Sunday Posts

As higher ed goes online, we must remember: The medium is the message. There is little point trying to do online what we do in campuses. This is what most online higher ed propositions are built on, and very quickly they become poor copies of the real thing. The screen reduces the whole web of personal interactions and relationships into just content delivery - and universities to diploma shops! It is not surprising that the students do not see the same value in online delivery as they do in the classrooms. But that format also underplays the key strengths that a distributed environment can bring. Flexibility in terms of time and space, for example, may not be that valuable if we are trying to replicate the same activities that happen in a classroom, but mightily important if we try to do what can't be done in a classroom. But there is more: This is not just about access but experience too. There was once a charm getting to know others across the barriers of time and space. Faceboo...

Perhaps this is a distinctly unfashionable question, particularly when so many new universities are being built all over the world and more people than ever before are going to the university. However, unless one belongs to that rare group of people who think that the government - governments, in this case - knows better, this is a question worth asking, as public money is being poured in, either to build greenfield universities or to pay for students attending private, profit-making, ones.  The university leaders usually treat the purpose of universities as self-evident truth and exempt, conveniently, their own institutions from the critical examination they claim every aspect of life should be subject to. However, given the importance of universities in the contemporary cultural life - they are deemed to be the creators of individual worth as well as its judge - some questions are worth asking. To do so, it's important to start at the very beginning, and ask - what are thes...

As the crisis in jobs becomes apparent, many think that the way to maintain the Middle Class society is to be found in entrepreneurship. In their mind, it is a straightforward transition: People not finding jobs would start businesses. In some quarters, those look for jobs are already maligned - 'Job Takers' they are called - as opposed to those committing themselves to entrepreneurial journey, the 'Job Creators'. As always, the reality is harsher than the theory. But my point is not to challenge the idea that there should be more entrepreneurs. It is how to get there I have questions about. More specifically, my doubts are about the new trend of creating university-based incubators, US style, in the universities in developing countries. The incubators are taking the place of 'Placement Offices' or what was euphemistically called the 'Industry Collaboration Office', becoming the last mile of the students' life cycle in an university or a busine...

Whenever I speak about Universities As Networks, the idea smacks of being the 'cool new thing': I am immediately hit with the claim of tradition - that universities have been in their current form for 'hundreds of years' - with the implication that this institutional form is resilient and not going to change anytime soon. The point is, of course, that the critical thinking that universities claim to imbibe in their learners is expected not to be applied to the institutions themselves. This claim of faux-tradition, that the universities have been around in some sort of unchangeable form for hundreds of years while everything around them changed, often goes unquestioned. So, a little scrutiny of the origins and traditions of the universities is quite useful for our conversation. And, humbling, too: Because if anyone seriously thought that the universities as networks is a cool new concept invented for the Internet age, a quick tour of the medieval universities w...

I wrote earlier about How To Build An University to argue that our current paradigms are flawed. My essential point was that the university, more than its buildings, curriculum and facilities, is a community, and this should be the key consideration for building an university. I wanted to add to this thought, how one may put the community at the heart of university-making, and think through some of the practical implications. This argument that one may need to look at the University as a Community is old, and indeed, the first universities were conceived as communities more than anything else. This is also at the heart of a sophisticated business argument - Clayton Christensen and his coauthors argued for adopting an 'User Network Business Model' for the universities - and this did become a talking point when venture investment in education was raging. I did write about it then (See Education 2.0: Universities As User Networks , Universities As User Networks: An Update ...

Darwin changed the way we think about the world. Before Darwin, there was God who created the world and the Man in his own image; everything existed with a purpose, and for that end alone. Darwin, almost boringly, offered us another vision: Of a complex, natural process, grinding on for million years, producing a great variety of life forms without a knowable purpose. The Man was no longer special after that, just an evolved animal with greater mental ability. However, the most profound impact of Darwin is perhaps in debunking 'teleological' reasoning, that species existed for a preordained purpose, and replacing this with less grandiose, almost boring, and perhaps even frightening, logic of evolution. However, most conversations about universities (particularly in the West) are defined by a teleological reasoning, that the universities exist for a preordained purpose, quite outside the social requirements of the day. Rooted perhaps in the defining treatise about the univ...

Education should be changing: The kind of education that helped us create the workforce during the industrial expansion may not, would not, work at a time of computerisation and globalisation. While this may appear kind of obvious, this is not what we are discussing though. Indeed, there is a lot of discussion about globalisation and computerisation, but the discussion is focused not on the educational challenge, but on the politics of it: For some, this is an elitist conspiracy which needs to be resisted at all costs; for others, all debate on the path to profit is utterly futile. In the middle of this charged debate lies the somewhat ignored issue: How can we create an education that helps people to adopt to this changing world of work? From this position, that change will happen is a given: One could clearly figure out that such changes have happened and those tried to resist it, rather than trying to benefit from it, usually ended up on the losing side. So, teaching people to...

The university is changing. This statement may be self-evident, but there is no consensus about what it is changing into, much less on whether this is a good thing. On one hand, there is nostalgia, based on an image of a golden age, which, as one of my teachers appropriately defined, was always based on as things were when the interlocutor was about twenty years old; on the other, there are the apocalyptic visionaries, the prophets of the information age, those who believe software is eating the world and should, must, eat the universities as well. And, overarching all these passions and interests is the very real question of entitlement - the questions of winners and losers of a new system - played out in Britain over the last few years noisily and vividly. I engaged in this conversation with intent and purpose. The changing landscape and its implications perhaps became clearer to me during the time I was attempting to set up a network of Vocational Training centres in many diff...

Eric Schmidt seems to think that the college is a 'slow dinosaur', on its way to extinction. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, given that more students are going into Higher Education than ever before and the promise of skills, when jobs are disappearing fast, is the only hope that the working class has. In fact, one can argue that the modern society stands at the back of the college - the hope of social mobility that it provides - and without it, there will be no social order. One way to think about this is that for too many people, this is turning out to be a false promise. The college does not lead to redemption, as it is promised to be; it rather leads to the same old place in the social pecking order, now made a bit more difficult and a bit more expensive to achieve. For all the talk of becoming a sentient being and developing a critical consciousness, going to college means turning out huge debt and becoming prudently conformist thereafter. Of course, in sunny ...

The issues surrounding For-Profit institutions have been contested around whether allowing For-Profits inevitably means profiteering, and given the prospect of students taking loans to go to For-Profit institutions, profiteering at the taxpayers’ expense. On the other hand, For-Profit institutions argued their case as the ones driving educational innovations in cost and delivery, challenging the status quo in Higher Education, which has, they claimed, failed to change with time. These battles over entitlements, however, should be seen in the context of a broader debate about what the universities are for. Collini (2012) defines the ‘modern university’ with the following four characteristics: “1. That it provides some form of Post-secondary-school education, where education signals something more than professional training. 2. That it furthers some form of advanced scholarship or research whose character is not wholly dictated by the need to solve the immediate practical pr...

U-Aspire is meant to be a 'Global University'. It is not unduly ambitious: This is indeed the plan. It is not just rhetoric: This is an article of faith in the founding team that a platform must be created to serve the groundswell of global aspiration.  Higher Education is an innovator's paradise now, as most people seem to agree that it is broken. The Higher Ed sector collectively may not have made a smooth transition to post-industrial economy, and the need to do so is urgent. And, this transition will change everything: Not just the institutional structures and cost of delivery, which is a huge problem, but also the academic roles and cultures, and deeper embedded values. This isn't about public and private, whether or not Higher Ed should be a business, but really about finding a way to equip a global, aspirational, mobile generation, a generation of 'Makers', as Chris Anderson will call them. In context, 'Global University' isn't a gran...

The universities are grand things, or so they have come to be. The image of an university is constructed not just of manicured lawns and grand buildings, but also of an unhurried lifestyle and leisurely pursuit of sports or intellect or romantic interests. They embody, typically, privilege and power, and getting through the university and earning the credentials have been, and remains, the rite of passage into socially privileged realms. However, universities have been changing. They were changing as the societies change and knowledge work becomes more common: Suddenly, it was not just the diplomats and the bridge-building engineers who needed Higher Learning, but even a person who merely programmes a desktop computer and lives in a rented flat needed to attend university. The rhetoric of opportunity society, that one will have a fair shot at life's pleasures no matter where s/he comes from, also made universities central to democratic governance and public conversation: This ...

This is a bad time for globalism. The recession has renewed the fear of the others, and various politicians, from Japan to Italy to United States, are inventing foreign bogeymen to obscure their own failures. Companies, while desperate for ideas and for growth, are receding to respective homelands for safety: The only international bit they would still like to do is to keep their cashes stashed in tax havens. In fact, by doing so, they have given global business more bad press - Starbucks dodging taxes, Wal-Mart paying bribes and various banks, almost all of them, defrauding customers and governments alike. Critics can say that this was bound to happen and globalisation is a sham: But when it comes to climate change, nuclear disarmament, human rights, the issues that the same critics love, they concede that there is no alternative to concerted global action. I shall contend that global connections (or disconnections) are a function of technology and due to progress in transportati...