Sunday Posts

MOOCs are taking big strides towards becoming accredited, but is that the right thing to do? As some of the Coursera courses get recognition for college credit, the mood for MOOC enthusiasts is definitely celebratory. The idea is gaining traction, they say, and here is proof that it is no longer a fad. The MOOC will now challenge college education, bemoan its detractors, pointing out that it is surely the inferior alternative.  The full college degree, as everyone is expecting MOOCs to get to some day, is a far cry from sme college credit. MOOCs will have to change their essential character to do full college degrees, as their major challenge, assessments, will become central in that game. Without the massiveness and the openness, MOOCs are not much of a phenomenon; Open and Distance learning existed for a long time. Russian engineers were training themselves by the Radio in the 1950s, as around the same time, earning diplomas. The game-changing possibility of MOOCs is whe...

We consume a torrent of data as we live, and we produce the same too. However, the more we produce details of each little step we take to live, we obscure the little data more and more, such as feelings and pleasures of human exchanges. The Big Data, the faster, bigger and more complex stream of data, does not so much chronicle our life as much as it changes it. While the technologists and marketers of various descriptions celebrate its arrival, it is time to pause and reflect how it changes us, our lives and institutions, and further, what it means to be human in the age of big data. One would wonder why big data is any big deal, as data gets bigger with every passing generation. As our networks grow, we know more; our storage technologies get cheaper and better, and we store more. Having lived in the age of floppy drives and 4kb memories, the big leap into megabytes was as significant as moving from cheap gigabytes to plausible petabytes. While the rhetoric is that the torrent o...

India goes from crisis to crisis, but that may not be a bad thing. In fact, if you imagine the country to be a jungle, these small events are equivalent to small fires, one that prevents big fires from happening. India, chaotic and crisis-prone, can be relied upon not to have a big upheaval, even if the Hindu extremists get the power to run the country. One would expect them never to get there, given the extreme complexities of Indian democracy, which will always ensure a coalition of interests, rather than one extreme view, gaining ascendency.  But, apart from the prevention of big crisis, the perpetual state of crisis is helpful to move the country forward. Though largely unacknowledged, the Indian government has scored some significant victories over the last couple of months, passed a raft of unpopular reforms, stalled for years, within a few weeks, got rid of an obstructionist ally, and promoted a new group of Ministers known for their effectiveness, and importantly, hone...

We barely started, but already experienced a pivot point: In the last couple of months we are at it, our idea of the kind of college we want to build has evolved already. We learnt, as we liberated ourselves from the constraints of practise, that there is a bigger opportunity out there in connecting, rather than recreating the wheel and trying to deliver, educational experiences. The metaphor for what we are creating is no longer a college - we shall work with colleges rather than create a new one and compete with them - but a global network based on shared values and commonly agreed frameworks. This is so much closer to what we believe adult education should be, an enabling mechanism to connect with the world and collaborate with the like-minded, and our technology tools and business model are fast evolving in line with this education ideal. Initially, when we imagined the learning environment, we imagined the students will come to a portal offering various services, just like a ...

I maintained social media silence on the playing out of the American election, despite the alluring narrative of this being Wall Street versus the world. Despite, admittedly, there was much at stake: If Wall Street could impose its views of the world on America, the World would have been in line, with the guns and bombs and enough American young men still ready to sacrifice their lives without really knowing why. While I got up early enough on Wednesday to catch Obama give his victory speech, and exclaimed on Facebook that he seemed to have got back his oratory just in time, this was very different from what I did four years back: Sat through a night of vote counting, in a hotel in the middle of a business trip, just because I hoped that this President would be different. In 2008, in a world of continuous war, terrorist attacks and recession, I needed the hope as badly as anything: I surrendered my sense to the blind belief that if someone looked different, he must be. Obama turne...

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...

An Ernst & Young report looks at the Australian universities and come to interesting conclusions. The British universities, which look at their Australian counterparts with envy these days, may take note of this: The report offers some insights which may have universal significance, and universities all over the world, barring the few at the top of the pyramid, may have to reassess their strategies in the rapidly changing context of today's Higher Education. In summary, the report points to five disruptive forces that confront what it calls a 'thousand year old industry' (though many in Britain will be affronted by the 'i' word): First, 'democratization of knowledge and access' , which means not just the MOOCs, but more fundamentally, Google, and YouTube, and the like; as well as the expansion of Higher Education systems in the developing world, based on the emerging consensus on Higher Education as the key to good life. Second, 'contes...