education and the universities. If anything, I shall argue, Open Courses are saving the universities and helping them to re-establish themselves with a more democratic credential and connect with a large number of people; the universities are regaining, through these courses, a so...

A Great British Institution This essay is about the creation of The Open University [OU]. Bill Bryson, an American living in England, lists OU among the great, uniquely British contributions to the World, along with William Shakespeare, Christopher Wren, Chocolate Digestive biscuits and Pork Pies (Bryson, 1996). David L Kirp, a modern American commentator on Higher Education, compares the founding of OU with the opening of the land grant universities in the United States a century earlier, as “both developments provided serious and sustained learning opportunities for large number of people for whom Higher Education had never previously been available”. He also concedes, quoting Walter Perry, the first Vice Chancellor of the OU, that of the two events, OU’s story was more remarkable, as the land grant schools “took at least seventy five years to achieve a fully established place in the American society, while [OU] had to be brought into full-scale operation almost instantaneo...