Sunday Posts

The idea came to me from various conversations in China and India: That teacher training in Higher Education is an urgent need and a significant opportunity. This is counter-intuitive. Most Western institutions of Higher Education, autonomous as they are, train their own teachers. For Continuing Professional Development, the emphasis here is on Research, and an established network of Conferences exist to foster the community. Teacher training is for schools, where the volume and turnover of teachers are high, and it needs constant refreshing. However, the expansion of Higher Education in the last decade in China, India and elsewhere brings into play a different reality altogether.  First, the Higher Education institutions created in these countries in the last decade are different from research-led institutions in the West: They are teaching institutions operating at a mass scale. The focus is on teaching at scale, and the appropriate teacher training is therefore of ...

As we speak to employers about what skills they value, they often talk about Critical Thinking. When we talk to colleges and universities, at least in the UK, Critical Thinking comes right at the top of the list of the things they want their students to be able to do. Someone I know, who has been working on the Educator-Employer interface for more than a decade now, tells me that even if they are using similar language, they mean different things by Critical Thinking. According to him, this creates the disconnect, and this is why while 70% educators may think the students are ready for the workplace, less than half the employers think so. With this in mind, I was engaging with educators and employers to figure out what the different definitions of Critical Thinking may be. It seems that both employers and educators mean the same thing - the ability to test and validate the assumptions that underlie a decision - when they talk about critical thinking. They are both talking about n...

I sometimes catch up with ideas and concepts long after they were needed. Call it slowness if you like, but this is not about slowness of wit but the lingering of love that I am talking here. This is not about missing out on something while I am at it, but rather indulging in an ongoing engagement even when the immediate need has been fulfilled. So, I really discovered the fascinating world of economic history - so much so that I may end up reading those books while on holiday - only after my formal education in economics was over. My obsession with John Dewey came only after I have completed my Masters in Adult Education, and I believe I understand him better now as I have completed the course earlier.  My current reading concerns leadership. I have got to it in a roundabout way. It all started with Vienna, where I am planning a short holiday around Easter, and Freud, upon whom I stumbled upon in course of my engagement with Modernity, itself a hangover from the Coursera cou...

What's the relationship between Education Technology and Teachers?  The most common sense answer is that education technology is the new mode and the teachers are the old mode, linked somewhat in an asymmetric relationship like the one between the weavers and textile factories. The former is just an inefficient form of doing things which technology can do much better, or at least, be able to do much better when it becomes smarter eventually. Others take a kinder view of teachers and teaching. They actually contend ed-tech will be good for teachers. The advent of ed-tech, in this view, is the panacea for the 'cost disease' of education, because, as the economist William Baumol has affirmed, education is one of those trades where the 'productivity' of the Professor does not go up much, though their salaries keep going up. This problem is at the heart of the runaway costs of education in the developed world, particularly in the US, where college fees beat inf...

While chronicling my experience of teaching leadership, I made the point that we explore three ideas of leadership: The first is that leadership is the behaviour that the leaders display; the second was that leadership is about a position and the activities that come with it; and finally, that leadership is a sort of personal ethic. I argued that I try to plod my students to explore all three ideas, and usually, once they discover the range, they settle for the third, as this is profoundly empowering. This is because leadership as a personal ethic could be achieved by anyone, at any point of their lives, as long as they could understand what that ethic is and are ready to commit to it.  This stands in contrast with the first idea, the leadership as a personal characteristic of a few people, because this grows out of the leaders-are-born-not-made view of the world. This theory indeed falls short against the argument whether all born leaders become recognised as leaders, which,...

We talk leadership all the time and everyone seems to know what it is, though everyone may have a slightly different idea. As a part of my teaching course, I do ask my students to define leadership, and get many definitions. In summary, the answer to my question is given in the lines of Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it", with a long list of names that stretch from Jesus Christ to Jose Mourinho. While this may sound intuitive, there are a few granular details in this definition we should be aware of. Indeed, Jesus Christ and Jose Mourinho are two very different kind of persons, but even the common strand that seemingly tie them together in my students' conception - the ability to move people - is actually two very different kind of things. Indeed, I exaggerate the difference by picking two extreme examples, and this would be much less emphatic if one picks another pair of names from the list, like Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi (or Abraham ...

I teach leadership. I am not sure leadership can be taught. Semantics aside - I know all that facilitating stuff as opposed to teaching - the question I am really interested in if one can really 'make' leaders through a series of classroom conversations. Some of my colleagues will argue that it should be a series of projects or activities rather than classroom conversations. I am no big fan of the kind of unambitious projects that people usually set up in context of business courses: Review your company's mission statement! I would tend to think those are worse devices than classroom conversations. And, in any case, whatever the method, how does one teach leadership? I am not taking the position that leadership can't be learnt, though! There are born leaders, but the leaders are only born and not made is a fallacious theory: We all know one or two people who were born to be leaders, but were never made. Whether or not leaders are born that way, they have t...

Culture, while it is increasingly an issue to be reckoned with in business circles, does not get the same prominence in the discussion about International Education. The reason why business pays heed to culture is perhaps because increasingly the Chinese, Indian and other consumers are 'emerging', and it is no longer the same monolithic world where all purchasing powers were concentrated in the hands of a certain type, Western, consumers. For the same reason, surely, western educators may pay heed to the issue of culture, as the Chinese, Korean and Indian students flock to Western universities.  However, such cultural sensitivities are less likely to take hold in the academia, simply because the demand for an Western education is simply taken as an acceptance of its superiority. Besides, educators usually resist the idea of education being a consumer commodity and see the need to adjust to the needs of different students as a compromise of the standards. And, finally, pra...

One of the colleagues asked during the Education Investment Conclave, which took place last week, what it means in practise. The question was directed to me, and my answer something to the effect that it means preparing the students so that they can be employable all their lives, not just get the first job. What I was thinking is that what goes on in the name of employability is so very lame, the writing of CV or preparing for interviews, all directed to somehow crossing the initial barrier into work, based on the implicit assumption that getting started is the most difficult thing. There may be some truth about the difficulty of getting started, but that's only half the story, if that. Employability isn't about just crossing the threshold into employment; in fact, in most cases, the employability problems start thereafter. The candidates don't get why it is so important to turn up for work at time, why you can't afford to lose temper, why you have to work in a...

I am working with a number of senior tutors with long experiences of teaching face to face in developing the courses which we shall deliver using technology. Indeed, our model is globally collaborative learning, which is as much as about distance delivery as about distribution of various learning activities. The learners are locally supported, their learning is designed collaboratively between the tutor, who is remote, and mentors, who are local, and they work with local peer groups as well as global ones. The technology we employ is easy, based on Open Source platforms and something that can run on a washing line, as they say: The trick of the trade for us is to design this complex learning structure effectively. So, this is a business about effective instructional design more than anything else. And, being in Higher Education space in Britain, where instructional design is usually seen as the prerogative of the trainers (and not of educators) and essentially American, it is an i...

Yesterday, for me, was a day of fascinating conversations, particularly on the state of Higher Education in India. This is with two senior executives from an Indian Higher Education institution. We talked about a number of things, including the changing mindset in India and the the regulatory regime, as well as the possibilities, and pitfalls, of collaborating with British and American institutions. For me, forever an enthusiast of global education, it was insightful, if dispiriting, discussion. Importantly, it gave me yet again a clear sense of the private higher education space in India. We agreed on most things, except one perhaps, and that is the role and importance of knowledge in Higher Education. The Indian Educators were quite clear: Knowledge is no longer important. Commercially, they did not think it made sense, as the students don't care about knowledge: They want the degree, as easily as they can. The parents don't care what the students are learning, they said...

I am in the middle of a teaching commitment, and having taken it up, I have started regretting it somewhat. This is indeed because of pressures of my day to day life, with many things demanding attention at once, not least the management work at the college. We are at an interesting point in the 'journey', when the changes I have been advocating for finally come to be implemented, and I am hopeful, the college will emerge as a completely transformed entity in the next 12 months time. My own business is also coming together, a logo, an office, ideas about technologies and courses, a partnership, various disparate elements: All of this is demanding my time too. Finally, I have reached the last taught module of my MA course at UCL, and this is possibly the most interesting one I have done so far. This is about learning and learning environments, and we have made trips to museums, cafes and finally to British Library to start thinking about learning environments. At this time, ha...

Yesterday I was speaking to a group of extremely bright young people about future, career and aspirations. If anything, this was a humbling experience. I seemed to have started from a point, that of undermining their intellectual capabilities, but was soon aware how motivated, aspirational and knowledgeable the audience was. This is a far cry from the usual crowd I get to speak to, but this is the crowd who we intend to appeal to when we open a new college offering courses in Business, Economics and Entrepreneurship in the next few months. There were a number of presentations from other equally accomplished people, coming from different career streams. Some worked in politics, others in Media, public services and banks. This was indeed quite a Hindu thing, arranged by Asian Voice, a newspaper for British Asians, and the City Hindu Network, which is a forum for young British Asian executives working in the City of London. Indeed, the audience drew from all kinds of age groups and religi...

I have been asked to keep a journal for one of the modules in my MA course. I am now trying to force myself into the habit, though I am never good at doing anything when I am forced. However, this is only required for a short while, with the final coursework due in early September, and I thought I can keep trying it for a month. I am expected to write about my Professional Practice and immediately the confusion starts. This is for an Education course and for the purpose of the course, I should possibly focus on the part of my role as an educator. Indeed, I teach Marketing Strategy to Post-graduate students one afternoon a week, and this is going to go up to one and half day a week starting September. However, this is only a small part of what I do. Teaching is my adventures in the chalk-face, an element in my exploration of models that I intend to employ, some day, in the Online College that I want to set up. So are other things - the administrative functions that I carry out as the He...

I have taken on teaching responsibilities starting this week. I wish I didn't, as the preparation for this has now been added to my already crazy schedule; but, then, I wanted to teach. This is the first reason I took on my current job. From the small amount of teaching I have done over the last year, I know I enjoy teaching too: It gives me the excuse to prepare, and learn more myself through conversations with students. However, this week's teaching commitment is slightly different from what I have done so far. I am supposed to do a 'tutorial' as opposed to a lecture. Personally, I am not sure what the tutorials are supposed to achieve. We are teaching for an MBA, and the stated purpose of the tutorial is to ready the students for examinations. While I know this may be necessary for some of our students, who clearly find writing nuanced essays a challenging task, the idea of preparing for the examinations run counter to my belief what MBA should be about. I am trying ...

My work role is undergoing a subtle shift. In the first six months in my job in the college, I was mainly involved in strategic developments, which meant I dipped my toe into almost everything, from planning new customer service initiatives to talking to strategic partners overseas. However, since January, after the college recruited a new Managing Director, whose role includes everything business related, my role has changed into one overseeing the learning and teaching in the business courses of the college. Which I indeed love, it is in line with what I am studying at the UCL and something that I wanted to do: In a way, I am dead serious when I say I have retired from business. My own assessment of the job is that there is a lot to be done. We do a much better job than most other private colleges around, but there is a lot to be covered still. Private College industry in Britain is sort of a cottage industry, without much professional practices in recruitment, design of courses, eva...

I am amazed how little discussion there is about teaching in higher education. I am currently exploring what is available, and indeed coming across people like Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Rowland, but this is quite inadequate given the huge expansion of university education and teacher numbers. Derek Bok , the former President of Harvard University, wrote that universities often don't want to discuss or improve teaching: Research yes, teaching no. There seems to be an idea that teaching needs to be steady state, whatever we need to know about teaching is already known and if you let someone with enough knowledge and experience inside the class, nothing else will be required. I have also read Phillip Altbach edited The Fall of the Guru, where he and his associates explore the teaching profession in the context of Asian Higher Ed. What comes out is that while the provisions for Higher Ed have generally expanded, there is a de -professionalization of teaching. Admittedly, teachin...

The key reason this blog exists is that this is my scrapbook of ideas. Sometimes, I tend to forget this, trying to mould this into a shape, as if this is a magazine or a newspaper, primarily because I think this will help me get more readers. But, at regular intervals, in the rare lazy Sunday mornings with nothing serious to do, I discover the enjoyment in being chaotic, in chronicling the chaotic and messy tale of my life, with the inconsistencies and all. The blog, after all, records everything in a most recent first structure, which is counter-intuitive, in fact, directly opposed to our obsessively sequential sense of order. That way, this is the right tool for my wandering about: I am what I am right now. My life is changing quite fast. I am truly out of my depressive frustration which would have showed up in the posts only a few months back. My life now is a lot more predictable, even a touch boring. The variations of my mornings now limited to which train I take and which coach I...

I have written about University model changing significantly and morphing into an User Network model, more akin to a library, where learners learn from each other. The reason behind imagining such transformation has obviously been the availability of technological options, and the social trends and imperatives of Lifelong Learning. One criticism I have received of such a visualization is that it pushes the teacher out of the equation, making her extinct and letting Learning Technologist take her place, or at least de -professionalizing teaching into some kind of technology assistant. First of all, I accept the criticism as valid. In my enthusiasm in writing about the universities as user networks, I almost forgot about teaching, not mentioning this at all. This, however, came from my own background and bias, because my engagement with education was mostly from the administrative and business perspective, rather than teaching itself. Being largely self-taught, it was rather obvious for...