Tertiary21

Performance Funding: Easier said than done

2011-10-23T14:35:00.000+01:00

Recently, HEA released consultation document about the implementation of the National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030 (The Hunt Report). It's worth a read, notably Appendix C, is a consultation paper the Strategic Dialogue process that will lead to performance related funding. The fact that we need a consultation paper about a dialogue leading to performance funding tells a lot about what a gnarly problem performance funding is. I think it's worth taking a little time to unpack some of the assumptions implicit in performance related funding models, and how one might go about implementing them successfully and how they might achieve their intended purpose (not the same thing!).

The basic idea of a performance related funding component is that there will be metrics, they will be wise and good, and that some proportion of funding will be contingent on doing well with your metrics.

The first implicit assumption here is that there will be winners and losers. Outfits that do well will be rewarded with more funding and will probably do better, having more money to play with. Institutions that do badly will lose funding, and, in time, fail. The percentage of funding we make performance based determines how many funding cycles the process takes. Set it to 100%, and we are done in one round. At the other extreme, as the proportion of performance linked funding approaches zero, the time taken for it to have an effect approaches infinity. This suggests an obvious path to painless implementation - set the percentage trivially low. Thus the framework can be successfully implemented and victory declared without actually needing to face any of the policy implications of the framework actually working as intended.

The second implicit assumption is that a market based model, where winners and losers are driven by student choice, either cannot work or should not be allowed to work. This is certainly the case in Ireland, where price fixing (at zero, plus registration fee and living costs) and an excess of demand over supply (almost all courses fill) basically neuters any consequential market competition between institutions. Your courses will fill and your monies will come in, really, no matter what you do as an institution.

Implementing a performance component to funding essentially tries to replace market style incentives with KPI driven ones, where how well you do on the metrics will determine how much money you get. We're keeping the buffet where students choose what course they wish with negligible difference in cost to them between a plate of chips and a plate of salad, but the state will pay more if they eat salad.

The third assumption is that there exists a set of wise and useful metrics to which we can all agree. The HEA paper is very sensitive to this point, and the hazards of chasing single KPI, University Rankings and so forth are well understood. Most academics either scoff the whole idea of metrics at all ("My contribution is utterly unquantifiable!") or, over in the sciences, fall to fighting over which metrics to use. The experience of research funding, which is driven by metrics on papers, patents and so forth, is not terribly encouraging. The choice of metrics strikes at the heart of complex issues around the purpose of the University. Utilitarians like me will suggest employment outcomes and graduate earnings compared to a propensity matched non graduate control group, and will be promptly heckled by holistic types who will argue the broader value of education in democratic society, knowledge as an end in itself, and so forth.

This suggests another easy path to implementation - pick so many metrics that everyone's a winner. Cook up a basket of 100 metrics, and let each institution pick three. They improve on them for a few years, win a biscuit, and then move on to another set once the low hanging fruit in that area have been plucked. Everyone's a winner! This might actually improve some things due to the Hawthorne effect, if anything else, and will give everyone something to do as institutions jiggle about winning performance funding year after year for something or other. Ministers can declare great progress is being made, and only the most cynical of observers (i.e. me) might suggest the process is just brownian motion, like a school sports day for junior infants except no one must suffer the indignity of falling over in the sack race.

There is no good solution to the metrics problem. You can avoid the problem by allowing a free market as in the US, or by funding everyone equally and blindly, as now in Ireland. Those approaches bring their own problems which may well be harder than picking smart metrics. You just have to get institutions to come up with metrics that they care enough about to chase, and the funding agency cares enough about to fund, and hope for the best.

If you solve that problem and don't neuter the process by setting a trivial slice of funding to performance, you must put in place a system for eliminating institutions that fail. Not allowing weak institutions to fail makes a nonsense of the process and, as we are seeing in other sectors, comes at a high price in the long run. If you are not prepared to allow your biggest University to fail if it comes to it, and have no plan in place to deal with that eventuality, then performance related funding is not for you.

And yet, perhaps there are smart ways to reduce the risk of institutional failure while maintaining the incentive effect of performance funding. Applying the performance funding to the total grant is a crude mechanism. A neater way would be to apply it to the payroll component only. If your organisation hit's it targets, everyone gets an end of year bonus, from the President to the lowliest postdoc. After all, you incentivise people, not organisations. Give the actual people an incentive to succeed without permanently tipping the playing field by obliging weaker organisations to find structural cutbacks or allowing strong ones to gold plate themselves. Instead of weakening already weak organisations by cutting their global funding, you provide strong internal incentives for them to boot their management team, and back that up by providing failing institutions with support from a tiger team who can roll in and help them find out why they failed, and remedy that.

Nothing around the implementation of performance related funding for higher education is going to be simple or easy. Maybe what's needed is a framework around the consultation paper for the strategic dialogue leading to an implementation strategy for waiting until it's the next governments problem...

The Education of Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T15:49:00.001+01:00

Over the last few days, almost everyone with a heartbeat and an internet connection has watched Steve Jobs giving that commencement address at Stanford (and if you haven't, do right away,hype aside, it's well worth the quarter hour). One of the things that struck me about it was his description of his experience of Higher Education.

In brief, his (adopted) parents scrimped and saved for him to go to college. He did, but dropped out after six months, judging that it wasn't worth the huge expense of his parents money. But he obviously thought it was worth something, because he hung around campus for another 18 months, going to the courses that interested him, rather than the ones he was obliged to take to complete his elective. In his speech, he tells of the calligraphy class, and how it led to his creations having beautiful fonts. There's an official biography out soon, and I'll be interested to read more details on his experience there.

Jobs went on, as we know, to be a powerful influence in education, creating initiatives like the iTunes University, and famously remarking that 'Computer Science is a liberal art'. Much has been written about the direct and indirect influences of the machines he made on education at all levels.

His experience of higher education gives us a lot to think about. He clearly valued it, and thought it worth the time, but not the money. He prized the content, but not the structure and form of following a path to a set discipline, as defined by someone else. He needed a system that would allow him to be a self directed learner, and follow his own agenda. It wasn't there, so he created it, first for himself, and later, for the rest of us.

For people of a beancounting inclination, like myself, who might be inclined in our weaker moments to dismiss a University course in something like Calligraphy, his story gives us pause. We never know quite where a piece of learning for it's own sake might take us, especially in an era where new disciplines, careers and industries spring up every few years.

Jobs was, of course, an outlier, one of the small number of unreasonable people who exert a disproportionate influence on the future. He was clearly remarkable, and surely we cannot draw too much inferences from his experience to that of mass higher education. But given the capacity of these outliers to change the world they live in, our education systems should allow the kinds of self directed learning journeys that Jobs took. We would do well to trade a few less graduates that fit the mould for a few more dropouts that break it.

Why Languages?

2011-03-27T10:20:00.001+01:00

Most bloggers try to show off their knowledge and insight. As regular readers will note, I find it more educational to display my ignorance. One of the many,many things I don't understand is why Universities would teach modern languages? Von Prondzynski brought it up yesterday on his blog, in the context of some departments facing the axe, which people seem to think is a bad thing. I don't get it, but I'm keen to hear a reason.

Some disclosure up front - I studied sciences - Geology - in University, and have not formally studied any language since French in secondary school. My apex achievement in foreign languages was giving an Italian tourist in Venice comprehensible and accurate directions in his own language (at least I think they were comprehensible and accurate, he went off in the right direction). I don't know much about how modern languages departments operate, or what precisely they might do, so feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

There seem to be two reasons expressed to do foreign languages in University. First, to be able to communicate in the language and second, to deepen our understanding of the culture (for the purpose of commerce or the joy of learning). Both these reasons were entirely valid up until, perhaps, the mid 1990's, when Ryanair and the Globalisation wave made a nonsense of them.

Supposing I wanted to learn, for arguments sake, Mandarin. Suppose I was prepared to invest an amount of time and money equivalent to a minor on a 3 year degree - say a year of my life, plus fees, and so on. I'd buy a plane ticket to China. While waiting for flights and visas, I'd might slog through a Linguaphone or Rosetta Stone pack, but I know I'll learn it a lot faster 'In Country'. Arrive, and go total immersion. I'm sure there's any number of schools in China that could provide support for that there there, and help to connect me to people for conversational classes. If I could legally work, I'd find someone that needed my English so I could get into a professional environment and have to speak the native language each day. It would be tough, but after a year of it, I'd reckon I'd a be well ahead of my alter ego studying in a language lab back home.

Will that help me grasp the culture? I might not be up to much on the literary theory, but I reckon by the years end I'll have a pretty good concept of how the place works. Again, a long mile ahead of the peer in the language lab back home, and much more useful know how on how to do business, live and thrive, in the place.

From a commercial perspective, as an employer needing someone with a language or country skills, someone who had lived and, ideally worked in that country for a time would seem a much better bet than someone who had simply studied it from afar. Indeed, for most cases, an local employer who needed staff with a grasp of, say, China, would be better off hiring people from China with some English, rather than the other way around.

In fairness to the modern University, the Erasmus programmes (in Europe) provide something of a framework for the kind of model I'm talking about, and I can't imagine that modern languages departments turn out graduates without them spending a substantial proportion of their degree time in country. But beyond providing enough basic language skills to students before pushing them off the deep end to total immersion, and perhaps organising an effective total immersion experience (work placements and so on) what role do modern languages departments have in Universities in the 21st century? How does it work?

Up until globalisation began to bite, they made perfect sense. When a year in Germany, or China or wherever was much more expensive than a year in your local University, then studying locally makes economic sense, even if it isn't as good. Now that just isn't the case, especially if you cost it out by language contact hours.

Note I'm not criticising the value of learning a foreign language and culture, for business or pleasure, I'm just puzzling over the role modern languages departments have to play in that, moving forward. Nor am I criticising the Classical Language and Culture Departments. I'm told Cicero is beautiful in Latin, and there there is much Arabic and pre Modern Chinese material that remains unstudied and untranslated. With no travel option there, a University Department is a good a forum for them as any.

So what am I missing? Noting the gaps in my knowledge on the topic, I have a very open mind on the matter, but I have a strong suspicion that this is an Emperors New Clothes scenario, where these departments exist because they have always existed, and defending the status quo is almost the defining action of modern Universities. What do modern language departments do that is really future proof? If my daughter, in 2022, says she want to do a University degree in Hindi, what should I tell her?

[Postscript - There is, I think, useful elaboration in the comments. If you have read this and are now angry, do please read on. If you have read this and are not angry, you really must read on to catch the counterarguments.]

Plagiarism in the 21st century

2011-02-25T14:28:00.000Z

There has been much hand wringing on the web lately over plagiarism. Today, Silicon Republic highlights the story of two young entrepreneurs who have brought the Write my Assignments business model to Ireland. Yesterday, we hear of a German Minister who may have plagiarised chunks of his PhD, and allegations of plagiarism levelled at Saif Gadaffhi's LSE Thesis ('The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions" - I kid you not), and last year the Chronicle featured a tell all piece by a paper writer for hire ("The Shadow Scholar")

This business model is one of the web's many surprise gifts. It was always possible, but only the internet provides the speed to quickly locate someone who will, for the right price, put together your assignment for you. Tools like TurnItIn cannot beat the model when the work is original. They cannot know who wrote it.

Some say we should respond by teaching ethics, as if ethics is something that could be taught in a university lecture to 19 year olds. This is fantasy. The fact is now, that like it or not, services like this are always a click away, and when students have the right combination of stress and money, they will be used. A rich, lazy kid might use them all the time. A hardworking one, fighting for a grade and on the edge of breakdown, might use one once, in a dark and guilty hour. By the time my daughter goes to college, I expect there will be software capable of writing the papers at negligible cost - the sons of Watson. Hand wringing over ethics cannot close the door technology has opened. We must deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

The underlying issue is a broken assessment design. Handing out essays and paper assignments was always a fairly cheap way to do assessment. You can come up with an essay title and scratch out quick rubric on your way to the lecture, and your students will never know. Essays are a pain to mark, but it can be done in relative peace later, or outsourced to a hungry Postdoc. But assessment, I am told, comes from a latin root which means 'To sit beside'. To sit beside a student, and develop a good understanding of their knowledge, strengths and weaknesses is a difficult and time consuming thing, impossible in large classes. You can grade an essay without even knowing their name - indeed, for highest stakes, you are supposed to.

Perhaps students getting others to write their papers is ok? Managing outsourcing is an increasingly important skill. Knowing what to outsource and to whom isn't always easy, nor is judging the quality of the work unless you know the domain.

You can probably still get away with the assignment model for low stakes, formative assessment.If your students are dumb enough to pay someone else to write a low stakes formative assessment paper for them, really, a University Education isn't their calling. You'll catch them at exam time.

Ironically, in this electronic age, conventional proctored exam models remain immune to plagiarism, and have much to recommend them. Even if open book, or open web, they will still test the capacity of a student to assemble an original coherent written argument without assistance.

But there are plenty of alternative models. Making students do a presentation instead of an essay is more likely to trip up people without original work, especially if there is time for Q and A. You can require the other students to submit their assessments of the presentation and grade those too - a good opportunity to help students learn to examine the work of others critically.

Team projects are also a good one. The effect of external support is diluted, and likely to be easier to detect (no conspiracy is stable beyond one member) and larger, more complex projects are harder to outsource, especially if evidence of process (weekly team meeting reports, etc.) must be produced.

But at a deeper level, maybe the form of the output is the problem? Why should our credentialling system focus so heavily on measuring a students ability to write something? Should it not rest on their ability to do something, create something or even achieve something?

What is Watson? Strong AI and Higher Education

2011-02-22T12:09:00.000Z

Watson, for those of you who have spend the last week under a rock, is an IBM computer which soundly trounced two long standing human champions in the US quiz show Jeopardy last week. The Watson story is a good hook for me to jump out of mundane Higher Education policy and get back to some bright splangly futurism!

Watson is one of the newest incarnations of a weak AI - an artificial intelligence with limited scope and capacity, below human levels. These are increasingly abundant things. They beat us at chess, decide on our creditworthiness, keep our cars going, or even drive them for us, trade on stock markets and so on. A great many human jobs only needed 'Weak AI' levels of function anyway, and they have simply vanished, or were never created. Our world economy runs on a vast network of invisible switchboard operators, filing clerks and so on, invisible in the machines. There would be billions of them, but for the machines.

Strong AI - Artificial intelligence on a human equivalent level is a different matter. Like Moon holidays and Aircars, Science Fiction promised it to us a half a century ago, and it never came. Moon holidays and Aircars were disbarred by economics and physics - they could be made to work, but never at a useful price. But the same forces, economics and physics, that stole these dreams from us brought Moore's Law. This rule of thumb predicts the doubling of the available processing power, at a given price, every 18 months. That makes strong AI inevitable. You can argue when, but not if.

Strong AI will mean the end of Universities as we know them, but perhaps also their rebirth as we dreamed them. To understand why, we need to unpack the economics of first decade or two of a world with strong AI.

One fine day, in our lifetimes, IBM, or HP, or some tech giant unborn, will unveil a strong AI. It will be able to pass a Turing test, and will do so for our entertainment on Oprah, The Late Late show, or wherever. It will hold it's own at Go, write a technically competent Sonnet and then quickly fade from the news cycle. Kurzweil predicts a date of around 2029, others later (there is a famous bet on it). It's development will have cost it's company around US$100 million in today's money, that being about as big a budget as a high risk project can justify and sustain. Most of that cost will have been payroll, the hardware will only be a fraction of that, perhaps US$10m (the Watson hardware will cost you about US$3m).

Let's assume that strong AI is about equivalent to a new graduate. It will have relative strengths and weaknesses compared to us 'meatbags' of course. It can read the manual quickly, but might not be so good at charming potential clients. But it probably won't sleep, take holidays, lunchbreaks, or gossip by the water cooler either, so in terms of raw hours it should be about 10 times as effective as a human. If we take a graduate salary of say, $30,000, and an initial cost for a strong AI hardware at US$10m, it's not economic. But Moores law will halve the cost of that power every 18 months. So in a decade or so, a strong AI is going to be cost competitive with a graduate hire, with a hardware cost of around US$300,000, equivalent to the first year wages of ten graduate hires that do the same work.

There many, many assumptions here. I haven't factored in software licensing (Open Source Strong AI anyone?), recruitment and training costs. I've not considered overheads for the humans or AI's, or AI downtime (will AI's need to spend 8 hours powered off a day sorting out our memories as we do?). Nor have I considered out year salaries beyond year 1. It's all order of magnitude guesses, but with exponential growth in available power, an order of magnitude error makes only 5 years difference. I'm dancing past an enormous debate on whether Moore's Law will hold or not, and taking the probable outcome it that it will. Early in the second decade after you see a strong AI interviewed on the telly, it will be a cheaper alternative to hiring human graduates.

Now, a human graduate takes 4 years to train (on average, assuming a short MSc after a 3 year degree), and another year before that to get college entry exams sorted out. That only leaves five years after graduation to earn back the cost of your University education, if a strong AI exists before you start. Even allowing a few years slack to uptake of AI's, unless you are already in college when you see that strong AI launched on the news, don't bother going. If you planned to do so to help you get a job, it's too late. Even if you get a job, you won't make your degree investment back in time before you are replaced. At best you'll spend a couple of years as a human buddy to an AI, until the HR AI figures out that your presence is no longer reducing the error rate, and you are gone. They'll hire a human to fire you. There's a sensitivity subroutine. They're nice like that.

You can still go to college, but go to have a good time. Study Fine Art, or Ancient Persian. Whatever interests and stimulates you. Do Social Work, or Teaching - people centred jobs will be the last to go. Chase your dreams. Learn to Paint, or dance. Meet people. Make friends. Study comparative literature, and sociology. Forget about Business, or IT, or Law, or any of the bankable professions of the olden days. You can't compete.

Our Universities long and often stormy relationship with practicality will be at an end. No longer will they need to bow before Mammon, and produce MBA's and degrees in Marketing or computational Finance. They will return to our dream of them, playgrounds of the mind, where we pursue knowledge for the joy of it, for it's own sake, and not for profit.

(The end of our day to day involvement in economic life may, of course, present other difficulties, which remain out of scope for this blog).

The Tertiary21 Manifesto for Higher Education

2011-02-14T12:58:00.002Z

If I was a political party, what would my higher education manifesto be? Have spent the last two posts poking at the Hunt Report and the Higher Education Policies of the political parties contesting the upcoming general election, isn't it only fair that I nail my colours to the mast and say what I would do to (for, even) Higher Education when I'm inevitably appointed by mass acclamation as planetary despot-for-life.

I've spent almost four hours working out the detail of my proposals (by my estimate, double the time spent by most of the main parties) I'm entirely open to suggestions for improvements or for odd incentives my framework will create. In a short posting I need to keep it high level - I recognise that every sentence of this probably needs many pages of operational policy to flesh out the details and smooth out the fish hooks.

Autonomy

Firstly, all higher education institutions need to be entirely autonomous, as non profit entities. I don't care what they teach, who they hire, what they charge, whether they grant tenure or not. Off you go. Enjoy yourselves.

Of course there is a catch.

Funding

Funding will be a state supported student loan model, largely following the Browne Framework. I'd love to simply make it free for all, but I haven't got the money. What I will try to do is make it a cheaper system, through other reforms, turning the screws to drive adoption of new, open learning paradigms. Full economic fees for an Arts Degree are €10,000, which is ridiculous. More on tackling that later.

A state run loans system does give me a bunch of handy levers. I can set some courses at zero (or inflation only) interest if we a short on graduates, or even write down loan balances for people who go on to do necessary, but underpaid jobs like teachers and nurses (that is, if actually paying them decently in the first place remains untenable). Loans will be drawn down module by module, and should be straightforward to access, not means tested. Income levels for repayments need to be set so that you are only repaying the debt your education actually helped you earn more than a comparison group that didn't borrow or study.

There are lots of potential fish hooks to be watched for. We'll need some provision in the system to ensure people don't abuse it by failing module after module. Loan levels for some modules will need to be capped if the employment outcomes aren't panning out. There will be an incentive in the system to create expensive, cool sounding modules ('Outdoor Adventure Instructors' say) that will draw students, but not, once the job market is saturated, actually help them all that much professionally. We'll need a way of handling dropouts and partial completions.

Funding for living costs is a genuinely thorny issue. We need to support poor (sorry, economically disadvantaged) people who actually get as far as third level and want to study full time. At the same time, we want to discourage people from becoming eternal full time students, living on loans they will never repay. While cheap loans for tuition go to what is, for now, a small controllable group of Higher Education Institutions which were already state funded, cheap loans for living expenses get spent and go straight into the economy - it's potentially very expensive, and much more macroeconomically active. There's no easy one paragraph answer to this issue. It's going to take some very delicate policy work to find a good solution. We can figure it out, but not over a weekend, and not in a mid length blog post.

I can also set conditions which must be met for a given module to be eligible for loans. You're not going to like them one bit.

Openness

To be eligible for loan funding, all of a modules material - course outlines, lecture content, slides, handouts, booklists, marking rubrics, sample papers, marking rubrics, teaching plans, who will teach it (and their qualifications for doing do) - must be open access, available online under a creative commons licence, ideally free for non commercial reuse (ie the other non profit HEIs can nick it). Course will change from run to run, so planned future variances must go up there too.

If you are not familiar with the ideas of open education, there are a couple of recent pieces in the Irish Times and the Times Higher Ed, or you could read DIY U, or take a look at people like David Wiley , a leading US advocate.

Here are a few rationales for Open Education at Third level in Ireland:

Taxpayers have paid for the material, and are entitled to see it. Virtually every piece of higher education teaching content in the state was developed with taxpayers money. You are entitled to access it. Public money should not be used to create private assets.
People not attending the course can benefit from open education materials. You might not be able to pay to sit the module, but you might still learn a bit by reviewing at the material online. The feedstock of a knowledge economy is knowledge, and the cheaper and more abundant it is to access, the better for everyone.
It shifts the value proposition of a module away from a content driven, transmission model, and on to genuine teaching and assessment. You can't really charge a four figure sum for a lecture based module where the lecturer interaction is limited to a Postgrad marking an essay or two. Either the costs must drop, or the institution must deliver real worthwhile teacher interaction and assessment, or provide access to specific equipment or facilities that justifies the cost.
By placing such a mass of courses online, it establishes Ireland as a central node on the global landscape of higher education. Freely available higher education online will speak with an Irish accent. If you liked the TCD course on Genetics online, why not come on over and do the degree in it here? If you like those Tyndall Institute nanotechnology modules, maybe you should take to them about doing some R&D for you company.
The Open access requirement will discourage for profit providers. They will be less willing to enter the market if they have to give away the goods. I'm uneasy about government backed loans supporting for profit higher education institutions, as it hasn't worked out well in the US or elsewhere. This will give them some pause.

Making the content available for free will reduce the inventive for new module development, so we may need to put a funding mechanism in place to provide seed capital for creating new material. I'm conscious also that dumping a weak module online simply creates a weak online module, and there is a long road from there to full, true open education, but the first step on the road is as important as the last. The material can be improved upon over time, and having it in the public domain will create a strong incentive to do so. If it isn't good enough to show in public, how can it be good enough to teach in private? If we believe higher education is a public good, then it must be public. But it must also be good

Quality
A fair proportion of the material put online will, of course, be rubbish. But at least we can all see that now. An open rating and reviewing system, both for the module material, and the lecturers and course delivery, will fairly rapidly sort the wheat from the chaff. Outstanding material and teachers, of which we have many, will rise to the top.
For qualities sake, I would also add a requirement that the module materials get a peer review every few years, which will be published too in the same place online. This means potential students can balance their own opinion of the materials, with scholarly and module graduate perspectives before making their decision to use that module. The peer review can also ensure the modules dependencies (prerequisite or follow modules) are appropriate. Weak modules will wither in the sunlight, and good ones will blossom.
With this model, I can ensure reasonable course quality with relatively little bureaucracy, and empower people to make up their own minds on whether a module is worth doing or not.

We will, alas, need some bureaucratic oversight, targeting audits on modules that are unusually expensive, or have unusually high (or low) completion rates or uptakes, or are getting strange reviews.

Have you noticed there is nothing in this framework so far to stop an individual, or any organisation, designing a course, having it peer reviewed and accredited, putting it ip, running it for free for a cycle to get open reviews, and being eligible for state loan support? Well done. Keep it to yourself.

Deep Modularisation
Underpinning the points of Openness and Quality is an ideal of Deep Modularisation - the Bologna Process taken to it's logical extreme. The Module is now the critical unit, not the degree. Education, and credentialling, can be acquired in module by module chunks, as needed, from any institution, not just in degree sized chunks at the start of a career, when you don't know what you'll need to know. It makes lifelong, distance and part time education the logical central paradigm, and the idea of full time degrees a less logical one. These kinds of changes take a generation to work their way into the mindset, but if we change the framework in which we imagine higher education, that mindset change will come in time.

Deep modulatisation also opens the potential for a module to be more than simply a classroom led learning event. Many of the best learning experiences for students are outside classrooms (In my degree, I learned the most useful things on Fieldwork) and we can open that out further, recognising prior learning and other, non classroom structured learning experiences within the module framework. Could we, for example, use a loan funded module to support an international relations student to work for an NGO like Concern for a bit? I'd certainly like to hear a case made for it. Let's get creative - if it's good, real learning, I'll back it.

Universities will complain to me that this will shift people from accessing full degrees into accessing learning piecemeal. I will understand this is 'people will no longer buy our big expensive things and want smaller, cheaper things instead' which is exactly what I have in mind. I've been rattling on about how the quantum of learning is changing to smaller, more agile units. Deep modularisation recognises this reality.

Access
Modules, of course, can still be stacked up into degrees, just like now, and modules will have prerequisite modules. No point in taking Quantum Mechanics 201 unless you have nailed a bunch of mathematics modules first. But tracing the web of modules down, there is a logical first module, for a 'prime learner, unlearned' which would have no formal prerequisites, and, as an entry level module, it should be possible to complete entirely by distance, just turning up in person for an exam (remote proctoring is, and will remain, technically dicey). So, in time, by picking off the bottom rung prerequisites online first, you can access higher education without bothering with the Leaving Certificate rat race, broadly seen as destructive of minds and (perhaps) lives, at all.

Governance
This should be straightforward. We need three main bits:
A body to administer the student loan and funding systems, it's all straightforward stuff. In New Zealand, the Social Welfare system looked after that, it's just a bookeeping and payments/repayments management exercise. A couple of years ago, I'd just have tendered this job out to a bank or two to manage. Now, maybe not, but I'm not paying for a whole new agency from scratch for it, not with your taxes.
We'll need a good policy shop to get all over labour markets and outcomes and understand which modules we need to set at zero interest or incentivised in some way, and which we don't need to worry so much about where that sits in government doesn't matter (and, indeed, we can encourage independant research on the matter) once it's good.
Then we need a quality management agency. Their role is to make sure the modules are good, and deliver the learning outcomes they are supposed to, and manage module development grants and so on. They'll also need a rather bloody minded team of cost assessors, who can audit modules and make sure the list price bears some reasonable relation to the cost of delivering them.

Philanthropy and Endowments
I'd like to give Higher Education institution's a little bit of autonomy. After all, if they rely almost completely on loan funding, they haven't really got any independence, even though it is largely students who will control who gets the money. Independence is economic or illusory. Since their administrators will spend most of the next 15 years crying over these reforms we should throw them a bone.
We'll need to make sure that the tax incentives are strong for donations to long term institutional endowments, rather than buildings or isolated, piecemeal scholarships. I'd love to set up our existing Higher Education Institution's with a nest egg, like the US Land Grant system, but I don't have any land. Perhaps there might be something else, a little slot of RF spectrum perhaps, that we could transfer to them on a 100 year lease to give them the potential for revenue. It might be something that seems valueless to us today, as a publicly held good, but having title to it would create an incentive for them to find a valuable use for it. I'm open to ideas. This is a long term strategy, all the more reason to start right away.

That, in a nutshell, is it. An open, actively managed education system supported by government backed student loans. There are, of course, heaps of operational policy issues to address is detail, and whole areas like research and innovation policy, and international education, that I have left off for brevity, as as they sit outside a core educational scope, but I'll happily work out those details for you if needed.

I advocate the system for two reasons:

Firstly, most obviously, I believe it's substantially better than current arrangements. Some of the changes are fundamental, but, like many systems, the state of higher education is strongly dependant on it's history, and it has evolved itself into a dead end, with too much junk DNA from it's 1000 year history. Only an aggressive reform can set it free, and get it moving onwards and updards again. There is much good in our higher education institutions, and we can help set that good free.

Secondly, I think these changes are going to happen anyway. Global higher education systems will look like what I've described by about 2030. Ireland can lead the change, get in ahead, and put our higher education at the head of the global pack, or we can follow, and fall further behind. Leadership carries risks, and demands courage and audacity, but will bring great rewards for our children, and ourselves.

What do you think?

Election 2011: Reviewing the Party Higher Education Policies

2011-02-11T21:54:00.006Z

This is the second long post in a series of three on Irish Higher Education Policy and the forthcoming election.

Ireland faces a General Election on February 25th. Higher Education policy isn't going to be a decisive issue in this election, but since it's our beat, I'm going to take a posting to briefly review the main parties policies on the topic and give my take on whether or not they make any kind of sense at all, in terms of helping Irish Higher Education meet it's future in some coherent way. Other bloggers will no doubt weigh in on the topic shortly ( Von Prondzynski has already begun his series on it) but the more the merrier. I'm going to work off whatever formal policy documents are on their website, rather than trying to slog through recent media stuff. If I have missed anything significant, do please let me know, and I'll happily amend.

Fine Gael:
Their position is likely to be government policy in two weeks, so their policies merit the closest scrutiny. They have a 32 page paper ("The Third Way") from March 2009, and a 20 pager on International Education, so they've at least thought about the issues in some depth.

They note upfront that "The challenges facing the third level sector include, but are not only about funding" which is a smart start, since so much of the thinking has been all about the money. That said, when you get into details, there isn't all that much daylight between them and the Hunt Report, except with regards to the money. They talk of moving the sector away from sole reliance on state support, which is funny, because when they got were in government last time they got rid of fees and created that reliance.

Their funding reform proposals centre on a graduate tax. The pros and cons of this have been talked over heavily online since Vince Cable floated it as an option in the UK last summer, so I'll not reprise them. It's not the worst model on the table, but I don't think it will work. Graduates already pay more tax on higher earnings, and if their earnings aren't higher, why should they pay for having been sold a pup. A Graduate tax will further encourage our best graduates to go overseas. I know we could, in theory, hit them for taxes while abroad, but it's quite impractical to do so in reality. Of course, depending on the details of the implementation, the functional differences between a graduate tax and the loan funded model can become merely semantic.

FG also mention philanthropy as a funding source. While noting that it's not a great time for philanthropy, they argue that tax barriers to it need to be sorted out, and that higher education institutions should be encouraged to make best use of philanthropic donations. That seems reasonable, and encouraging the development of endowments along the US model is a smart strategy, for the very long haul. Pity we don't have any land to grant as a basis for an endowment, as was done in the US. I wonder if we have any decent RF spectrum we could give them instead, or have we auctioned it all to cronies?

In a section on 'Meeting National Goals' the speak of the need to make sure new courses map to real employment and labour market opportunities - talk sure to raise squawks from the Arts Faculties of the Nation. They suggest that before any new course is launched, an industry and labour market survey should be carried out. Personally, I like this idea, but I know many academics feel that 'market research' is a dirty, commercial activity, and will cripple any idea that isn't very practical sounding.

Otherwise, there isn't much that is very different from the Hunt Report. As in Hunt, sectoral reforms are proposed to for tidying up the governing bureaucracies. FG propose sector governance fall to a new Technology, Skills, Innovation and Higher Education Department, which sounds like a reasonable grouping, moving Higher Education out of the main Education department, where it is a poor relation. They did something similar in New Zealand when I lived there, forming the Tertiary Education Commission (I worked there on a short contract in it's early days). out of bits of the NZ Ministry of Education and a few other agencies. It seemed to work out ok.

As in Hunt, there is much talk of Accountability. FG talk about a fairly major Audit exercise, both on the financial side from the Comptroller and Auditor General, and on the quality side. It sounds pretty full on, but I take the view that if there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear. If nothing else a nice clean audit might silence the ongoing mutterings in the public domain about academics, workload and waste.

There is some other decent stuff there - they actually mention web based instruction, for a whole paragraph, as a means to increase contact hours. The propose an overarching umbrella University for all the Institutes of Technology, an idea I like better than assembling two or three 'Technological Universities'. I think an Irish National Institute of Technology could approach an internationally meaningful critical mass we are too shy of here. Equality of access and funding for part time students also gets a mention, as does improving Access for the disadvantaged, but that's motherhood and apple pie - who could disagree with it.

The document on international education is also thorough and competent. It merits a review of it's own, but we'll pass on it just now since it's a bit of a side issue, since all parties who have anything to say on it seem to align on "Copy New Zealand"

Overall, FG have turned out solid effort, showing good attention and consideration to the material, although lacking in imagination. A 2.1 Grade from me.

Labour:

Likely to be the junior partner in Government, so their Higher Educational Policy should be important. Now, where is it? A search on 'University' in their policy set turns up one document (on biofuels). There's a dozen bullet points down on Page 14 of their innovation strategy, but it's all about international education. There's a Labour Youth Budget proposal document (Is that official party policy?). There's some stuff on Ruari Quinns Blog about Higher Education, where he ironically enough says the Hunt report 'lacks detail' and 'is vague'.

Finally, I find a page in their main manifesto.

They say they are opposed to the formal reintroduction of fees, but the document is silent on how to resolve the sectors deepening financial problems [Update: They say it is impossible to abolish the student charge. So they are opposed to fees, but say it is impossible to get rid of them. Refreshingly honest of them]. There is a bit of talk about Audits, a word on centralising the administration of grants (sensible, FG says this too) and, strangely, no mention of Accountability, which is the policy buzzword of the year for higher education.

Interestingly, Labour have a whole policy piece on a scholarship plan for students from the BRIC countries - a sort proto Irish Rhodes Scholarship to help develop links with them. It's a nice idea, but they've written more on this one idea than everything else I can find on higher education put together.

Overall, this is a terrible effort from Ireland's third largest political party.

Fail.

Fianna Fail
FF policy will probably shift considerably over the next few years, as in opposition Michael Martin freshens up the lineup and positions. There's not much to go on in the main manifesto, in which the word University appears precisely zero times. There's promise of a Higher Education Labour Market Fund - promising €20m to help the unemployed access higher education, and they say they are committed to funding 156,000 higher education places overall - no talk of how, or how well.
Based on lack of material, I'll have to assume that the Hunt report is their position moving forwards. I reviewed that in detail in the last post, and won't repeat myself. I gave it a 2.1 grade as competent but unimaginative. The funding model mooted is a loan based approach. By proxy that gives Fianna Fail a 2.1 Grade, although with the caveat that Hunt isn't formally their policy, and since they sat on it for six months before releasing it, it might not align well with their thinking. So, a 2.1, but resubmit an original work before election 2015.

The Green Party
Again, as with Labour, no higher education policy document. There's a general 50 step plan for education overall, which is up to step 24 ("Provision of health and nutrition classes for all parents of children starting primary school"). Down at step 13 they talk of fully implementing the McIver report on Further Education (from 2005, not available online). Funding wise they talk about a loan scheme to help full time students with living expenses, and when in government they made much of opposing the reintroduction of third level fees. So no clear ideas on how to fund the sector then, although their first point (of the planned 50) is to fund the education sector adequately, somehow. They also have the points on streamlining students supports and grants and making things easier for part time students, but there isn't anything notably different there to FG.

As with Labour, I'll have to fail it, for lack of substance.

Sinn Fein:
I'll quote their policy in full:
"Education and training to be an entitlement for all made possible by adequate grant-aid and support mechanisms,and the provision of focused access programmes for schools that currently have a low take up of third level places."

38 Words.

Fail.

[Update and correction: Buried in the main manifesto another few dozen words, committing them to free education at all levels, as well as reform of the grants system. It's still too little to scrape a pass from me. I hear reports of an education policy being launched - I will update this post if it contains anything of note.]

So, I'll have to give it to Fine Gael for a competent, if unimaginativeness effort. FF well second place, but only on a technicality - must resubmit an original work. Greens, Labour and Sinn Fein: Fail. Overall, a deeply disappointing body of policy work from our political parties.

Thoughts on The Hunt Report: The National Strategy for Higher Education

2011-02-09T21:51:00.001Z

This is the first of three planned posts concerned with the specifics of Irish Higher Education Policy. Due apologies to my overseas reader.

'Doing nothing is not an option' says the preface of the report. You got that right, at least.

The recently released and widely discussed National Strategy for Higher Education, known in Ireland as the Hunt report, addresses the future of Irish Higher Education for the period to 2030, which places it top dead centre in scope for this blog. Because of a busy January, I believe I'm the last blogger or columnist in the country to read and comment on it, so here I go.

Overall, there is some sensible stuff in there, but the report misses a couple of very fundamental things, largely through excessively conventional thinking. You can't plan to 2030 with conventional thinking. I'd give it a 2.1 grade overall, but barely. If we could deliver everything in this report, we would be a long way down the track, but it should have been much better.

The report cites 5 high level objectives (Page 29) which are alright as far as they go. Ensuring equity of access is one key issue which isn't emphased enough at this level, but overall, the high level objectives are, as is usual with such documents, the subset of things no one could really disagree with. The recommendations are somewhat meatier, and are summarised, section by section on page 17 of the report pdf. I'll spin through them section by section.

Teaching and Learning
Eight solid sensible recommendations here, nothing objectionable, all motherhood and apple pie. There's an emphasis on putting teaching and learning at a parity of esteem with research (Recommendation 3) which is long overdue, and down in Recommendation 8 an aspiration that teaching staff should actually be qualified and able to teach. Sensible things are said about getting the quality assurance systems up to speed, ensuring the system is flexible and open to accommodate part timers, people switching around, crediting prior learning. There is a very strong recognition of the need to open up higher education into an ongoing, lifelong process, fitting around peoples work and lives, rather than as a finite and bounded undergraduate experience. I've written about that before. The report is strong on this, and it needed to be. This section seems to implicitly recognising the need to atomise the system and rebuild around a smaller quantum of learning, which I'm all in favour of. Unfortunately, it's implicit, and perhaps I'm reading too much into that.

What's missing? While they say the system needs to be characterised by flexibility and innovation,but there's no specificity. There's nothing explicit here at recommendations level about open access or open educational resources. Indeed down on page 52, the report cites that 'large group teaching will remain the bedrock of instruction in higher education'. Lecture halls in 2030? Really?While it goes on to concede that podcasting and online discussion will supplement that (to 2030? Could we be a bit more ambitious here?) the focus in the language and thinking is fairly instructor centric, not learner centric.

Research
Four major recommendations here, all seem very sensible, but the most important, and perhaps least probable in the current economy, is actually funding up research to 3% of GDP. I also like the recommendation about improving between the public sector, private sector and Universities. Certainly our Academics would, I believe, significantly benefit from some off campus work experience.

Engagement with Wider Society.
The reports recommends this should occur. Engagement with wider society isn't really something Universities in Ireland do a whole lot of. Society sends a steady flow of first years and money and that's pretty much all the engagement there is. There is the occasional 'Town and Gown' bunfight, which are generally seen as an opportunity to panhandle graduates and grandees.

While the overall idea of increasing higher education's engagement with the wider society is fine and good, this is a bit of a 2.2 grade section. The underling text is very soft on tangibles. One obvious pathway to engagement, via open educational resources on a large scale, is missed out completely. The report reads like they haven't heard of it, which is alarming to me.

Internationalising Higher Education
Again, a very soft section. Basically, the report notes it is happening in a big way, and Irish institutions need to get with the programme. The thrust of the report is of this as an opportunity for Irish Universities to attract overseas students, collaborate and so on. As ever here, it misses the big point. International Universities will, to 2030, increasingly attract the cream of the crop from Ireland, and international players will enter the irish market directly. This is a clear and present danger to the existing institutions in Ireland. There is a real danger of them being sidelined as bigger, global players take the smart and monied students out of the Irish system. Scraping a pass on this section, I'm afraid, for failing to warn us of danger.

System Governance
Again, to my eyes, nothing to see here. It's all fairly straightforward and sensible administrative changes. Some commentators have argued that the tighter management of Universities proposed here is inappropriate. That may be so, but so long as they are solely funded by the state, Universities have no real freedom anyway. Freedom is economic, or illusory. So long as the state is the sole funder, close management is reasonable. The smart thing, would be not to have the state as the sole funder.

Developing a coherant Framework for higher education in Ireland
This is one of the sections that people got slightly excited about. It makes a strong push for amalgamation and consolidation in the sector, especially among the Institutes of Technology. Ireland has too many small tertiary institutions. While I don't think scale is everything (not many students at CalTech or Insead) individual disciplines do need to have a critical mass of staff and students to use equipment effectively, to support enough staff to maintain full expertise and so on. Irish Higher education has in recent years had a centrifugal tendency, where every key marginal constituency felt that it's own University was warranted. This report, and the burst of interest it has triggered in mergers in the sector is for the good. Also good is the commitment to create no new Universities (although the 'Technical Universities' term is ambiguous). The magic title ' University' has too long been a fetish. Remember some of the finest Tertiary institution's in the world are not formal Universities: America's Institutes of Technology and France's Grand Ecoles are the crown jewels of their countries higher education sectors. It is no shame to be an Institute of Technology. I've written on this in more depth last week (On Scale) so I'll not repeat myself further.

Sustainable and equitable funding model
The first recommendation (number 22) talks about reviewing current academic contracts and says 'accountability' a lot. It's contributed much to a local brouhaha about academic freedom and tenure. I'm inclined to come down in favour of accountability and clarity. If academics don't present themselves well to the taxpayers who support them, they can expect this kind of prodding and poking. Those with nothing to hide, have nothing to fear?

Recommendation 24 is perhaps the most important. It proposes a shift to the student loan driven model, as has become the standard in the english speaking world. This is unsurprising, and probably necessary, although it presents well known problems, all of which we will have to rediscover here. With increasing numbers and costs, deferring the costs to future taxpayers and earners if the obvious, if lazy choice.I've commented previously on the UK's Browne Report funding model, and I shan't repeat myself, since we'll wind up with something similar.

Overall, this section faces the reality that you can't simply expect to increase enrollments and improve quality in the same system without lots more money, but it misses completely the idea that the solution isn't necessarily finding more money elsewhere, instead of changing the paradigm. Again, I'll give it a 2.1. It's workmanlike, unimaginative stuff.

Of course, with reports like this, the answer you get depends on who you ask. With that in mind, the composition of the panel is interesting. I don't know any of them in detail, there's a heavy weighting towards Higher Education industry insiders - current university presidents and so forth. These guys will have a strong background and investment in the conventional higher education industry. It's would be a bit like the Pentagon asking McDonnell Douglas and Boing to sit on a think tank about it's future aircraft needs: Big expensive ones. I think a 'self licking lollipop' is the technical term.

There were a couple of IT industry people on the panel too, and while I'm sure they're sharp as tacks, I can't imagine they had much time to think deeply on the issue. Generally, if you want a conventional answer, ask conventional people. The report would look very different if they had put a Stephen Downes, Donald Clark or Steve Wheeler on the panel to present some fresh insight.

Overall, I feel the panel limited the reports thinking. For example, there's a bounding assumptions that the skills we need can only be delivered via conventional higher education. For contrast, consider how much of Isreal's high tech entrepreneurs learned the soft skills critical for entrepreneurship in the IDF, and how many other great success stories of our time didn't get a Higher Education at all. Higher Education isn't the only show in town for shaping can do, innovative, entrepreneurial people. Unless you ask a panel of University Presidents, of course.

There are other annoyances. The report seems to take technology as a static non factor, something students are to be educated in, but not with. Learning technology revolution? No, apparently not this side of 2030, according to these guys. It's still your grandfather's University. Similarly, no talk of reorganising our crazy system of entry to Higher Education, although to be fair, it was probably (but incorrectly) set out of scope.

My final vote - it's a great effort, full of good strategy to see Ireland through the 1970's and 1980's and, once fully implemented it will leave the sector well placed to take advantage of the 21st century.

I know everyone wonders why they sat on the report for half a year - but actually, they didn't. Closer to 35 years, judging by the content. Good effort fellas. Better luck in the repeats, eh?

On Scale: Rightsizing Universities

2011-02-05T22:32:00.001Z

What is the right size for a University? Why are they the size they are? What drives them to grow or shrink?

The question comes to mind from the recommendation in the recently released Irish National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030 (known on this isle as 'The Hunt Report'). The report recommends clustering, collaboration, consolidation and amalgamation of existing institutions to produce institutions of 'appropriate scale', and has accelerated a wave of merger talks between higher education institution's in Ireland.

My immediate reaction to this was very positive. Bigger is better, isn't it? Ireland, like many places, has had tendency for higher education institutions to spawn in every key marginal constituency. Some of our institutes of technology are tiny, and many of our Universities have departments with teaching staff in low single digits.

There are heaps reasons why bigger is better. Physical equipment, labs and so on, can be more fully utilised as students traipse through them in shifts, instead of expensive equipment sitting idle most days. More staff in a department, means you can afford to have real experts in each area, instead of people filling in to teach courses on topic where they might lack deep knowledge or real world experience. More postgraduates means more ambitious research projects can be undertaken. Few advances in the sciences are made by lone geniuses anymore, and even in the humanities, the intellectual spark between peers and rivals over morning coffee sharpens thinking and insight.

More cynically, a bigger institution has a bigger budget, which give more status to it's leaders. Double the student body and a lone administrator may appoint a minion or two, and become a manager. A Head of Department, her budget doubled, can afford an obsequious postdoc to do some of that tedious teaching stuff, freeing her to attend Important Meetings.

For students, a modern university is expected to have chess clubs, track teams, debating societies and so forth to provide students with a full breadth of potential experiences. The study body should be diverse, so that students can meet all manner of people and form the social networks they will draw on through their careers - people they will get drunk with, marry, and work for. You can't have those things with 100 students.

All that said, the size of the quantum of learning is, I think, the key, usually overlooked, driver. A Multi year degree is a big product, constructed of thousands of hours of teaching in a variety of disciplines. A fully gunned up University is expected to provide this product across a range if fields, from Classics to Nanotechnology. Think of them like a car manufacturer, or, better yet, an industrial combine like Siemens or Samsung. These combines make complex things, like Trains and Nuclear Power Stations, and they make a large variety of them, often with relatively few overlapping components. They have to be big to do that.

But as I've written before, the quantum of learning is changing. As we move into a modular world, with people picking up the learning they need piecemeal, as they go along, big institutions are having to learn to take their Trains and Nuclear Power stations apart to teach people who don't have time to spend four years hanging around campus, or who don't need a complete degree, at least not yet. They would be better to cherrypick modules, or at most certificate sized qualifications, from different places as their careers evolve. The size of the product is smaller, and perhaps so too should the institution delivering it.

Much of the 'economy of scale' argument, when examined in this light, falls down. The economies of scale are not at Institution level, but at departmental or, at most, school or faculty level. Whether we need two or twenty Universities in Ireland is perhaps beside the point - we only need one School of Classics.Why, for example, does Ireland need multiple French Departments. Could we not simply have one Institute of French, and attend there if our personal learning plan dictates a need for it, and, indeed, if physical presence is required (and, why indeed, should we not simply go to France and get it all from the horses mouth, but that's an argument for another day).

Many of the best respected higher education institution's in the world are specialists. Think of CalTech and MIT, Insead and the LSE. They forego a broad platform and large student numbers but still harvest economies of scale by being essentially an independent Uber Faculty of Science, Business or whatever. Many of these, granted, are postgraduate only institutions, and require a more general undergraduate degree for entry.

For another of you in Ireland may have enjoyed a visit to Corks Old English Market. It's an indoor market, full of specialist stalls of all kinds, which provide, at a competitive price, a range of foodstuffs of higher quality and variety than Tesco fare. You have to poke around a bit, and they don't deliver or take online orders, to be sure, but it's an overall richer, fuller experience. The traders benefit from a shared indoor space and a network effect from physical proximity, but operate as entirely independent businesses.

What I'm getting at here is that I think the issue of scale in Higher education institutions will be much less important in the 21st century than 20th century thinking might lead one to believe. I think the future is for a more network centric, less hierarchical institutions, where an education is assembled from a variety of ingredients, from a spectrum of smaller, more specialised providers and put together as needed, rather than coming in one large ready made packing from a conglomerate style University. These free standing entities will operate to a common standard of modularisation and accreditation, much as traders in a Farmers Market all use standard currencies, weights and measures. They will leverage network effects where it makes sense to do so, but they will stand alone, as specialists with deep expertise in their niche, not elements of a general, catch all college, trying to be all things to all people, a supermarket University in a boutique age.

Nigella Lawson: Electric Hyperteacher

2011-01-04T23:25:00.000Z

Printing, McLuhan tells us, created Authors. Gutenberg's invention, by lowering the marginal cost of reproducing books changed them fundamentally. It became possible to write a bestseller, like "A Tale of Two Lovers' (a racy proto-romp printed in 1467 whose author went on to become Pope Pius II). and later, more serious writers like Desiderius Erasmus, who could actually make a living as a semi independent intellectual, respected in his own lifetime.

If printing created authors, what has the internet created? To see it clearly, we really need to step back from the Internet as one piece of the puzzle and think of the bigger picture, including all of what McLuhan would call 'The Electric Media' - Radio, TV, The Paperback and the Magazine.

We usually call them 'Historian/Chef/Economist, author and broadcaster' - whatever their discipline is, with Author and Broadcaster tacked on. It's a clumsy name which implies that they do something we don't really have a name for yet. - I'll call them the Electric Hyperteachers, until a better neologism comes to mind. These are not conventional educators gunned up with new tools. Why should they be - first authors weren't book copyists. Appropriately, Marshall McLuhan himself was one of the first of this breed, appearing on the relatively new TV medium, although not, perhaps, selling as well as Simon Schama or Alain de Botton. They are now abundant, from economists like David McWilliams here in Ireland, to highly visible academics like Niall Ferguson or Stephen Hawking. It is the chefs, however, who lead the way and show us total mastery of the discipline, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and their kindred.

They educate by combined arms warfare - Blitzkrieg for learning. They use all available media, in a tightly integrated way, to put their message across. First, air assault, ten episodes in a good slot on the Autumn TV lineup. Then ground war - massed hardbacks surging out of the bookshops, every December. Book tours and syndicated columns bring the message to key target zones, iPhone apps provide mobile hitting power, and twitter allows them to get right on the front line, clearing out the misconceptions, tweet by tweet, room by room, mind by mind.

We can dismiss them as trivial, but in Gutenberg's time they said that about anything that wasn't theology.
We can dismiss them as mere entertainers, but being entertaining is just a psychological hack to keep our attention and get the knowledge past our ramparts of apathy.
We can dismiss them as shallow, but those that are reach wide, and open the way for others.
We can dismiss them for being unable to engage with students, as we go off to lecture to classes of hundreds.

These creatures can cross the research barrier too - and I don't just mean Heston Blumenthals culinary labs. Time Team, the British Archaeology show, not content with teaching my five year old more Saxon history than I ever wish to know, claims to have published more academic papers than all the Archaeology Departments in the UK combined.

These are new beasts, and they are genuinely new, but they can't do everything a Teacher does. Not yet. Three things are missing, that I can see, Assessment (formative or otherwise), Peer to Peer learning, and Accreditation.

Nigella Lawson, sadly, does not come to my kitchen to assess my roast potatoes, but she is on Twitter. I can see on Facebook which of my friends likes Jamie Oliver, I could, if I wished, organise a cook off among them, and tweet him to tell him how it went. The new forces of social media provide both the possibility (perhaps, the illusion) of engagement with the teacher, and a relatively easy avenue to find and interact with others interested in the same topic. It enables unstructured peer to peer learning and assessment. In practice, at any scale beyond the smallest of seminars, conventional assessment by the teacher doesn't scale, as anyone who has ever marked exams papers knows to their aching bones.

As for accreditation, I cannot, for now, earn any module credit from any culinary institution for competently turning out one of Nigella's Feasts (even if I could), but how long until one of them snaps a TV series / Book package into a franchised local cookery course model, and if there was a paying interest, gives the attendees a certificate on completion? You may consider cooking trivial, but the model is easily applicable to any discipline, if an audience and a profit can be found for it.

Over the last half century, the profusion of new broadcast media created new gurus of transmission model education - mainly Chef's but Economists, Historians and Scientists too. The addition of social media might well give them to toolkits to step past that and become Educators in a much richer, truer sense. They will not be like the ones we have known before, no more than David Starkey is like Herodotus.

They are, of course, mainly in it for the money. The new media, for the first time, allows creates the possibility for educators to actually make large amounts of money. It's almost a thousand years since Peter Abelard taught from 'pecunie et laudis cupiditas' - Greed and Ambition, and now it seems that, if you have the knack, that might not be such a fanciful ambition after all, for the few.

And it will be for the few. A century ago, people could make a living as an opera singer. Not a great living, but a living. If you wanted to hear Opera, you had to get in a room with an Opera singer, and pay them. There were lots of them, and they made a living. Them came the Victor Talking Machine Company, Caruso and McCormack. Now Carreras and Ntrebco fly privately, and everyone else in the business takes the bus. The new media creates a long tail, to be sure, but it also creates a high peak - books created Bestsellers, and records created Rock stars. What will full contact transmission and social media do to our educators?

Interesting times.

-

What mattered in 2010

2010-12-31T16:09:00.002Z

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" William Gibson famously remarked. And in 2010, it did feel that the future crept a little bit closer. In the spirit of the season, it's worth reflecting on what was significant in the longer term in 2010.

I believe I was the only blogger in the Milky Way who didn't write about iPads this year. I do think in the long run the tablet wave is indeed significant. It creates casual, mobile access to the web without the screen size problems of mobiles and smartphones, and the 'open the lid and lean forward' requirement of a laptop. That is really important, especially when combined with the continuing spread of good fast mobile networks. Tablets make knowledge properly mobile at a reasonable price point, and I think that's a significant step ahead. Progess like that, while it seems incremental, brings us closer to the next phase change in our behaviour and relationship with knowledge. Next step in the stairs is gesture controlled wearables, but probably not mainstream until late in the decade when the Tablets market is saturated and commoditised.

The Browne report, and the rapid implementation of it's financial changes was also a big story this year, with substantial local effect in the UK. It basically shifts the UK from having the current taxpayers paying for Higher Education to having future taxpayers and workers pay for it via loan repayments (and bailing out loan vehicles with tax money when they go sour). Some countries have had this model for years with loan schemes of one sort of another, with mixed results (thinking of the US and New Zealand). I suspect the UK move might finally put that model over the top as the global standard.

Also in the UK, Pearson announced they were moving to offer degree level qualifications. My perception of Pearson is as a very mature, serious operation. From Ladybird books to The Economist, they produce good stuff. I'd certainly take a qualification from them seriously. The move represents, I think, a maturing of the for Profit HE sector. Meanwhile Kaplan, probably the most famous trailblazer in for-profit HE, seem to be having difficulties with a number of business ethics related legal cases. Early entrants to new frontiers do often tend to have, shall we say, flexible ethics, but in time the frontier grows up, a sheriff arrives and things settle down to business as usual. I think we're seeing this here.

Meanwhile, while the first world, and particularly Ireland where I write, wallows in economic mud, India and China, and the world overall continues to grow richer. In 2011 I'll really need to learn more about higher education works in these places, as it's there the future will be defined. By sheer weight of numbers as their middle classes pour into HE, how it's done in Chonqing and Calcutta becomes the world standard, perhaps wearing the European University model as a skin, if at all.

Predictions for 2011? Off the top of my head:

Cheap, ubiquitous tablets become a commodity and overtake the laptop as the standard information device
Building tempo of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies (or similar) in the UK higher education space as the sector shakes out the implications of the changes.
Universities in India, China etc continue to fight their way up the rankings and grow.

But I don't really do short term predictions...

Book Review: The Gutenberg Galaxy

2010-12-29T11:38:00.000Z

I've heard a lot about Marshall McLuhan over the years, most recently in an excellent article by Megan Garber at the Nieman Journalism Lab, so when I passed him in the library, I thought the time had come.

The basic idea of the book is that printing didn't simply alter the economics of book production, it actually altered how we think. Prior to printing, we lived in an oral culture. Ideas came in through our ears and out our mouths. Teaching methods were (it is thought) centred around discussion, dialectic and the scholastic method - very open and verbal.

After printing, the book length argument became the quantum unit of knowledge. Ideas now came in our eyeballs, and out of our hands. We became a visual culture. With that, we lost something. You can't argue with a book, except maybe by writing another one. The book becomes an eternal Authority. It establishes a monopoly, and the idea that any idea not in a book form is somehow trivial.

The implications for the development of higher education are interesting. With the book comes the text book, and the idea that one course maps to one (or a small group of) text books which the course aims to help students understand. The book and the course became symbiotic, containerised learning blocks.

McLuhan's book also raises the idea (in 1962!) that what he called 'The Electric Age' was undoing this transformation, and putting a closing bracketed on a 500 year period of book centric history - 'The Gutenberg Parenthesis". McLuhan saw that the media of the day was moving people back from a print and book centric culture to an oral culture. We've seen it accelerate since, from the radio talk shows on to the internet, bloggers and twitter, as the quantum of knowledge gets smaller again. Later ideas like Connectivism make the case that the knowledge doesn't really sit in a fixed, static object like a book any more, but resides in a network of connected people and resources. We've moved from an audio/oral culture with a small quantum of knowledge, to a visual/text culture with a large quantum of knowledge, and now back or onwards to a multimedia (visual and oral) mode of culture where the quantum of knowledge is small again. The Megan Garber article I linked to above demonstrates it nicely, putting short text, a piece of video and hyperlinks in one easy to digest quantum of learning. The medium is the message, as McLuhan says.

The implications for the future (and present) of higher education are substantial. The quantum of learning shrinks back down again from a book sized argument to 500 word blog post, a 6'40 second Pecha Kucha presentation or even a 140 character tweet. The quantisation of knowledge into Bologna Standard modules stops making sense again just when it has been formalised. The Gutenberg age is over, knowledge is now sized for Fedex Box, or a postcard, not a Shipping Container.

In terms of style, I was surprised to find McLuhan is a pain to read. The book opens with a lengthy discussion of King Lear as a metaphor for something or other. It all sounds clever, but like King Lear, I have three daughters. Being thus driven mad already, I didn't follow it. Perhaps on a second reading it would become clear, but there are 100 million books, and life is short. No second chances. His prose assumes an easy familiarity with folk like Kant and Heidigger which will put a some of the book out of reach for many. Some writers bring the reader along on a journey and make them feel clever. McLuhan just makes me feel dumb. And yet, when I approach a point of giving up the book for a bad job he trots out a line like "As the book market expands, the division between intellect and commerce ends". As clever, thought provoking and quotable a sentence as any I've read. That's a whole book right there in twelve worlds. It's a shame about all the other ones. It's telling that his insightful ideas on how printing created authors didn't mention how it created editors too.

Would I recommend it? If you're a humanities wonk who eats Kant and Derrida for breakfast, knock yourself out. Please. Otherwise no. He has great ideas but save yourself the time and just read the Cliff notes.

Book Review: A University for the 21st Century

2010-12-12T21:59:00.000Z

"A University for the 21st Century" is a thoughtful and thorough book, detailed and well considered, although it let's itself down by making a fascinating topic seem somewhat dull.

I had high hopes for this book. The author, was President of the University of Michigan for 12 years, and has clearly thought and researched deeply on the subject.

In terms of content, the book did not disappoint. While focused very much on the top end research University, Duderstadt had a clear grasp of the big issues. Even technological trends which had not yet taken form when he wrote (like Personal Learning Environments and the importance of online social networks) he seems to have been able to smell coming in the wind. His writing is detailed and thorough - the author is an Engineer by training, and it shows. The work feels like a textbook. The issues are dissected with considerable clarity - his chapter on resources and funding is a particularly clear primer on this currently hot topic.

I found the picture he presented of a high end US university interesting. From a European perspective it's easy to miss the fact that many US institutions own and operate substantial teaching hospitals, which are often themselves as large as the University itself, and are very significant health care providers. On the other side, they also operate football and basketball teams which attach huge followings and media attention. For Irish readers, imagine if University College Cork (my local) owned and operated the Cork University Hospital (currently, the connection is nominal, the hospital is state run despite the name) while also managing the Cork Senior Hurling and Football teams. The diversity and complexity of the task is daunting.

For a book written a decade ago, it's aged well. Even the technology chapter, which you might expect to be weak given the time it was written, clearly maps the same kinds of longer term trends I've written about here. Other trends, like the idea of Open Content, he certainly grasped as a general implication of the internet, even if he did not predict them in any detail (who could).

Duderstadt, alas let's himself down in the writing. Perhaps my limited attention span has simply atrophied beyond use, but the book to me reads too much like a textbook. In his forward, the author expressed the hope that the book would interest a mass audience. It will not. There are fairly well established ways of making non fiction compelling and accessible (use of narrative, personal anecdote and so forth), and Duderstadt employs none of them. Something about his writing gave me a compelling urge to get up and make tea a paragraph in. There is never a good reason to start a paragraph with 'Furthermore', as he often does. It's a pity, as it made it harder work than it needed to be, and will have greatly narrowed his readership and influence.

If your library has it, I'd recommend taking a look at it, but it will be a book to lean forward and study with coffee, rather than lean back to read with a Christmas drink. If your interest is casual, you might skip it, but if you are involved in the management of higher education at any level, the book is mandatory and will repay careful study.

The Four Big Trends: Pecha Kucha Presentation

2010-12-07T11:54:00.002Z

Here's a presentation I did at the Cork Pecha Kucha event on the four big trends in Higher Education in the 21st Century. The content will be familiar to some readers, but you may find it interesting nonetheless.

Pecha Kucha is a really interesting presentation format if you haven't run across it, it's worth trying. 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, slides advance automatically. No time for Ums and Awws, and you have to cut to your main point on the slide right up front or you'll miss it. The speed also forces you to gloss the details and caveats a little. Challenging. If you haven't tried it, do.

My apologies for the lighting on this piece. I do in fact have a face as well as voice, but the presentation is perhaps the better for my appearance as a Mysterious Shadow.

Thanks to Nicki Ffrench-Davis for arranging the event, taping it, putting it online, and making me do it over again when the tape ran out halfway through my first run.

Book Review: Deschooling Society

2010-11-19T16:15:00.001Z

"Classics" wrote Mark Twain, "are something everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read". Judging by the number of copies in the library, I'm obviously the last person with an interest in Education to have read this book, and it is a real classic. As you may have noticed, I make it a rule* never to conceal my ignorance, so I'm going to review it anyway.

As you might gather from the title, the book is highly critical of the modern educational institutions. The opening sections are a strong, and now familiar critique of the educational system as a means of institutionalising society. The criticisms are not so different from those of Ken Robinson, although Illich is intellectually a much heavier hitter, and Ken Robinson has better jokes. Perhaps the criticisms were radical when he wrote the book in 1970, but, alas, not anymore. Illich takes the critique a step further by observing that the current system convinces people that all education must come from a school (or University). This it tend to make people expect that everything must come from a bureacratic institutions - he talks about '"HEW (Health Education Welfare)Pollution". Politically, it's all fairly left wing stuff, but Illich never slides into sloppy polemic. It's all well written and coherently argued, and he is as quick to jab at the Marxists as anyone.

The book really starts to sizzle about halfway, and I note from the markings in the library copy, most readers had given up by then (Highlighter Pen only managed chapter 1, The Underliner left me after chapter 3). Unlike many critics, Illich goes on to propose an alternative model for education, and, for something written in 1970, it's remarkably prescient in terms of where learning is really going in the 21st century.

Illich outlines a system where people connect directly, on a one to one basis, with people who have skills and are willing to teach them. He couldn't foresee the web as an enabling framework, but the system he describes is uncannily close to the Web 2.0 model of education, where deep social networks can easily connect learners into peer groups, or with experts in the field. He talks about the need for shifting education from a funnel based model, where people are given the learning that the institution thinks they need, to a web (his word, in 1970!) where people sought the learning they needed across a network, directly from experts, not necessarily teachers. He talks about giving people access to learning objects, and letting them get on with it, which reminds me of Sugata Mitras experiments enabling children in India to learn with fairly unregulated access to a computer.

The accuracy of his vision is uncanny, and does much to explain his popularity with the connectivist/web 2.0 set. He was a Catholic priest, and such men have been canonised for lesser visions than his.

The book is full of other ideas ahead of their time. Social networks, Government 2.0, appropriate technology and hacker culture are all in there, imagined as they might be without the enabling medium of the internet I feel I aught to read it again very carefully, to see if I can pick out The Next Big Thing.

Style wise, it's not at all heavy going, and at 116 pages it isn't an intimidating read, a couple of bus journeys, you have no excuse. If you don't have time to dig it out of the library, there's even a free eBook (all formats) you can download this very instant from http://www.feedbooks.com/newspaper/6810 and, funnily enough given the book, there's also discussion forum on Wikiversity, which is a example of exactly the kind of learning web he was talking about http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society.

His lefty/anarchist perspective might put some readers off, but if you can put up with my writing, his will present no challenge. If you are interested in a fresh view of education in society, this is an important book.

Read it.

I'll tip my cap to Steve Wheeler at this point, who brought Illich to my attention in a talk he gave to us in UCC in late 2008.

* More of a guideline, to be honest.

Polytechnic Day: Higher Education and Democracy

2010-11-19T11:14:00.000Z

I am slightly off topic here, as this post relates more to Universities role in society, rather than their future per so. I hope you'll forgive these occasional transgressions.

This week (November 17th) marked Polytechnic Day. On this day in 1973 the Greek Military junta moved to put down a student revolt on the campus of the Athens Polytechnic. The bloody events mark the start of a chain of events that eventually brought the military junta down and restored Democracy to Greece.

If you say 'Student' in a word association game, chances are you'll think 'protest' or 'riot'. It's true. As recent fees protests in Ireland and the UK remind us, students are often the first to the barracades in any civil dispute. It's a long and proud legacy, and while I might disagree with them on the issues from time to time, they keep our leaders on their toes and provide a vital warning tone that all is not well. But this is a credit to the young, not to their Universities.

There is an idea doing the rounds that Universities are a vital keystone of democracy. Frankly, I think this is nonsense. We've had universities in Europe for almost a millennium, and it is only in the last century that we've had any substantial number of democracies worthy of the name. Meanwhile, Universities tricked on (admittedly, only barely) in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and all manner of other less remarkable thugocracies. Only in Maoist China and Pol Pot's Kampuchea left nothing standing high enough for Universities and their graduates to cower behind.

Universities are fundamentally conservative organisations. They cannot exist without the approval of the state, which recognises their degrees and allows them to operate. Their graduates are usually professionals who work in the existing system and are invested in it. They have no interest in change, and often find themselves first against the wall when the revolution comes, as symbols of the old order. In their time, Universities have been seen as bastions of Christianity, Upholders of True Communism, Faithful pillars of the Aristocracy, or whatever the prevailing nonsense of the day was. To present them as upholders of Democracy is nonsense, they simply tack to the wind.

That the tides of tertiary education and democracy have risen in tandem in the 20th century is correlation, not causation. Both are tied to a deeper increase in wealth and the rise of the middle classes. It's these middle classes who send their children to University, and can afford to. It's these same middle classes who, once they they have something to lose, withdraw their tacit support for autocractic regimes and press for a transition to democracy and rule of law. Where Universities find an inadvertent role is that they bring the youth of these middle classes together in the cities, where they can meet and organise. Poor democracies, like India, are remarkable exceptions, but it is only now, as it's middle class expands, that more Indians are getting to Higher Education.

It is true that Universities can promote social mobility, but often that is as an ideal, rather than the reality. Recent news reports in Ireland, (neatly summarised by Eoin O'Dell over at cearta.ie) remind us that even here, the land of saints and scholars, that ideal is often unrealised. It is true that universities can provide a refuge for truth in the face of tyranny, but often not for long. The pen is mightier than the sword, but swords make a very convincing and immediate argument for compliance.

Get rid of Lecturers

2010-11-09T12:27:00.000Z

And I don't mean the people. Well, maybe a few (I have a little list, they never will be missed...). It's the title I'm on about.

OK it's a Pet peeve, but why do we have to call them Lecturers? Why should the job title, right there on the contract, on the business card, explicitly specify a pedagogy? It would be like calling Doctors 'Bleeders'.

For Overseas readers, most academic teaching staff in Ireland and the UK are not professors, they are officially known as lecturers. Professor is usually held as a title for heads of Department, or folk of similar gravitas and salary. Academics from Ireland and the UK love the instant virtual promotions they get when they visit America.

You might fairly say, what's in a name, but names are important signals for purpose. If you think your job title doesn't matter, fine. When I become Planetary Emperor, I'll change your job title to Idiot, and see how you like it.

Lecturing is contested pedagogy. Truly great lecturers, even merely good ones, can inspire us. The personal experience can uplift us and affect us in ways that catching it on Youtube can't. It's a monkey brain thing. On the other hand, most lecturers are about two levels worse than they think they are, on a scale of 1 to 3. Their delivery suffers little from being speeded up 40% on playback. They sound like Chipmonks and it's an improvement. The job title implies a one way delivery of content. It's literally old school. Let's dump it.

The title also ignores what most of them really do. What about all that real teaching and mentoring? What about the research. Since many of them spend as much time on bureaucracy and meetings as lecturing, let's call them bureaucrats. It's often as accurate as lecturer.

The US title, Professor, is at least pedagogy neutral. Professing is a largely forgotten verb. Scholar is pretty good too, wrapping up as it does both the ideas of teaching and research, and with a little gravitas (Where I grew up, "You're a Gentleman and a Scholar" was high praise, usually reserved for people who had just bought you a drink). But please no neologisms like "Adjunct Knowledge Development Officer" or "Learning Catalyst".

As a (very) slight aside, if you haven't watched Donald Clark keynote from the Alt-C conference, please do. It's an excellent critique of the lecture as pedagogy, and well worth 40 minutes of your time. The pro-con lectures argument is too big to get into here, and will be settled by empirical evidence in the end. Donald will tell you all about it...

The Armageddon Game: Universities as evolving systems

2010-11-05T12:03:00.000Z

Space Geeks love the movie Armageddon. There's a game they play where you count the technical errors. It's easy and fun. There are, apparently, at least 168.

Critiqing universities is just like that game. It's fun, and easy to play. I've done plenty of it on this blog, and will probably do more. But there are smarter, harder question is why these problems exist. How did Universities come to be the way they are, instead of what they could be?

No one designed Universities. They evolved, and evolution is a slow and imperfect process. 4 billion years, and I'm the best it's come up with. Basic errors get locked into the designs, which is why our retinas are stuck on backwards. Evolution gives us adaptations for situations that no longer exist. That leaves us tonsils, appendixes and monkey brains. Evolution cannot adapt to changes on a timescale faster than several generations of the lifecycle of the organism, which is why we humans are managing a planet with brains evolved for hunting bunnies and gossiping.

The evolutionary analogy is not exact. While joint ventures are increasingly common, universities have not yet been observed to reproduce sexually as conventional lifeforms do. Nor, in modern times, do Universities die nearly often enough for classical evolution to function. They're more like bacteria really. Bacteria, I hear, can pass genetic material between themselves, allowing good mutations, like immunity to antibiotics, to spread quickly. Universities do the same. New ideas, occasionally even good ideas, like Humbolt's Research University meme of the 1800s, get picked up and copied. They spread on the pages of The Times Higher Ed, and down the policy catwalks of the OECD. Existing institutions pick up the new meme and can change their genomes, to a degree.

Core aspects of the University like the lecture evolved in response to a reasonable need at the time. Lectures made lots of sense when books were hand copied and extremely expensive. It was worth reading out the material so students could copy it down. It was a cheap way of duplicating books. The method stopped making sense in about 1500, but by then it was too late. It was physically encoded in the architecture of the campus - buildings full of sloping lecture theatres, which reinforced it's psychological and economic hold. It was also a cheap way of having one expert 'teach' an arbitrarily large class. Whether the class learned anything was their own business. Universities couldn't evolve past the lecture paradigm, no more than cells could evolve past having mitochondria.

There is a debate about the future of education which can be summarised as evolution versus revolution. Can existing institutions change and adapt fast enough over time to meet the changing requirements of society? Or will new institutions step up to fill the gap, by accident or design?

It's always tempting to bet on the incumbant. Universities have impressive pedigree and form. The capital base is massive. They captivate our imaginations. The obvious favourite. But that's how the incumbent systems always looked. The Roman Empire, The Church, The Gold Standard all seemed like they would sit forever at the centre of our lives. But they didn't.

Rapid environmental changes cause mass extinctions. If all the organisms are the same or similar, they are equally vulnerable. What lives the same, dies the same. Survival of life in a changing environment demands diversity. Where all Universities are similar, doing the same kinds of things in the same kinds of ways, they are all vulnerable to the same external shocks, be they technological, financial or social. The Higher Education sector needs to be as diverse a possible to survive. Plus, the wider the variety of institutions, the more likely it is that some will be able to take advantage of those changes, or find new niches to grow.

If I was a University scheming to survive the coming mass extinction, I would nip down to the Environmental Sciences building and collar some ecologists for tips. An obvious one is to become a switching predator. Switching predators eat whatever is handy. They aren't picky. Being a switching predator is a key contributor to the success of humans. We eat cows, roots, seals, fish, roadkill, mushrooms, berries anything. Even other humans, at a pinch. It means that we can stay alive almost anywhere. Most European universities are not switching predators. They eat an exclusive diet of taxpayers money. As we are learning, this is fine on a good year, but when the rains fail, it is simple suicide.

For profit Universities are switching predators. They work their way into new ecosystems and find a way to survive. They can eat grants, loans, direct payments, whatever is going. By dropping many of the expensive old traditions of conventional Universities, they can run a lot leaner, and survive on a lot less than grass fed public universities. They may well turn cannibal, and eat some of the weaker public universities that fall by the wayside. And as they rise red fanged from the carcass, they may well wear the head and hide as a trophy, and a disguise. But make no mistake, a leaner, deadlier creature lies beneath.

A Blog Birthday Joke

2010-11-02T08:10:00.000Z

This Blog is a year old today, so I'm going to step out and tell your a joke.

It's a building site in London. A Corkman arrives looking for work. A Cockney foreman challenges him on his knowledge (accents required, hence use of phonetics).

Foreman: "A'right mate, ya gotta know wot your about 'ere on the site. So 'fore I give you a job, matey, I gotta test ya wiv some questions eh. Ya gotta know ya stuff for a job 'ere."
Corkman: "A'right boy. Fire away."
Foreman: "wos' the difference, see, between a Jois' and a Gutta'"
Corkman: "Ooohh, das easy boy, dat's fearse easy. Goethe wrote Faust, and Joyce wrote Ulysses"

I didn't write this joke, but have no recollection where I heard it. It has a Niall Tobin kind of ring to it, but if anyone knows the source, I'll be pleased to find out and acknowledge it.

The creation of version localised for central Europe I leave as an exercise for the reader.

One Year On

2010-11-02T08:09:00.000Z

This blog is a year old today. Thank you all for reading and passing links on. Particular thanks to those who took the time to comment, most notably those who disagreed with me. Dialogue is a far better learning mechanism than monologue.

I've covered a fair bit of ground over the year, although only a fraction of the topic has been addressed. As I hoped for, the act of writing things down has advanced and clarified my thinking on the subject considerably. It's helped to illuminate how little I know, on one hand, but also built my hunches of a year ago into better supported viewpoints.

A year ago I felt, like many, that some kind of revolution in tertiary education was just around the corner. Now I know it isn't, at least not exactly. In truth, Higher education is about halfway through a century long revolution. The four megatrends I identified early on in this blog aren't things that sit in the future, they are trends that really began in the early to mid 20th century. We are now halfway up an S curve on each of them. The revolution in higher education won't begin in 2010, or 2015. It really began sometime around 1925, and in some places will be complete by 2025. As William Gibson famously remarked, the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed. It will take until 2100 for that new model of higher education, the shape of which is already clear, to become global, by which time higher education will be almost universal almost everywhere.

Humans, of course, have difficulty in observing change on this scale. We are peculiarly blind to it. It doesn't help that the new models of higher education are already here, in disguise. Modularisation, lifelong learning, Open universities, distance learning and recognition of prior learning and so on have steadily crept into the mainstream in the last generation. The OU is the largest University in Europe. The Indira Gandhi Open University in India is the largest on earth. For profit entities like the Apollo group, owners of the University of Phoenix, among others, teach millions of students in the developed and increasingly the developing worlds. All use technology enthusiastically and largely eschew the traditional medieval models of the 'Universities of Place' and the paleo-pedagogy of the lecture. The distance and blended learning models they adapt are leaking back into the conventional university sector, almost imperceptibly dissolving the concept of Universities as being fixed in space and time.

Ironically, the very inefficientcy of old fashioned Universities will preserve the greatest of them. In a world where everyone can access cheap distance based higher education (because distance means nothing), the old fashioned, inefficient model where everyone travels to the same place and time becomes a luxury good. Like an expensive golf club, the very fact that it is expensive and filters for the rich and the clever will sustain it's appeal. While technology will bring affordable mass tertiary education to the world, they will all still yearn for access to the gilded rooms of the Global Ivy League, which will remain, for many, the surest gateway to membership of the global elite.

I have at least 20 years before my lastborn receives her primary degree, so this blog has a long way to run. If you'll permit me a moment of levity in the face of such a road, in my next post, I'm going to tell you a joke...

Why start College at 18?

2010-10-29T14:22:00.002+01:00

There a nice post just up from Seth Godin just up called 'Pushing back on mediocre professors'. He says of students:

I think you have an obligation to say, "Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way..."

What he's missing alas, is that most undergraduates aren't that smart. As Ernie Balls put it in a comment on my post "Pay for outcome, not process" "Most people who attend university do so to get laid" and simply aren't thinking ahead like that. George Hook said the same thing recently, saying that only 20% of students were thinking past graduation day. The debt (or opportunity cost, in countries where fees are state paid) is a problem for some arbitrary future version of them, not a real problem for them today. It's imaginary money. They simply aren't mature enough, or sure enough of themselves at 18 to provide the kind of smart pushback that Seth talks about in his post. The herd instinct is too strong. Everyone else is keeping quiet and taking notes. Let's not rock the boat, I want a good mark.

But there are students who do exactly that - mature students. They are, to the last man or woman, exactly like that. For educators, they are pains in the neck. They understand exactly the sacrifices they must make to get the degree, and exactly what it will cost, and precisely what they want out of it. Why can't we have more of them?

The solution? Let's have no one under 25 in college. Life is long now, in the first world. Why rush out of a schools system and straight into college. Why make kids at 18 make huge decisions about their lives, incur massive set and set their future path for years? It's too young. Some can handle it, most can't, and simply make the best of the choices down the line.

Careers have extended out the other end. None of these kids coming into college today will retire in the sense their parents will until they are 80, if ever. So why not make them spend 5 or 10 years actually doing something in the real world and then, when they actually know what they want to achieve in college, let them return to do that and start their grown up careers? Wouldn't they make smarter choices of degree, and be more likely to be smarter students? And if a bunch of them found that after 5 years in the wilds, they didn't want or need to follow the herd into a college degree just yet, would that be such a bad thing? Because everyone else is doing it isn't a good enough reason.

Book Review: The Great Brain Race

2010-10-27T11:43:00.000+01:00

Ben Wildavsky's book 'The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World' is well worth reading. Wildavsky places international education firmly in the context of globalisation. He makes the case for international education as free trade in minds and ideas and as a key piller of globalisation. In the long run, it's more important and more beneficial than the free movement of goods and money that have been the icons of globalisation so far.

The early chapters, looking at the growth of overseas satellite campusus felt a little weak to me. It's largely a story of elite institutions leveraging their powerful brands to draw in the elites of the developing world. It felt like a tale of the top tenth of a percent, globalised institutions training the next generation of Davos Man, which isn't something that I find all that relevant to the longer term future of the sector as a whole. Counterpointing the western institutions reaching out are new institutions rising in "emerging markets". Some, like Saudi Arabias KAUST, seem like towers of gold build on sand. Others, in India and China, have emerged to be real competitors to the first world institutions they in part emulate.

I found the book really found it's stride in the chapter on for profit tertiary education. Much of what is written about the for profit field is either by conventional academics, who are, on principle against it, or business writers, who are equally for it. It's rare to read a more nuanced view. Wildavsky doesn't shy from the critiques of the industry, quality and so on, but makes a strong argument that for profit higher education is filling a gap for people who cannot otherwise access conventional higher education. This is especially the case in places like Mexico, where the higher education system simply can't accommodate the demand. It's also potentially true anywhere the demand for tertiary education exceeds supply. Any academic in a non profit University who isn't seriously concerned about the growth of for profit tertiary education doesn't grasp it's implications, or perhaps is in a field where they can make the jump when the time comes.

My only gripe with the book is the style. In common with many journalists who go on to write full length book's the story is told with a shock and awe bombardment of quote, statistic and anecdote, rather than by boots on the ground narration. Every opinion seemed to be someone else's, and the the clear narrative of the authors own voice and views was hidden until the end. It seems to be a journalism thing, they are locked into the model of reportage rather than storytelling, painting the picture with little dots of fact rather than the impressionistic brush of a more narrative storyteller or a big thinker like Clay Shirky or Neil Postman. The book feels like a collection of in depth feature articles, rather than a coherent book. Nevertheless, they are good feature articles, so it's more of a personal pet peeve than a deep flaw. While I think it could have been a much better book, it's still well worth reading if you, or your institution is really thinking about dabbling your toes into the world of international education.

If you don't fancy buying the book, there's good video material from the author online at the book website and on the facebook page. There's also audio of his talk at the LSE online and on iTunesU.

The Coyote Effect

2010-10-25T16:42:00.000+01:00

Wile E. Coyote (c) Warner Bros.

When the Coyote makes his mistake and runs over the edge of the cliff, he hangs there for a little bit.
We all know he's going down. He know's he's going down. It just plays it for laughs for a few seconds and gravity takes hold.

Organisations do this too. They run off a cliff, into a place where the rationale that kept them up is gone. They hover their, legs kicking the air for while, sometimes years, until down they go, ACME rocket boosters and all. Sometimes they see it coming and slip in a double take. Sometimes not.

Know any victims of the Coyote effect?

It's really hard to tell. Unlike Wile E Coyote, the bigger something is, the longer it will hang in mid air before crashing. There's too much mass and inertia. Too many people are involved in the little details, no one can see that the ground isn't there any more. Those that can, probably don't think it's their job to tell anyone. Who would listen anyway?

In the private sector, economics enforces gravity. If customers stop coming, the balance sheet goes bad, and one fine day the boss finds he can't make payroll next week. Down she goes, without too much delay.

Sometimes, even in the private sector an organisation is so big it distorts reality around it, and can draw in other resources. Because no one really believes something so big can be broken, or can contemplate a world without it, or they believe that it's just a temporary problem, it gets bailed out by someone. This happens to banks a lot these days.

In the state funded sector, it takes a long time for the Coyote effect to kick in, Decades, perhaps centuries. For example, in Ireland, we still have an office of the Chief Herald*. Killing state supported enterprises is politically difficult. No one wants to shoot the dog. Easier to keep feeding it taxpayers money and let the next government sort it out.

Universities are particularly prone to the Coyote effect. The combination of state supports (especially in Europe), their hold on the public imagination, and their special relationship with time mean they can float in this air for a century after running off the edge of their reason for being.
.
Universities haven't leapt off that edge yet, but the road is winding, and there's a lot of ACME equipment strapped on just now. But if they do go over the edge, the Coyote effect means it will be some time before anyone notices. A generation at least, perhaps two. But sometimes, for the lucky, the Coyote effect is no bad thing. It can carry you over a leap of faith. By time we all realise it, the other side of the canyon might be in reach. Or indeed, they may have grown wings.

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University Time

Note
* I know virtually nothing about this office. It may, for all I know, do something extremely important, and contribute substantially to the state coffers. I cite it as an evocative per example only, and mean it's staff no offence.

Get Rid of Graduates

2010-10-21T16:17:00.000+01:00

I was on campus at the end of the Summer, having a coffee with the twins, then 17 months. It was autumn graduation season, and everybody's big day out. With bad haircuts and short skirts, respectively, the sons and daughters of the land were lining up in pride, and rather old and tired looking parents looked on. In 2031, I said to the twins, that will be you. They declined to comment.

Or will it? Isn't graduation silly?

I've said before that you can see your graduates as customers, or products. Now, if you see them as products, you have other issues to address as I've mentioned before. If you see them as customers, think a little about how you manage them.

So you have your customers on site for three or four years. They build this deep relationship with you as an educational provider. They meet all their friends on your campus, have some of their best and worst moments there. They lose things like innocence and virginity. They gain things like spouses and debt that they will carry with them for many years. You've built a deep institutional and personal connection with them.

Then, one day, everyone comes by for some medieval dress up, you give them a scroll in latin, and send them off. Goodbye. Have a nice life. You'll send them a graduates association magazine a couple of times a year, and their mammies will read it, if you're lucky.

Can you imagine if your favourite coffeeshop, where you've gone for years, turned you away from the counter one morning. I'm sorry, time to move on. We've sold you enough coffee. We need to make way for new customers.

The analogy is imperfect, of course, but marketers tells us it much cheaper to keep a customer than to win a new one. Shouldn't you be trying to hang on to your students, not booting them out the door with great ceremony?

The trouble is, of course, the money. By the time they graduate, they probably don't have any left, and won't have for some years. Then ten or twenty years down the line when they've made good your University foundation will phone them up and ask them for some. Is it any wonder they don't get too good a response?

The idea of University education with fixed start and end points made heaps of sense in Bologna in 1155. Students started when they showed up in town, finished when they left town. It doesn't make so much sense any more. The world is a village, and there's no way out. After they 'graduate' when they are starting new careers is just about the time when they might need you the most, leveraging networks to get jobs, needing 'just in time' learning and mentoring to fill in gaps and help them get established in their careers. Why cut them loose just then?

I don't have a ready to roll alternative model (not yet...) but isn't time to ditch the binary idea of student vs. non student and stop labelling people as 'graduates' as if declaring them to be a finished work. Isn't there a smarter way? Why should our formal learning suddenly stop in our early twenties? Google famously sets aside a percentage of it's staff time for great projects. In our so called knowledge economy, can't we set a target of everyone spending 10% of their time for formal accredited learning? It sounds like a high ideal, but let's be mercenary about it. If we all go to a Browne style model of student loans with repayments keyed to income, won't real formal lifelong learning support our former graduates in their early careers and yield an excellent return on investment?

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The End of College Age

A Bloggers Creed.

2010-10-19T12:06:00.000+01:00

Am I being inconsistent? Of course I'm being inconsistent. I'm writing about the future. How could I be consistent? The present is inconsistent. How could future be anything else? 2010 makes no sense, in fundamental ways. The dots won't just suddenly join up in 2023. And how could an evolving set of ideas be consistent? Then they aren't evolving, they are just filling in the gaps. If I read anything more than a year old on my blog and don't take issue with my own ideas and arguments, them I'm learning nothing.

Am I being rash?Do I fire off ideas half baked, and then retreat from them when they catch flak. I hope so. This is the internet. Your supposed to throw out ideas fast and fresh, see what flies, and see what dies. If you are precious about looking foolish the next day, stick to peer reviewed journals behind steep paywalls and conventional editorialising.

Am I attacking straw men? Do I critique parodies of the University, not the modern realities. Perhaps, but then let's get the straw men burned out so we can get into the meat and muscle. And remember, if you work in the space and actually read blogs and social media, you're well ahead of many of your peers. Among academics any kind of technology assisted learning beyond eMail and Powerpoint is only just getting past the early adopters like you. Your institution might have accept credit modules from all over, and have great approaches to lifelong learning and recognition of prior learning, but there's a lot of wagons still coming up to the pass behind you. The straw men still walk.

Am I being provocative? Do I push an idea a little far sometimes? Gee, I hope so. If what I'm writing provokes nothing (not even contempt, ridicule!) then what exactly is the point? Why waste the electrons in agreeing with accepted things? The future belongs to crazy ideas. But which ones? Only one way to find out.

Fee Fie Fo Fum. The Browne Report

2010-10-13T18:15:00.001+01:00

It's out of scope for this blog to assess whether the recommendations of the Browne report are wise or fair. Many others will cover that beat from every angle and political view. Worth reading are Donald Clark, who explains how Browne misses the point, and Charlie Stross, who makes a good stab at putting it all into a larger historical context.

My question is will the recommendations fly, and if it does, will it make any difference to how Universities look in the 2020's and beyond.

My feeling is that they will fly, although I have never followed British politics closely so I'll confess it's only a hunch. The political arcana of Whitehall is a mystery to me. May it ever be so.

Where the UK leads, Ireland will surely follow, and others will take note. It's likely that when my daughter goes to college in 2023 (as of this month, she want to be a vet, by the way) it will be under a funding model quite like Browne proposes, which puts it top dead centre in scope for this blog.

What's driving the thinking in Browne, I believe, is that as attendance at a Tertiary institution slides up into the majority, it's starting to get simply too expensive for the state to support it. Governments have two choices. They can keep funding it publicly, let it go on up to 100% and accept that it will be largely rubbish because it's underfunded. It's very rare that a single purchaser (be it Walmart, or the State) with a broad pool of suppliers to choose from has not bled them white. It only happen when they are all playing too much golf together, or perhaps in Scandanavia. With China and India turning out graduates in increasing numbers, having a high proportion of graduates with fairly indifferent degrees isn't going to be much help. The big IT Offshorers can put 1,000 people on your project tommorow morning. You can't compete on scale.

The other choice is to walk away from directly funding the sector, underwrite it with cheap loans (the education is, after all, a public good, it's the least you can do) and hope that your world class institutions, now student debt funded, can produce graduates of such quality that England Inc. (or Ireland Inc.) will stay in business.

Will it make a difference? Years ago I worked in evaluation of public sector policy, and the experience left (or perhaps found) me cynical about the power of the state effecting real change in the near term. Government politicians like to claim credit, the opposition assigns blame, usually within 12 months of announcing the policy change, and before implementation has even begun. "Major Government initiative might have made a difference, or maybe it didn't, we aren't sure" isn't much of a newspaper headline, especially for an audience who have never heard of a counterfactual. By the time outcomes become clear, all but the hard core policy wonks have forgotten the original initiative. Even big initiatives (the GI Bill comes to mind) often just accelerate patterns of change that were ongoing anyway. That said, this shift probably is big enough to make a change at a generational scale, if the implementation isn't homeopathic, as public policy often is when the rubber hits the road.

For Universities, it's all good. Effectively deregulated, they can charge what they like, and need dance no more with bankruptcy. This will probably lead to some improvements in teaching on the ground. Alas, it will also lead to US style facilities inflation, with an ever nicer set of student facilities being built to entice and compete new entrants. After all, if you are going to go into tens of thousands of debt, what's a few pounds more. Besides, Student Age 19 isn't paying, some hypothetical adult he will grow into will pay in some dark imagined future.

Some TEI's will pull ahead, and engorged with fat fees will produce more appealing graduates. Some of this will be due to better funding leading to better teaching, and some, alas, because by being more expensive they filter for the elites that elites like to hire.

Will it change the balance of course provision, casting history, classics and so on into the darkness and forcing those without independent means into more lucrative areas? For good or ill, I don't think so. When I worked in New Zealand, which has a student loan system, all the largest loans were for students who had trained as helicopter pilots. New Zealand needs more chopper pilots per capita than most places, but not that many. I recall one course had trained a substantial number of tourist submarine skippers. Vocational sounding, but they would have better off with a classics degree. Browne notes the importance of career guidance up front in the report, and having a PhD in a discipline I've never worked in, I couldn't agree more.

For students, the prospect of a big debt may deter many who might benefit, but I suspect most will suck in their guts, sign on the line and go. After all what's the alternative? The tills at Tesco? It will slow the growth of tertiary education, perhaps holding it at around the 50% level. The loan model means that people without means can still attend if they are prepared to bear the debt, so Universities will still function as engines of social mobility, which is a substantial part of their overall benefit to society. Big picture, the change isn't nearly as radical as it looks. The middle classes still pay, in loans now, instead of taxes.

Related Posts
Follow the Money: http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/2010/07/follow-money.html

George Hook says "Your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on"

2010-10-12T10:46:00.002+01:00

George Hook's talk in UCC last week was only briefly mentioned in the Irish Times today, and his remarks might interest local readers. For those overseas, George Hook is one of the 'Commentariat' a journalist and media man who came up as a Rugby commentator and has a general reputation as a 'straight shooter'. He is not a University graduate, but is, I believe, married to a University lecturer, and his views would be fairly good proxy for the general public - The 'plebs' as late mother used to call them.

“Your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on" was the session title. Much of the talk was fairly reasonable hard won advice on the value of preparation, planning presentation and communication to set yourself aside from the pack. It was the kind of thing I wish I'd heard when I was 19, but wouldn't have listened to.

In responding to an audience question, Hook was characteristically scathing of the hold that Universities have on the public imagination. Too many degrees, including many from the Institutes of Technology that couldn't possibly lead to jobs were making the tertiary a holding pen to put off reality, he said. "There were enough people studying journalism in Ireland to staff every newspaper in the US". The number of students should be halved, he said, to better reflect the real job market for people with degrees.

This view of the degree as job training is one I've caught flak for in the past, and will again. Sure, it glosses over all the other values of a degree, and the deeper value of a well educated population to democracy, but first we must eat. That said, a lot of places do try to flog degrees which sound like they would slot you right into a job, but won't. Journalism sounds like one. I suspect a lot of people would be much better off with a good meaty Philosophy or Maths degree, that sets them up with the kind of intellectual deep, wide stance to keep them balanced as they tackle whatever the 2020's might throw their way.

"The standard for first class honours degrees needed to be brought back up to where it belonged, producing less graduates but of better quality. "

I can't argue with that. I have a first in Geology. I'm smart on a good day, I put in a bit of work in fourth year, and got lucky on a couple of papers but that should mean a 2.1. The firsts in Geology belonged to the Rock Whisperers. There are many like me in other fields.

Of University presidents, he said "They think they are Multinational CEO'[s, but they are really big school principals" and said their salaries should be halved to reflect that.

I'm ambivalent on that one. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. That said, any kind of CEO pay package should, I believe, the tied in hard to hitting specific goals. I'd pay them less day to day, but put the difference into a golden handshake that they have only an even chance of hitting. But then, of course, you have to set smart targets and find good independent people to review that. Easier said than done.

Many students, he said, condemned themselves to failure by not planning ahead. Less than 20% of students, he felt, were really thinking about what was going to happen to them after college. Students needed to be prepared for that fact that while they must work after college, they might not earn. He advised the crowd that they should consider voluntary work to gain experience after college. I couldn't agree more.

Future wise, his remarks overall give us a clue as to what many voters are thinking. Our economies are in recession and the substantial population without degrees suffering perhaps more than the graduates. In such a climate, voters will support spreading the pain as widely as they can, to lighten their load. There is a political window opening for reintroducing third level fees. The UK, if they adopt the Browne Report, is going to jump out that window, and I expect Ireland to follow suit.

Finally, I'll note that the talk was arranged and hosted by UCC Entrepreneurship and Social Society, one of many vibrant student societies on campus. Groups like that were a massive part of my own education in college, rounding me out as a person and helping me make many useful mistakes in a fairly safe box. I'm continually amazed that I've never once read anything about them in the broad and vibrant online debate about University Education.

The Mission

2010-10-10T13:48:00.000+01:00

What are Universities for? Humans are tool using primates. What kind of tool is a University, and what sets it apart from the other tools in the box.

There seems to be two answers to this. One is Utilitarian, what we use Universities for, and the other Idealistic, their self defined mission. To the utilitarian, we chiefly use universities to educate us and test our mettle so we can compete with the all the other tool using primates for jobs, spouses and so forth. At a larger scale, we also use them as general purpose knowledge factories, coming up with useful tools for our future and insights into our past. I've written from this viewpoint extensively before and am somewhat partial to it, so I won't repeat myself.

The Ideal, as I understand it, is that Universites create and spread learning. 'Where Finbarr taught, let Munster learn" as goes the motto of my alma mater. By research they learn things no one knows yet. By teaching, they help students learn things they don't know yet. It's a passionate, messianic mission, to be a flamethrower of knowledge, setting the world ablaze.

The two answers don't really align all that well, (and both leave out other things, for the sake of clarity) but neither answer is wrong. This isn't arithmetic. The real world is messy. We can hold misaligned, conflicting ideas in our head and put them all to good use.

I was recently doing some thinking on behalf of a training company. Their mission is very different to the Universities, and very clear. They must make money. If the owner felt his capital and talents would be more profitable making biscuits instead of training, then to the kitchen he would go. Profit, in the near and longer term, is the measure of success. It's lovely, sure, that everyone enjoys the work and learns things, but that is secondary. The profit makes creating and protecting something of commercial value central. You need great teaching materials, and you need to protect their copyright. You need good trainers, and you need to deliver learning in a way you can bill for. The learning is a little candle, an arc welder. Hot and bright, perhaps, but kept somewhat hidden, except for paying customers.

True Universities are not for profit. Because the language of business leaks over, their leaders often forget that. Business Minded Managers, trotting out outdated MBA speak and talking about the balance sheet rise to the top, which spawns Reactionary Idealists in the ranks, who forget the mundane, utilitarian purpose on which to which their light of learning must shine, and frown on incursions of the practical. The language and ideas of business can be a powerful tool to make Universities work better, but the bottom line is different.

One of the really great things about the open educational resources movement (OER) is that is makes sense only when you remember The Mission, and sounds insane when you think you are a business. It's like a litmus test. Do you make all your teaching material available to the general public? If you are a for profit training company, no way. If your mission is to spread learning as much as possible, then, yes, obviously. How could you not. If it isn't good enough to share, it isn't good enough to teach with. Do you publish your research in expensive journals read by the few, or make it free for all to read? If your mission is to spread learning, it's a no brainer. It has to reach the widest audience. Are you wary of putting your teaching up on Youtube? So you should be, if you are in it for profit. You would only put up a sample of the good stuff, for marketing. Not for profit? Put every last minute of it online. St. Paul would have used a creative commons licence for his letters if he had one to hand, and so should you.

Universities need to keep the lights on and pay the wages, but that's a means to an end, not the end in itself. If they could make the light of learning blaze the brighter without those things, they should. A University balance sheet belongs closer to bankruptcy than any private business could bear. Training companies turn knowledge into cash. Universities turn cash into knowledge. Both should maximise the conversation ratio, using all means at their disposal, and neither should finish the year holding much stock.

Pay for outcome, not process.

2010-10-08T15:05:00.000+01:00

Universities are funded, more or less, for bums on seats. Whether it's paid for by the taxpayers or parents, fees are paid for time present on the premises, It's paid just like day care, but without the Lego.

But what we're paying for - time on campus - isn't what we want to buy. What would happen if Universities were paid for outcomes? What if Universities were paid a balloon payment for each employment outcome, weighted in line with the graduates starting salary.

Suddenly, pointless degrees that are cheap to deliver but go nowhere are a liability and go out the window. Universities fight tooth and nail for the best and brightest that can be placed quickly. They need to be sharp, and make sure they are teaching the skills employers really need. The careers office moves to the centre of the institution, instead of stuffed into a far corner beside Classics. The Alumni network is no longer simply a set of people to shake down for checks - a lead on a good jobfor an undergrad would be worth much more.

Life skills like communication become central, as they greatly enhance the saleability of the student. Even student activities, often funded but ignored, but a key aspect in rounding out a good saleable CV, take on a new importance.

Timing would become critical. If you have a bright girl in second year who could get a good job, should you try to place her, or convince her to stay for another year, to get a better salary. There are options at the bottom too. Taking in disadvantaged students in large numbers, and making them employable might help the bottom line considerably. Outcome payments could be weighted to favour placing disadvantaged students ('fixer uppers' if you will) over easy to place smart kids from good homes.

The institution that would be produced would be as different from the university of today as the shark from the whale, a lean mean beast ruthless in it's hunt for the best careers for it's students. Would I send my daughter there? I might. Would it be a more effective use of taxpayers money? You bet.

In a sense, this happens for research already. Departments and Institutions which fail to turn out demonstrably good outputs tend to find it hard to win grants and sustain their funding down the line. Good results help to win the next grant, and success build on success. There are very few disciples which avoid this and manage to produce large amounts of unneeded research ("I have a little list, they never will be missed") but they are the happy exception.

It's a radical idea, but being radical is not itself a fault. Like most such ideas, the devil is in the details. There are a number of obvious problems, which I shall leave as an exercise for the commenter. But at least it would align what we want - people with useful skills who can find a place in the world, with what we're paying for, and remove the incentive to underfund potentially expensive courses which lead to decent careers, and shortchange important skills, while supporting cheap degrees that shift hundreds of people from lecture hall to exam hall for four years, to no obvious benefit to anyone except keeping them off the unemployment rolls.

Do you see your students as products?

2010-10-05T11:15:00.000+01:00

Do you see your students as products? It's ok, really, I'm not going to judge. Lot's of people see it that way. You can use whatever metaphor you like if it helps you get the job done.

Lot's of Universities, implicitly or implicitly, see students as products. School leavers go in, get their school educated heads deprogrammed, learn new stuff, grow up a bit, and go out the other end, ready to take their place in the knowledge economy. You can see Universities as the coal mines and steel mills of the information age churning out the raw feedstock of the knowledge economy.

If you see them as products, that's fine, but maybe you need to follow through with that idea a little bit and see where it takes you.

Firstly, the three and four year production line is a bit long, don't you think. Moves towards shorter, compressed degrees are a step to rectify this. If you feel students need the time to mature, fine, but is that part of what your University is good at? Maybe they can mature better someplace else? If you do want to mature them as well as educate them, is the campus/lectures model the best one? Shouldn't you be giving them credit for other things, like engagement with college life, clubs, societies and so forth?

It doesn't take a Lean Six Sigma guru to figure out that your physical assets, lecture rooms and so forth, are lying idle all weekend, much of the evening and substantial chunks of the year out of term. Summer schools, evening classes and so on help a bit, but some institutions run on two 11 week terms! I can't see Toyota running a plant day shift only for less than half a year for very long. Of course, you'd need to take on an extra shift or two, but that big campus probably costs as much as a semiconductor fab, or a pharmaceuticals plant. There's plenty of people trying to get in. Sweat the asset.

And what about market research? What employers 'buy' your graduates. Exactly what ones. No generalities, names and phone numbers. What do they think of them. You run lots of focus groups with the big employers, don't you? Don't you? You hardly you turn out something that costs tens of thousands of euros with no market research? We'll, at least you follow up with the graduates every year to see exactly what they are doing and feed the data back into your course design. Don't you? I know they are hard to find, but we have this Facebook thing now, so it's no problem.

I could go on, but see where I'm going here. If you need the mental exercise, take any manufacturing paradigm you fancy and apply to the University. Enough of the insights will be relevant to make it worthwhile.

Seeing your students as products is a powerful, if impolitic, metaphor. Maybe it should prompt you to looking at how great products are really made in the 21st century, and what valid lessons can be taken from that to how your University churns out graduates. Of course, the 'student as product' metaphor breaks down in a bunch of ways, for starters, there is the mismatch between whoever is 'getting' the product and whoeever is paying for it, but that's a whole other post for another time. Just because the metaphor is imperfect doesn't dismiss the ideas it prompts.

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus

2010-10-04T12:06:00.001+01:00

Clay Shirky is one of the best communicators around when it comes to how the web influences and changes society. Because the web is at the sharp end of a wedge of disruptive forces working to remodel Tertiary Education, Shirky is a must read.

The basic premise of the book is that we have heaps to leasure time in the first world, most of which we spent watching TV, because there wasn't much else to do with it. Now we have the web, and by connecting up this time, even a tiny amount of it can create extremely useful things. Wikipedia is the poster boy for this. It took about 100 million person hours to create, estimates Shirky, which is about as much time as the US spends watching TV ads. Such a tiny proportion of the available human 'down time' connected up by the web, can achieve remarkable things.

Shirky also talks about the end of what he calls 'Gutenberg Economics', where content is produced by a small number of professionals to a high standard and pumped out, one way to the masses. Everything from the Bible to Survivor is like this. Much of what we assume is a given (like newspapers being big sheets produced each day, or degrees taking four years) are simply accidents of history, structuring content to suit the producers. We are now entering a post Gutenberg model, where anybody can produce content. It's not as good overall, but there is a lot more of it. He cites Lolcats (funny cat pictures with captions) as the entry level here. They aren't very good, but they put people over the threshold from being passive consumers on the sofa, to creating something they can share with the world. Some of them will work their way up to better things, and overall the bar is raised.

The consequences for education are obvious enough. Even poor quality content, right here and now - Lolcat Education - is better than great stuff that is not accessible, locked away in a 20 credit hour course. Creating and sharing something - anything - is better than simply consuming lectures. The good stuff will rise to the top. The conventional University system, where professionals produce education content in a capital intensive fashion and push it out in degree sized chunks is textbook Gutenberg economics, and has no special claim to be able to resist the changes than anything else.

Overall, this is an excellent read, well worth buying, especially if you haven't thought or read much on the area. Having read 'Here Comes Everybody', Shirky's earlier work, seen the TED talks and being fairly up with the play in the field, nothing in the book blew me away, but it was still worth reading to help draw together the ideas. It's a fairly light read. Shirky is a skilled narrator in start contrast to much of the overweening verbosity retched out by many academic 'writers'. If you aren't interested in his content, it's worth reading for a lesson on how real pros right non fiction for a mass market.

The Natives have landed

2010-09-30T11:18:00.001+01:00

This is a momentous month in Tertiary education, but it will be another five years before people notice exactly how, and what it means.
This month, in campuses all over the world, the first cohort of true digital natives are arriving, children who never lived in a world without web. The web became a publicly available service on August 6th 1991, and this is the first year where a substantial proportion of the new cohort were born after that date. They were four when eBay and Amazon was born, nine when the dotcom boom crashed, and ten when Wikipedia was born. When they turned to adolescence, Facebook and Bebo were waiting for them.
They are the first generation who always went online first when looking for information. Facts, for them, are things to be retrieved in seconds, not memorized or held in a revered old head. The limits of geography are to them a fading anachronism of the old days, slain by Ryanair and Skype. Their social networks connect them into an extended collective mind. New ideas flash across it, flower and die in hours. It's long term implications are unknown.
Much has been written about this generation web, generally by older academics, who don't hold with That Sort Of Thing, (whatever it is this year) or starry eyed prophets who see revolution on the wires, any minute now. Both will be shown to be wrong as this new generation transition to adulthood and find their own voices. They will be a generation like no other before them. Handle with care, and expect to be surprised.

Book Review: A History of the University in Europe Vol 1

2010-09-26T18:05:00.001+01:00

You must know the past to see the future, so to the library I went. I've been reading Volume 1. of "A History of the University in Europe" edited by Walter Ruegg. For completeness sake, I'm posting a short review here, if you'll forgive me for going off piste a little, both in topic and style.

The Book is dull, scholarly and thorough.

It paints a richly detailed picture (or, perhaps, collection of jigsaw pieces) of the emergence of the European University in the high middle ages, describing how they emerged from the fog and assumed their more modern form. Chapters by different authors provide a fairly high level of detail about what is known on the subject. Sometimes it's too much detail, and because of that, and the multi author nature of the book, no grand narrative emerges to keep the pages turning. In fairness to the authors, it probably wasn't intended to be a page turner. I'd been hoping to get an idea of why Universities spread and survived so well in the period, but that picture isn't drawn, although there are clues. I'll have read the other three volumes in time, but I'm not looking forward to it.

Interestingly, the book views the University as a distinctly European institution, and dismisses any precursors from outside out of hand. I'm not an expert on medieval history, but that seems rash and Eurocentric, given that as European institutions were coming out of the murk, some fairly sophisticated institutions of higher learning existing on the other side of the Mediterranean in the Islamic world. Strangely, the very old institution in Constantinople, unarguably in Europe, and a University in all but name, is not mentioned at all. It seems improbable that European developments were not informed by those places. I suspect that the operating definition of a University was very much framed by form rather than function, which excluded other matters of importance.

To be fair, the book notes that little is really known about the ecosystem in which the universities fitted into. What came before? How did they relate to the cathedral schools? Before attending, what kind of education did students have? There is a survivor bias here, Universities survived and kept their records, and bred scholars interested in researching their origins. Other institutions did not survive, and left little trace.

Other issues, significant factors, like the Medieval Warm Period and population increase, which drove European society forward to the point where the Universities could grow, get scarcely a mention. The High medieval period was an exciting time, you could call it 'Europe's false start' - cut short by the Great Famine and Black Death in the 14th century, but the book doesn't really give a good sense of the historical context. It's very much a fact basket book.

Nevertheless, the book is full of fascinating titbits and snippets, which illustrate how little has changed. For example, the tendency of lecturers to simply read through a body of notes and have students write them down, it seems, came from a time before printing when getting a book copies was an expensive proposition. Thus, students preferred lecturers to read the text so they could write it down.

Other insights show how little has changed in 800 Years:

On Meetings: "Little is learnt and the time needed for study is wasted in meetings and discussions" Phillippus de Grevia, on the new Universities, c1220AD.
On Student/Landlord disputes: Some of the earliest church documents pertaining to Universities relate to bishops laying down the law to limit sharp practices by landlords gouging students.
On Fees: "Science is a gift from God, and cannot be sold" argued the medieval church. Teachers disagreed. The fees/no fees debate clearly goes back a long way.

No mention of University rankings in Volume 1, which covers to 1500AD. They appear to be a more recent torment.

Overall, a detailed and thorough work, full of tantalising snippets of information, but weak on context and big picture. Worth reading if you are interested and your local library has it, but I wouldn't have rushed out to buy it, or keenly read it if my interest was only casual.

How to put Universities out of business

2010-09-23T09:23:00.004+01:00

A University isn't a business, but it operates subject to the same laws of supply and demand, in the same ecosystem, even if its objectives aren't profit. So long what it produces is valued by society, and no competition exists, Universities will survive, regardless of what torments their governments or administrators put them through.

So what do Universities produce that we need so badly? Graduates.

Why do we need those again? It all comes down to employers. By looking at a resume and noting the institution, subject and grade, a prospective employer gets a vast amount of information about a students intellect, knowledge base and approximate character without the expense of an interview. A candidate pool of millions can by pre screened down to dozens with a few dozen characters of text.: BSc (UCC Geol) 1H, PhD. It's beautifully compact, ten to the tweet.

Now, imagine for a minute if Universities didn't exist. The Martians arrive one day and carry them off, leaving nothing but some empty real estate and a few torn flyers for the freshers ball. What would happen then?

Employers would have a problem. How could you filter for people with specific skills, aptitudes and background. How could you figure out who had grown up a bit, and who hadn't? Can't interview them all, it would take too long and cost too much.
The resumes would be like novels, full of odds and end. Imagine how many bits and pieces you would have to do to be, for example, a Vet? At the very least, you'd have to thoroughly read the resume, decide on the virtues of whatever courses they took, whatever work experiences they had, volunteer activities and so forth. It would be tedious and slow. Inefficient.

But this is the 21st century. Now we have machines for that kind of work, don't we?
If I wanted to put Universities out of business, I'd find a faster, cheaper way of filtering candidates for employment. Some way of tracking and assessing the true value of what a potential candidate has done and matching it to closely to potential employee needs. Stripped of the false simplicity of a degree, I could match personality and aptitude test results, more domain specific education at a much more granular level than a monolithic degree. Such a system would select candidates for interview who would be a much tighter fit to my needs than the gross level degree filtering. If we can unzip genomes and read from them useful information, surely we can unzip peoples life experience and map it to the right jobs and careers.

From the student perspective, instead of spending four years chunking through a monolithic primary degree, people could do a more varied mix of things, and have the same system advise them closely on what they aught to be doing to match whatever employment or career path they might be interested in. Instead of a degeee being a thing entered blindly at one end and exited traumatically after big bang finals, with hope and a scroll, it becomes a lifelong process as they student (and never, truly, a graduate) accumulates useful experience to steer them towards whatever they want to be.

Universities can be at the centre of this new model, if they move fast. They are well placed at the centre of a the education web, with strong established brands, considerable (if, presently, overstretched) resources and a strong incentive.

But they probably wont. They are too close to the current model to see anything different as anything other than nonsense, or a threat to be poo poo'd. There is a reason Amazon isn't called 'Waterstones' or 'Barnes and Noble', and eBay isn't called Buy and Sell. It takes an outsider to see the potential, and act on it. Someday, soon, someone will do this. The first few efforts will fail, for mundane reasons. These things happen. You can then dismiss the model, until one year, the applicant numbers start go top off, and then go down, little by little, until one fine day someone who is perhaps now only a middle ranking lecturer find the hard choice is the only one and turns out the lights.

At least you'll have some good real estate to sell.

Related Posts:
21st Century Assessment: The University of Farmville
The Qualifications Arms Race

University Rankings are Dinosaur Racing

2010-09-13T12:22:00.000+01:00

I don't care about rankings, and neither should you. University Rankings are a bit like Miss World. Every year, people who purport in public not to take an interest in such nonsense surreptitiously tune in to how well they match up to the templates of Academic Beauty: Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. Most find that, unlike Miss World, the well balanced rack of Nobel prize winning assets required to reach the top is not so easy to procure.

Academics, of course understand clearly the dangers of such simplistic rankings. But if giving a simple score measuring how closely a thing matches an unattainable ideal is folly, why do we do exactly that each year, giving 1st class honours to those whose minds, we find, most resemble our own. As you sow, so shall ye reap.

Some of the metrics that go into the rankings are worth considering. Just like Miss World might inspire one to maintain a healthy BMI, behind the University rankings there are some well considered metrics and KPI's that any University leader should be on top of. But if University rankings were like Miss World, the ideal of beauty would be Eleanor of Aquitaine, or perhaps a muse of Rubens. The 'winners' are those who models have been successful in the past - often the quite distant past. It's a backward looking indicator, and those chasing purely rankings are chasing yesterdays dreams and ideal. It's like dinosaur racing.

Ignore the rankings. Think about what your institution needs to look like when you retire, or when you children or grandchildren attend. If you try to be like everyone else, you won't stand out from the pack in the global market. Find a different vision, chase a different dream. If some measure or KPI helps you do that, create your own ranking scheme, with metrics that are important for your own vision. Then strive to be the world number one at that. Take Coco Chanel's advice:

“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

Are teachers necessary?

2010-09-06T15:18:00.000+01:00

At Tertiary level, are teachers necessary?

It seems like a stupid question, but often stupid questions have interesting answers, if it is only that we understand the conditions that make it a stupid question, and whether those conditions might change. History has a way of undermining assumptions so that yesterdays stupid question is tomorrows front page surprise.

Teaching is facilitating or catalysing learning. If you teach at tertiary level, it's worth reflecting on how much of your time is spent actually doing that. Strike out the hours spent on college politics, bureaucracy and course management, research, lecturing and any marking that isn't properly formative with feedback and how much time is left for real teaching? Probably not so much.

Students have gotten used to that, and often teach each other. It's an open question how central that peer to peer learning really is, and how important it is to have a present guiding hand (see my MOOC post and comments thereon for some points on this), but it's fair to say a good slice of what you learn, you learn from trying to figure something out with the person next to you.

Advocates take that idea one step further. If teaching is the part of education that doesn't scale, and if tertiary education is becoming unaffordable, as it has for many, especially in the US, who needs it. The web has changed the game. Why endure third rate lecturers when you can find first rate ones online for free. Why pay extortionate rates for textbooks when the web is awash with free content. Why go to the cost and expense of physical attendance when you can find peer groups online in just about anything. If you really want to pay money for accreditation, there's any number of online for profit providers, like University of Pheonix, who will gladly take your money. Anya Kamenetz's book DIY:U (see my review) competently summarises a lot of the thinking in the field, but the ideas go back a long way, at least as far as Illich's 1971 book, Deschooling Society.

It's generally been a fairly left wing idea, with Birkenstocks on it's feet and a chip on it's shoulder. But it's origin has no relevance to it's quality. Even if it is a terrible idea, it can still be important and influential (consider, for example, much of Economics as a wellspring of influential, profoundly bad ideas). It's also an idea that might find allies beyond it's left wing originators. To those who see teachers as 'Salary Costs, Fixed' finding a model for teacherless learning will surely be compelling. If it can be done, they'll find a way. Business models that cut to the bone, pile high and sell cheap tend to do very well, and bring things to people who couldn't afford them otherwise. You might hate Ryanair, but are you going to take the Bus instead? Somebody, quick tell Africa tertiary education is important, but they can't have it until they can afford tenured professorships.

Can it work? It works all the time for informal learning. Lack of a teacher is practically a definition of informal learning. The web has certainly made it possible to learn a lot more informally than before, while at the same time extending the reach and firepower of 'hyperteachers' like the Khan Academy into an informal space. We've slowly cottoned on to the idea that maybe a not so good Youtube right now for free is better than a really great class next year sometime.

But can informal, teacherless learning conquer all?

My current opinion is no (but I'm ideologically fickle - change my mind). I've had some excellent teacher catalysed learning experiences as a student, (generally from Postgraduate teaching assistants it must be said). Probably one of the most important elements of teaching is contriving situations (assessments, labs and so forth) where the student fumbles through and learns something on the way, often without any direct intervention at all. My most significant learning experience was one of those, 53 days of field work, entirely alone, but addressing a challenge first imagined by some long forgotten Professor. More on that in another post. That kind of teaching, the creation of learning experiences, can often scale very well indeed. If I wanted to make teachers redundant, or catalyse more learning with the ones I have, I'd look hard at that.

Can MOOCs make learning scale?

2010-09-01T15:23:00.000+01:00

One of the big challenges of education is that it doesn't really scale well. At primary and secondary level, pupil teacher ratios are political hot potatoes with good reason. At big ratios students don't get individual attention. Bump classes up beyond any small number and the teacher can't keep a handle on who is or isn't up with the play, can't dip down and interact one to one with the students to work through a difficulty. They can't teach, basically. They fall back on lecturing and crowd control.

Lecturing now, is a different story. Lecturing scales really well. You can lecture a million almost as easily as 10. People (usually lecturers, as you would imagine) often mix up lecturing, as the signature pedagogy of the University, with teaching. Ideas like iTunesU and Youtube.com.edu are great for disseminating lectures, but that isn't teaching and learning. It should be called iTunesLectures, not iTunesUniversity.

Technology has not, so far, been able to solve this problem. People in technology circles who have never taught anything, and evidently, haven't learned much either, often miss this point. The same webtech wheezes that have ripped up conventional media can't rip up Education. Education isn't media.

MOOC, or Massively Open Online Courses, are one fair effort at leveraging technology to make education scale. There's a good paper about the format and the issues involved online now "The Ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC" which gives a good overview of the model, and the issues encountered. It's worth a read. Basically in a MOOC the course is online, it's somewhat unstructured, the format uses pretty much any kind of web tool you can think of to facilitate a big networked conversation on the topic. Courses can have thousands of participants, some for credit, other not, some engaging, some not. The first instance ran in 2008, led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, key thought leaders in the field.

Personally, I found the format hard to engage with and commit to, but that's probably more to do with me than it. I'm slow to pan the format, because it's early days, and only a handful of MOOCs have run, but the paper linked above seems to resonate with my concerns about it. I don't think it's going to solve the problem as it stands, but it's probably as close as we've gotten.

Learning comes, in part from a dialogue. That dialogue is one to one, between someone who knows a lot about it, and someone who wants to know a lot about it. Lecturing (or reading) is only half of it, it's a monologue. It's often hard to ask questions in a lecture, impossible in a book.

A core part of the concept of a MOOC is peer to peer learning, through dialogue. But it's a dialogue between 2000 people who all know a little bit about the topic, with the course leaders piping in from time to time. It's as likely to confuse as enlighten. A big online course, with some lecture/readings, some student chats is a good effort at a fusion, but even the most hyperactive educator isn't going to be able to run around and engage with more than a few dozen students, or have any clear idea of who knows what.

I think perhaps the MOOC a stronger model for the humanities, where there is often no single clear answer (I squandered my college years in the hard sciences, where we pretend there is). It's certainly a better model than everyone sitting in a lecture hall taking notes. On balance, until something new comes out on the technology side, it's probably one of the best models around for mega scale cost effective learning. If you teach in University, get on one if you have a chance, and see how they work. If I hear of another coming up I'll let you know.

Primary Digressions

2010-08-31T15:01:00.000+01:00

Today my daughter, the muse of this blog, began Primary School, and the long road through the formal education system that may lead her, in time, to some kind of University in the mid 2020's. She is attending a mid sized, well equipped suburban single sex school, a world away from the primitive rural two teacher school I attended in the early 1980s.

Primary and Secondary education is not something I know a lot about, but I should. It's the big machine on which tertiary education sits, mining and refining brains and souls to be fed into the Tertiary system and there recast, by some magic, as functioning adults. The systems move in lockstep, with much of secondary education twisted to get people through the entry requirements to University, and a fair chunk of the undergraduate University system trying to untwist them again. If there is to be a revolution in tertiary education, it's as likely to come from below, driven by change in the Primary and Secondary systems, as anywhere. To understand the future of Tertiary Education, I think we really need to understand Primary and Secondary as well, at least a little.

So this blog post is a warning of Primary Digressions to come. As my daughters path gives me a more current data point to reflect on, you can expect some posts from time to time about Primary Education, alas, probably rather ill informed and biased. You have been warned.

Class Spectrometry

2010-07-15T10:51:00.000+01:00

"Please save my son the Engineer" cries the Irish mother, across the raging surf. It's an old joke, funny because it's true. University degrees in Ireland, and elsewhere, are all about status, and status is mostly about sex.

Everything that breeds is obsessed about status. It's our polite way of rating how much our genes like the look of your genes. Good breeding, as my mothers generation would have more bluntly and honestly called it. Potential mates (and rivals) advertise their genetic fitness with symmetric faces and good skin. It's hard coded into our brains, and drives our behavior long past breeding age. Anyone spending more than a few euros on a watch, or a few thousand on a car is succumbing to the same programming, advertising status, and flaunting style and taste as proxies for supposed good genes.

Degrees are magnificent instruments for the measurement of status. They cannot easily be faked. They require some level of intelligence, conveniently quantified by the final grade. They require persistence of effort over years. Even in a land of free fees, they cost money, both directly, and in income foregone. This gives a good indication that the holders parents have at least some money. Successfully getting into college implies a family stable enough to get the graduate out to school for some years prior, and a home environment sane enough to let them get some study done. All good proxy indicators that the potential mate is unlikely to yield a brood of unmarriageable misfits.

Within the degrees, each detail is nuanced. Ireland, and other countries, operates a 'points' system, where access to degrees is controlled on a supply and demand basis by the number of points earned in a high stakes schools system. Thus, when I went to college, everyone knew someone in electrical engineering or pharmacy (both near maximum points at that time) could be expected to be excellent breeding material, but seducing a civil engineer would be a very dicey proposition indeed. In other countries, where fees are the norm, it's even better. By looking at what institution was attended, you can practically figure out the family tax returns. It's like submitting potential mates to an IQ test, a medical exam and a financial due diligence process all with one simple question "And what did you do in college?". Like a mass spectrometer sorts atoms out into streams of different mass, Universities sort us out in streams by wealth, privelage and genetics. Class Spectrometers.

Degrees are way better indicators of genetic fitness than money. With money, people can get lucky, win the lotto or find themselves on the right side of an asset boom ("Nouveau Riche" as my mother would have dismissed them). Monomaniacal pursuit of money might even be a warning sign of mental imbalance. Scions of new money should be approached with great caution. Educational achievement is much less likely to mislead than wealth, especially when considered in a basket of other reasonable indicators.

Precisely the same things make degrees useful to potential mates make them useful to potential employers. Those seeking intellectual grunt may pick their PhD, those seeking 'class' may filter for Oxbridge, and so on. In designing a system for one outcome, we have achieved another.

Behind the newspeak and propoganda of education for the knowledge economy, social inclusion, education as an end in itself and so on, we forget that the degree, in it's very DNA, is an engine of social inequality. It's evolved that way because we made it so. Humans, innately sensitive to our place in the social pecking order, have seized and developed it as an measurement instrument of that order. It's not good, or evil, it's just human. It's probably the most astonishingly obvious thing never said about higher education. It's mostly all about sex.

The Social University

2010-07-12T11:55:00.000+01:00

Prisons are the Universities of Crime, critics say. And yet there are no formal classes, Gotti never taught advanced Racketeering in Marion Penitentiary, and I don't imagine Bernie Madoff lecturing in Hedge Fund Management at Butner. So how are prisons so effective at turning first time crooks into hardened criminals, and what does it tell us about Universities?

Universities and Prisons are both social institutions, where peer to peer interaction with your fellow inmates, and the overall environment exert a far stronger affect than often distant, formal interactions with the staff.

Universities spend most of their time, money and staff focusing on the teaching experience, but a disproportionate amount of the influence a University has on it's inmates happens outside of lecture hours. New undergraduates are pitched into a vast pool of people and must sink or swim. Like baby turtles stumbling towards the sea, they must find their way quickly, and relationships formed at the outset can last decades. I'm still good friends with a person I happened to be standing beside in the registration queue almost 20 years ago. Like many of my peers, I met my spouse in University.

Three or four years of University, following a schedule that is busy, but not crushing, students form deep, sustainable relationships with people who will be their spouses, colleagues and friends for decades. In the 21st century, this matters more, not less. In the old days, people would work in one job for decades, and have time to form equally deep linkages and networks. Those days are gone. People work short contracts of a year or two, they move houses and countries. Three or four years as an undergraduate may be the longest static spell in people lives until their own children start school.

The building of these social networks is of conventional tertiary education's 'killer apps'. The capacity to draw large groups of young people together for extended periods of time is something competitors cannot do. High intensity programmes, compressing a four year degree into two frantic years are certainly possible. They'll be cheaper, and perhaps even better academically, but no one attending them is going to have time to talk to each other, let along make friends with them, get drunk with them, or fall in love with them. Online programmes can't compete at all in building this kind of social capital. Even in the Facebook age, humans are still monkeys in jeans. We need to be able to make eye contact, shake hands, slap backs. We cannot love those we cannot smell.

Just like prisons, peer pressure in Universities reinforces and amplifies behavior patterns far more effectively than the staff can. People with at least moderate academic inclinations enter the system and slush around in it for a while. Those who cannot sustain it are removed from the pile, they flunk out, cut away and shunned from the social group they were only halfway through building. For every one that falls away, another dozen take note and align a bit better with the expected patterns of behaviour for proto doctors, engineers or whatever. The final product is both distilled by losses and aligned by peer pressure.

Conventional Universities ignore all this at their peril. Student groups often get the tail end of the budget and attention. There are bright points, most Universities fete their sports teams, but that's only a tiny fraction of the student body. Little thought is given on how to structure the organisation to promote building this social capital. It happens largely by accident, taken for granted. The student social experience should get equal billing with the academic experience. It's one thing the competition can't do better, faster or cheaper.

Why Learning Technology is like Prno.

2010-07-07T21:05:00.000+01:00

Learning Technology is like Prno.

A small number of people are in it.
They are usually professionals, doing it for show. The same half dozen things we've had for years keep coming up, dressed up differently and pitched to look new. After a while, you realise it's the same old faces, same old moves.

A lot of people are watching, wishing they were doing it.
They work alone. They feel they should be doing more. It's exciting to watch at the conference, but it's all over so quickly, and so unsatisfying. They have all the gear, but can't seem to convince others to join in.

Most people aren't in it, and aren't watching.
They'd love to be doing it, really. They're all for it, but they haven't the time, the energy or the resource. By the time they get through all the lectures and get scripts marked, it October and the whole ding dong has started again. Really, all they have the energy for once the must doos are done is a cup of hot cocoa and a leaf through the Times Higher Ed.

Follow the Money

2010-07-05T16:28:00.001+01:00

"Follow the Money" Raymond Chandler advised us (via Marlowe), and it's good advice to take when considering how the cost of Tertiary Education effects it's future. It's timely to think about now, as Ireland, from where I write, considers whether to continue with a 'free' fees model, where the state pays, or return to a fee paying model, where some or all of the fees are paid by students directly to the University. How might these choices play out in the long run, and which is the smart one?

All else being equal, the cost of a University education would rise in proportion with inflation. If GDP growth outpaces inflation, as it tends to, University education gets cheaper in real terms. More and more people can afford it, and we all live happily ever after. All else, alas, is not equal. As we get richer, our expectations rise. The school my firstborn starts in on August 31st might as well be on a different planet from the school I started at in '79. It's more reasonable to think of the cost of University education in terms of it's share of GDP.

Whether the cost will rise or fall as a share of GDP depends on who, exactly, is paying.

Where the state funds University education, as in Ireland, it's a single, strong customer with tight pursestrings. That keeps a lid on costs. Unless Universities suddenly get a lot better at picking the governments pocket than they are, the costs can't grow faster than GDP, and will probably shrink as other agendas draw on state coffers. The state will pressure universities to expand enrollments and spend less. While the slice of national wealth consumed is smaller in relative terms but the cake is growing all the time. So, in absolute terms, Universities do get more money, and deliver a better service. The voting middle classes won't mind them bleeding a little, but won't like to see them bled white, just like schools. While universities command a smaller and smaller wedge of national wealth, more and more people go there, because it's cheap. You end with with near universal tertiary education in the long run excluding only those so already too badly sabotaged by family or school to make it. That's how state funded primary and secondary education works, why should tertiary wind up any different.

Universities won't like this. Having only one paying customer is bad business. Like a pea farmer selling to a big supermarket, you suddenly realize you don't work for yourself anymore, and your profit margin is what they tell you it can be. When they feel a squeeze, you get crushed. Primary schools don't have a lot of autonomy.

Universities would like to work like any other business. They would deliver a service, and charge what it costs, or as much as they can get away with, whichever is more. As well as helping the top line, making goods more expensive makes them more exclusive. All Universities, deep in their hidden hearts, want to be Harvard when they grow up, and that means being expensive enough to filter out the riff raff, and elite enough to attract the very best talent. Employers, at least ones that potential students would like to work for, like that too. It makes it easy to sort the CV into a slush pile. There are some Universities, who, as a core value, try to keep costs as low as possible, but they are, alas, not economically significant. You can see this model in operation in the US.

Where education is on a fees basis, the prices will rise as fast as the market will bear. Faster, if predatory lending practices, as seen in the US, come into play. If people are borrowing for their education, based on their beliefs around future earnings, fees can logically rise faster than GDP growth. Fees go up, Universities command an expanding slice of the national pie, and (successful) Universities are grand and well resourced, like the US Ivy Leagues. If you can afford to go to the best, or can swing a scholarship, your future is assured. Less and less people can afford to go. Things like community colleges, online and for profit colleges spring up to satisfy that market.

Note that other costs (housing, food, and so forth) are more or less neutral either way. Whether you are in college or not, you've still got to eat and sleep indoors. There is an opportunity cost as well, time spent in lectures and years of earnings foregone while in University. In either model of funding, so long as University can get you a better income than no University it's worth going. That better income might be a better job than a non graduate, or indeed any job. If practically everyone has a degree, not having one would be a fast track to the benefit office, with rare exception.

These two scenarios are of course end members of a continuum of solutions. In Ireland, people suggest an intermediate model, where Universities charge fees but the government provides adequate scholarships to ensure access for people who cannot afford them. This is a great idea, and like many great ideas, it won't fly. Democracies don't reliably support people who don't vote. Any scholarship programme for the deserving and needy will get whittled away over time. Cutting those programmes keeps them out of college, and not competing for jobs with the children of nice, voting, middle class parents who knows the name of their elected representative and would like the money spent on themselves. Think of the consistent heavy flak affirmative action attracts in the US, and how it survives only because it is supported by a substantial mass of voters who benefit from it.

The other intermediate model is to have some state supported free Universities and some fee paying Universities, so everyone gets what they want. This is not unlike the US system, and has serious consequences for social equity. Your degree will forever record how rich your parents were, and humans being humans, your place in the pecking order is set.

There are, of course, many excellent Moral Arguments for this funding system or that. I'm not concerned in this blog with Moral Arguments, however just. I'm just concerned about what will happen. History has no morals. Nor am I concerned with what decision Society will make. Society does not make decisions, it responds to stimuli.

Universities however, are small enough to make actual choices. Given these two options what should a clever University lobby for? What is likely to ensure your relevance and survival in the long run?

If you are in the top 10%, then lobby for a fees model. You've got a good shot at 'Ivy League like status in the long run. Take it. With the enforced egalitarianism of state funding removed, you can lay claim to the top spot in the public mind. Fees will bring competition, and you're well placed to win it. Call your Minister, book a nice Restaurant and good luck.

If not, think carefully. You're not going to get a big endowment or asset base, like the Land Grant colleges in the US, to cushion you against the hard years. In a free market, they will come. The state might be one big customer, but it's checks don't bounce very often. THe business will start to look a lot like the Private sector. Rising costs will bring in competition, like in the US. Strange movements, like the EduPunks, will challenge your right to exist as an institution. Students incurring big debts are much more likely to cause trouble. If your country grows an Ivy League, and you're not in it, what then?

Old Media Never Dies

2010-07-02T18:32:00.000+01:00

"The Strange Survival of Ink" The Economist, June 10th 2010

The Economist notes that the death of newspapers, so recently foretold, has not come to pass. A little while back, in an interesting survey on the state of Television, we learned that it's doing just fine too.

Champions of the new media might think this impossible, a dead cat bounce, the coyote hovering in mid air for a doubletake before plunging to doom.. They forget that old media never dies, it just fades away. In the age of the plasma screen, cinemas still make steady money. In the age of iTunes, CD shops still struggle on.. Radio, the original broadcast media, still commands vast audiences, and advertising revenue.

At first glance, all of these old media should have been swept away by the New New Thing. That they remain casts doubt on similar portents of doom for Education. But look in detail and you can find a subtle logic for the persistence of old media. Newspapers cover local news nobody (much) blogs about. Television controls broadcast access to live sport, and everybody wants to watch the world cup final. Radio is easy, pattering on in the background, creating the illusion of company for solitary drivers and workers.

There is also a survival bias. We forget old media that has lost the battle. Newsreels are the only example that come to mind, cinema shorts, and Radio Dramas, slain by television. I'm too young to remember others. We also forget that the media that survive evolve. The Sun newspaper is a very different beast from it's forebears in the 17th century.

Universities too can evolve, at least those that survive. Just like TV and newspapers, they can find niches in the new age and grow into them, as Television found salvation in live broadcast sport. The danger is time. Other media operated in the private sector. The transition for newspapers will last perhaps a decade, with titles that don't get it going under. Universities, in Ireland at least, don't go bust. As essentially public sector organisations, they have a deep insurance policy, and a capacity to ignore shifting realities. Sometimes this is a strength, protecting them from the need to chase fads. But sometimes, it is a deadly weakness.

If not University, what else?

2010-07-01T10:01:00.000+01:00

An interesting post on University Diary today about whether a degree is still worth it. The post recounts the tail of person who went back to University to get a degree, found no benefit to it in employment, and considered the four years wasted. And this was, I assume, in Ireland, where the purely financial cost incurred was low. In the US, the same exercise would have bankrupted the man, and his family.

"...sometime in 2023 she will go to University.."

Right there is a founding assumption of this blog. My little girl will go to University some day. But what if she couldn't? What if, for some reason, that door was closed. In the world we live in now, or even in 2023, what are the credible alternatives she could present to an almost certainly scowling and sceptical team of parents, aunts and uncles. Out of that 'advisory board' of 10 people, there are four (five, says one dissenter, shouted down) PhD or equivalent degrees, a bunch of Masters of one sort or another, and only one person with 'only' a primary degree (but that person has a bunch of fairly meaty professional qualifications, so we'll give him a by). What do we know about non University careers pathways? We know, and are descended from, a few farmers of the 'bog and an acre' style but that's about it, and you need a qualification to do that nowadays anyway. In a professional context, I only worked with one person without a degree. He was great, a real go to guy. He subsequently had to go back and get a degree because not having one was blocking his pathway to promotion. Good grief, you probably need a degree to run away and join the circus nowadays.

Any ideas?

Accreditation and Assessment: The Corregidor Position

2010-06-28T17:17:00.000+01:00

Using the dominance of degree granting power to protect a Universities future is like defending Corregidor. At best, it's a holding action. At worst, it's a deadly distraction.

Corregidor, as viewers of The History Channel will know, was the Gibraltar of the Orient, protecting Manila Bay, the best natural harbour west of San Francisco, and with it, the Philippines and Americas empire on the Pacific rim. A magnificent fortress, it was thought to be able to withstand siege for six months, plenty of time for the fleet from Pearl Harbour to relieve it at leisure. Within a few minutes at Pearl Harbour, with that fleet in ruins, Corregidor's fate was sealed. It indeed fell six months later, after a long a bloody battle which tied down substantial Japanese forces. Few of the defenders lived to see VJ day.

The degree granting power of Universities is indeed a fine fortress. Degrees hold vast power over the imagination of the middle classes, a magic scroll, held like a wand by a robed graduate, to open the door of success and respectability. They provide employers a handy shortcut to assess the diligence and knowledge of potential hire. They are difficult to earn, thus filtering out students without the brains, resource and good fortune. A degree is a valuable thing.

It's a good business to be in, making graduates. If you are an academic and don't think education is a business, the next Pegasus back to Fairyland leaves at four. it might not be a for profit business, but students, or taxpayers on their behalf, spend a heap of good money to get graduates. It's a transaction. That makes it a business. If you don't think it should be a business, do it for free.

There three big barriers to entry for a potential competitor who might try to get into the graduate making line.

First, the brand. The University of So and So has been around for a long time, and will have build up a certain reputation among employers and potential students. It takes a long time to build that up. If I decided to open a university in the morning (The University of Rob), however good it was, it would still take me years, and a vast expenditure or marketing and public relations propoganda to build that brand. Potential students are often steered by parents and career guidance teachers who'll be a clear quarter century out of touch. Employers are more fickle, but still lean on degrees from places they've heard of to filter the candidates into the slush pile. The brand (or, reputation, if you don't like commercial language) is the most valuable asset a University has.

Second, the infrastructure. The conventional degree setup is expensive to run. Lecture halls must be maintained, academics fed and watered, quads mowed. Students spend four years knocking about the campus jumping through one hoop or another, and that costs money. So long as people expect a degree to look like four years physical time on campus, it's going to be expensive to do that. If I wanted to open a university in the morning, I'd have buy some expensive real estate, do a lot of building work and hire a great many academics. I can't just put up lots of content on Youtube like the Khan Academy and expect people to take me seriously, no matter how good my material is.

Finally, there is the state sponsored monopoly. The state reserves the power to decide who can and cannot hand out degrees, or even who can call themselves a University. The University of Rob would soon find it's letterbox full of troubling legal correspondence.

This is the weakest link.One keen populist or neo-liberal politian, one piece of legislation, and it's gone. If I ran the circus (after the Revolution, you know) I would sweep this away with the stroke of a pen, just to see what would happen.

What would happen, exactly?

First up, a whole bunch of private providers would ride over the hills. Most of them would be cowboys. The natural reaction would be to put some kind of bureaucracy in place to regulate exactly what size chunk of cognitive transformation a Batcholers, or Masters degree is (How would we measure congnitive transformation, exactly?). Adding quality assurance system is tempting, but why not just let people get their learning in module (or smaller blocks) and have graduates and employers rate how useful each unit was. Things like Tripadvisor work fine for a weekend in a hotel, which is about as long and expensive as a single module might be. Cowboys with turkey courses would soon find themselves on the receiving end of poor reviews and hard pressed to win further business. Existing institutions may find some surprises, good and bad, in the cold light of day. Students could go as they please, learning what they need, wherever it is best, where and when they need it. Employers might learn they don't care so much about the broad education, they want people who have done this or that unit. Newspaper commentators may feel it undermines society. Society is of course, not prevented from subsiding the process, just as it does today.

Universities shouldn't rely on their degree granting power to survive, no more than the defenders of Corregidor could rely on the Pacific Fleet. A state sponsored monopoly is no secure long term foundation for any enterprise, especially in a time when other changes have the potential to strongly erode the incumbents position. Alas, the Tertiary Sector will have no Pearl Harbour. The Edupunks shall not fly over the hill one day yelling Banzai, to wake Universities from their complacency. The collapse will come slowly, as first two planks of their value wear away, decade after decade, until they rest more and more on the monopoly of degree granting power. That too, will in time become irrelevant.

Corregidor was eventually retaken, of course, in a war that ended using tactics and technologies unimagined when it was constructed. It was not rebuilt.

Photo: Ruins at Corregidor, by Jepster via Flickr.

Don't do Strategic planning on tactical timescales

2010-06-25T09:58:00.000+01:00

Most Universities conduct strategic plans with a five year time horizon. This is too short. Most degrees take three or four years (allowing for repeats, long medical degrees, interminable PhDs etc) so five years is a little bit longer than one 'product cycle'. A car takes, perhaps, a few weeks at most including components. Could you imagine Ford or Toyota having a 3 month strategic planning horizon? No. It would be ridiculous. You would argue that the analogy is false, that what Universities produce is much less tangible, and more embedded in society than a mere car. Correct. So our planning needs to be even longer term.

As I have argued in previous posts, the time steps in education are long. A University reputation takes decades to built or destroy - witness the long march of Ireland's newer universities, DCU and UL to credibility, and the mixed outcomes of the UK former polytechnics. A good research department takes years to mature, building the capacity and credibility to attract lead researchers and fat grants. Technological shifts are, in practice, marginal over 5 years. Public policy fashions take that long to go from the catwalks of the OECD to the statute books of the Dail.

Strategic planning is about vision, it's about where you want to be in the long term. It needs to encompass an idea of where you want to be in the long term. That means hard thinking about the long term, and where you want to be, not just making a to do list for staying put, wrapping in the pseudo corporate language of the day.

The Tragedy of the Commons and The Last Consumer

2010-06-11T23:38:00.000+01:00

As I warned you in the last post, I'm still a little off piste and at the edge of scope thinking about the economic context universities will operate in as the century wears on. Bear with me, I'll stop soon!

My eldest daughter, previously mentioned, wishes to be a Mermaid Musketeer when she grows up. "Wouldn't it be nicer to be a Vet" I think, but I don't say it. I remember how many of today's jobs were (and remain) inconceivable to my father's generation. Maybe Mermaid Musketeers will be in high demand in the 2020's. What do I know.

The conventional narrative of technological development has been that with successive leap forward some gadget or other removes another piece of drudgery from the Toils of Mankind. The newly unemployed riot a little, and then find more fulfilling careers as Advertising Executives, Psychoanalysts and Personal Trainers. Since the plough and irrigation gave us the first agricultural surpluses and allowed priestly and bureaucratic castes to emerge, it's been one of the key narratives of history. Thus, we assert, it will always be so, just as the autumn turkey is confident of a good winters food and a fine spring to come. It ain't necessarily so.

Come with me, if you will, to the supermarket. Tesco, Sainsburys, Walmart, wherever. They in a key place in our world, bringing stuff we need from the four corners of the world into one convenient place, beyond the dreams of any dead King. All strive, rightly, to do so as cheaply and efficiently as possible, cutting costs where they can so they can remain profitable, and competitive on price with the other supermarket down the road. Nothing wrong with that.

A year or two ago, the automated tills were a novelty. People were reluctant to use them, but they have become accepted. It seems slower than the human till, but for a small basket on a busy day, great. I'm sure it means that the supermarket can cut the number of staff at peak times, with one staffer monitoring six or eight autotills. Of course, now that RFIDs are dropping in price, pretty soon we'll just have our trolleys autoscanned on the way out, we can swipe our payment card to exit and be off in moments. Much faster, and it'll be a no brainer compared to waiting in a queue. They can cut most of the till staff. It looks like a horrible job, good riddance.

Meanwhile, back in the storeroom, we'll start seeing more and more machines helping out. It's a lot cheaper to run storerooms with robots. Companies like http://www.kivasystems.com/ are starting to put in place systems that are faster and cheaper to run. Stacking lemons is a bit more complex. It's taken a long time for robots to be able to do that kind of work, but if a robot can fold towels, how far away can a commercial shelf stacker be? A long long time ago, when I was doing my PhD, I paid part of my way stacking shelves for Coca Cola. Great workout No brainpower required.

So as the century wears on, smart supermarket operators will put in those systems. Driven by sales data from the till systems, warehouse robots will load and unload the trucks (no more tricky health and safety issues in the warehouse - no humans allowed) and specialist packer robots will keep the shelves stocked, working mainly at night to minimise human interaction. You could, conceivably, have a complete supermarket shop without dealing with or seeing one human. A nice Augmented Reality system with voice recognition can show you where the cheese is, no shuffling about looking for staff.

There will probably still be a couple of staff though. So many laws assume a shop will have a shopkeeper, it will be hard to avoid having a bored looking manager or greeter around. Technicians may come and go to fix the odd thing, but in time a good R2 unit could replace them. The trucks will still legally require drivers, but as time goes on they will be more closely monitored by expert systems and central controls so they have little or no autonomy. Industry will lobby for UAV trucks to be allowed between, say, three and six am. The accident figures will make their case compelling, eventually.

Of course, in the meantime, most of your food supply will just arrive, a shopping list mediated between the expert systems in your supermarket, your fridge and pantry, the health assist system your health insurer mandates (no more ice cream!(, with a final approving nod from your bank that the delivery fits within the budget you approved. The milk just appears in the fridge, unpacked by your housebot. No more late night runs to the cornershop for milk. Indeed, no more cornershop,as the few that survived the death of the newspaper close up.

In this future, who actually works in the supermarket? We have a few drivers and perhaps a half dozen staff per megastore so there is enough to cover 24/7 opening, annual leave and so on with always one person instore. We would imagine teeming head office, but as AI's and expert systems improve, we need less and less there. Tasks are hived off to expert systems or outsourced to some up and coming service provider where brains are cheap. Productivity per worker, as measured, becomes immense. There just aren't that many workers anymore.

The supermarket story sounds trivial as presented, but you can, with a little imagination, infer a similar story in many industries. A large proportion of our jobs are semi skilled, and do not really demand much brainpower. All the unskilled and semiskilled people who, even in the first world, make the service sector hum are going to be in trouble.

Now, your local supermarket is still making money. It's still paying people, just much less, more highly skilled people, and of course larger dividends to the owners. Who, exactly, is shopping in this supermarket, and with what? All those unemployed people? Henry Ford is alleged to have paid his workers over the odds, as he felt anyone working for him should be able to afford the cars they are making. What's happening here is a parody of that. With each reduction in workforce, there are less and less consumers who can actually afford to buy very much. It's like the Tragedy of the Commons. In this classic economic fable, it pays each farmer to graze the commons as heavily as possible, even though, in the long run, it will destroy the grazing and ruin them all. Increasing automation to increase productivity and cuts costs is a sensible, responsible decision for any business. Each time it happens, it reduces the pool of gainfully employed consumers until there are none left. So whose left with money to shop? Only a handful of highly paid core staff, and the shareholders, mainly pension plans for people who'll never be able to afford to retire.

Historically, of course, the displaced labour has migrated to newer and more interesting professions, but as the machines get smarter and smarter, the pool of professions that only humans can do gets smaller and smaller. I've already blogged about Emily Howell, the virtual composer and other examples of Artificial intelligences tackling problems long thought to be human only. It's also worth noting the set of problems faced by a business are not all best solved by a brain designed for staying alive on the savannah. Intelligences not as smart as us, but different, might do just fine. Think of chess as an example. Or sorting post, or telephone switchboard operators. The machines may even do better, since they lack some of the human brains many, many cognitive bugs. They don't have to be as smart as us, they just have to be smart enough. And besides, who says we're that smart?

Science Fiction writers readily paint pictures of utopian post scarcity societies, where humans live in abundance. Roddenberry's Federation is the classic example, or more recently Iain M. Banks' Culture Novels. The question unanswered is how do we get there from here. The technological path is clear, tractable, and generally plausible. There is however no guarantee that our economic model will be able to adapt to it. Changing economic models is a somewhat risky operation.

Human history has, of late, been an extraordinary positive narrative. While the History Channel drones on about the great wars of the 20th century, we as a humans live in unprecedented numbers and affluence. Famine, poverty and war, once the global norm, as seen as failures, problems to be contained and solved, not accepted. Much of this prosperity comes from technological change. But there is no guarantee that this will continue. It's conceivable that our economic model, structured around rationing and scarcity, might bring us to some kind of dead end. Increasingly homogeneous government models, where each country operates in much the same way following agreed international norms, limits the capacity for different countries to respond in different ways and for new approaches to evolve.

I'm not advocating a stop on technological development. That is impossible, and unwise. We still need to move fast forward to bring the levels of comfort we have largely reached in the first world to all, and solve some of the problems we've created along the way. But we need to be agile and pragmatic about how our societies are organised, and start keeping a good close eye on numbers like the Gini coefficient, so that things don't get ugly. We need to be open for other ways of doing business, and mindful of how we can keep our economic models flexible and adaptable. I'm not preaching anarchism or socialism. I suspect the exact 'ism we will need hasn't been quite invented yet.

As for what it means for Universities, it's hard to tell. In the long run (and I'm thinking a century out here, at least), I think there will be big shift away from professional/ vocational training we see a lot of now, where the focus is often on getting a job at the other end. In a world where there is no job at the other end, or at least, nothing you or I would think of as a job (is blogging a real job?) what people will do in Universities might look a lot more like recreational activity to us today.

That seems like a big leap, but look at our world through the eyes of an early graduate of Bologna or Oxford. Our Universities might look pretty easy to them. No memorisation, no hand copying books. And the jobs out the other end? I don't know how many hours a scribe to Emperor Barbarossa worked, but I suspect they worked harder and longer than a 21st century middle management white collar type.

We're a little further along the road than we might think.

The Three Economies of Plenty

2010-06-11T18:30:00.000+01:00

First, some apologies on two counts. Firstly I'm going to swing to the edge of scope for a post or two, as I'm thinking a little bit about economic context in which Universities will operate as the century wears on. I want to capture some thoughts I have on that, which sit at the edge of scope, both in terms of topic, as they don't address Universities specifically and in terms of time, looking ahead towards the centuries end. Apologies are also due that this topic is at the edge of my expertise, I'm no economist, a point which will no doubt become painfully evident presently.

The 21st century will be a century of 3 economies, material, informational and experiental, or, for short, stuff, ideas and fun. Right now the three economies are entangled, confused and confounded. That will change over time.

The material economy is the most familiar. You buy stuff, you make stuff, you sell stuff. For a long time, it didn't go anywhere much, as the supply and variety of stuff was limited - mainly potatoes in Ireland, it seems.Basic economic constructs like supply and demand curves come from this economy. It started to get interesting a few hundred years ago when industrialization greatly increased the volume and range of goods available. Supply up, cost down, demand up, world economy go go go!

This kind of economy will approach, but not hit, the bumpers over the next century. Environmentalists tell us finite resources and raw material supply puts physical limits on the worlds capacity to make stuff and we must all make do with less. Perhaps. More likely, in my view, is that we will hit the limits of what we can consume. There are only a finite number of cars, phones and shoes we can actually own. Even in my lifetime, attitudes to material goods have shifted. A house heavy with possessions is an anchor, not an asset. When everything is available, 24/7, there is no need to accumulate your own personal warehouse - you can buy what you need, when you need it. We may continue to buy more expensive objects as status symbols (the Mercedes instead of the Skoda) but the amount of physical goods involved, and the relative functionality of those goods won't change much. To put it another way, there is only so much cake we can eat. It might be very good cake, hand baked in Switzerland by the latest celebrity chef and flown in by SST, but it's still cake. In some cases, the real status is to have less, drowning in possessions in unfashionable. Who wants a GPS, an MP3 player,a portable a HD handycam and a phone nowadays when you can have them all in one slim device?

This economy does have a fair bit left to run - the sons and daughters of Chad have a long walk in the dust, generations, until they reach the point where that third hovercar is just an encumbrance, but their grandchildren will get there.

The second economy is the information economy - books, music, movies and media. For a long time, people thought this was just an annex of the physical economy. From the first Bible at 30 florins to the last DVD Series Box Set at €9.99 in the bargain bin, people thought they were selling physical objects, when they were really selling the information encoded on them. By creating a finite number of copies, you could create an artificially limited supply and slip into the working patterns of the material economy without trouble.

This economy, as you may have noticed, is in trouble. Napster smashed the illusion of scarcity. Now we all understand that the marginal cost of a piece of information is zero. In the age of the eBook, no bestseller can sell out. Because humans have a herd instinct, and like to have something to talk to each other about, there are still hit singles, blockbusters and bestsellers which are valued enough that they can conceivably charge for access - some TV stations make a tidy sum charging people to view soaps online - a day early. Others services charge for convenience - it's easier to pay 99c for a song on iTunes than to hunt for a dubious download. Undercutting the whole process is open content, open to all, distributed at no cost. You may want to be paid for your column in the newspaper, but ten others behind you will blog the topic for purely for glory. Your book may be insightful and comprehensive, but I'll get the gist of the topic on Wikipedia first.

This economy will sort itself out into a working model over the next decade or two, and then hit the buffers of demand. Just like physical goods, there is a limit to what humans can consume. We can only read, watch, and listen to so much in a day. Time is finite. It doesn't matter how compelling your new album is, I'm all compelled out. I don't have time to watch TV, but I keep a list, I call it the Dribble List, of stuff I'd like to watch sometime. When I get to a stage in life when all I can do is dribble, and hit the pause button so I can make a rude suggestion to the RoboNurses, I'll catch up. Maybe.

The third economy is the experience economy. It's the holiday, the restaurant meal, the night at the theatre. It's not like the information economy, for every person having an experience there is a real, often very high, marginal cost. Supply is somewhat elastic - new restaurants sprout remarkably quickly when the economy improves). Except sometimes it isn't - only a handful of people can climb Everest each year, there are only so many tickets for the Met, and so many unspoilt beaches. Unmet demand is enormous, as we have more and more free time, we increasingly want to do something more compelling with it than watch Big Brother, if we have the money. People in the second economy are smartly moving into the third, if they weren't there already. I'm going to a Suzanne Vega concert tomorrow. I spent more on two tickets than I would to buy her entire back catalogue, and she'll get a bigger cut out of it. Musicians will make more from concert tours, authors from public speaking engagements, TV stars will make more from stage shows and tours.

The interesting thing about these economies is they run on a system designed to manage scarcity in the first, physical economy. If there is only so much stuff to go around, then it makes sense to invent money as a measure of need, and give the stuff to the person who will give you the most. The ideas of supply and demand, fundamental to economic thought and theory, come from this economy of stuff. The rules make no sense in an information economy, where the marginal cost drops to zero. Similarly, in a world without scarcity, these rules make less sense. We have to create artificial scarcity, in a overpriced, designer limited edition batches, to keep prices up. Despite the best efforts of marketing gurus, everything can be had, in quality far better than our parents had, in the bargain warehouse, at the China price.

Healthcare is an interesting example of an experience economy which breaks our economic models. We have trouble, globally, in finding models for funding healthcare that work because our economic models simply don't work when supply is finite and at high marginal cost, but customers have no choice but to get it. You can buy rice instead of wheat, but dialysis is dialysis.

Education, particularly tertiary education, would see itself firmly in the experience economy. Tertiary education changes your brain, your heart, and often your liver. It's an real experience. Let's not forget though, that many Universities still have one large boot in the information economy. Libraries, lectures, course programmes and journals were part of the package of information you bought access to with your fees. Universities who spend a lot of effort on that need to think again. You can't make a buck on something that become free or bulk commodity, unless you have superstar lecturers, the Simon Schamas and Niall Fergusons who will by virtue of their status attract keen students and make you more marketable.

The smart move is to give the information away for free and focus on the experience. Anything else is swimming against the tide. 'Destroy your business' wrote Jack Welch, former celebrity Ego CEO of General Electric. He was wrong about a lot of things (who isn't), but right about that. What he meant was - think what a disruptive competitor could do that would put you out of business. Do it. Do it to them before they do it to you. MIT understood this when they launched their open courseware initiative. Universities who put their very best high value content up on youtube and iTunesU for free understand this. It doesn't matter if it isn't sustainable in the long term. In the long term, as Keynes put it, we're all dead. Another 15 years and the sector will be so unrecognisably scrambled that everything will be different anyway. The 21st century is like being trapped in a burning building. You might not know where to go, but you better drop and crawl as fast as you can, 'cos staying put isn't going to keep you alive for much longer.

Black Swans and The Fifth Megatrend.

2010-06-07T17:40:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading Nassim Talebs book ' The Black Swan'. It's essential reading if you are thinking about forecasting, and a lucid and entertaining read as well..

The core idea is that many processes thought to be governed by Gaussian distributions are really governed by Power Law Distributions. For example, over a short term, much financial data looks like it clusters around an average value, in the same way as height or weight does. In fact it's a Power Law, where larger scale events are increasingly rare, but overpoweringly large. Over a short or selective term, a set of data like, say, the the size and frequency of bank collapses, drilling accidents or airline disruptions seems like a simple normal distribution, with the probability of severe events tiny and easily quantified. A day later, events make fools of us all.

This idea impacts on recents posts where I set out four key trends which I thought would drive the story or tertiary education through the 21st century: Demographics, Economics, Telepresence and Artificial Intelligence. In each of these trends I somewhat boldly extend a current trend in a broad swish across the century ahead and consider the effects. As Taleb would argue, I am like the Turkey extrapolating his ever increasing meals and weight gain to dream of the mighty bird he will be come spring - a simple inductive fallacy.

It's worth taking the time to consider the rationale behind each of those trends, and how much inertia they have. Are they indeed driven by fairly dull, Gaussian processes, where, for example economic growth generally flits around two or three percent a year, with the occasional wobble up or down a few percent, or are great surges over and back possible - Black Swans, in Talebs language.

Population growth seems to be at fairly low risk of a major shift. It's a consequence of many factors; how many children people want to have, how many they can have, and how long they live. The biological factors are well bounded, at the bottom (you can't have negative children) and at the top (It's really unlikely you'll have 14 children, or live to 200). The variables are driven by things with a lot of inertia - how many children you would like is keyed to economic factors and social expectations which change slowly. Infant mortality is keyed to economic wealth, and how long you live is usually driven by economics too, through the sum of your lifestyle and health from womb to tomb. So population forecasts have a lot of mass behind them. Given that uncertainties coming from basic factors like birth rates and so on amount to over a billion people either way, it would take a particularly vigorous pandemic, or an enthusiastically conducted nuclear war to make much of a difference.

Economic growth is the most interesting one. Predicting 10 fold increase in wealth feels bold in the current climate, but that's just 2.5% a year. Anything under 1% is declared a disaster by the media. Many developing economies scarcely felt the 'Global Financial Crisis' of 2009 and are still growing at rates well in excess of 2.5%. A lot of this growth is probably technologically driven, but given that a very sizeable minority of the worlds population have yet to benefit from the inventions of the 20th century, even if we invent nothing of note from now on, there is plenty of scope. There are limits to economic growth, particularly in the physical 'economy of stuff'. There is only so much physical stuff we can own or consume, and so much physical stuff we can make. The sustainable economics of information, with a marginal cost of zero, is still a subject of debate. It is bold, but not implausible, to suppose that whatever the overall level of growth in the 21st century, the regional inequalities that arose out of the industrial and colonial age will largely even out.

Good quality Telepresence seems like a no brainer - an engineering problem, with an obvious economic payoff for a solution. I can't see how it couldn't come to pass, all else being equal, although some forward advances in the affordability and speed of physical travel might delay it's adoption. Any kind of adverse system shock, like a high mortality pandemic or war, would hit transport nets more and promote telepresence.

Artificial Intelligence is probably the rockiest potential megatrend. Others might not even consider it - it will arrive as a Black Swan to many. Moore's law is a classic inductive case. The long established historical trend doesn't prove it will continue for one more day, no more than the Turkey feeding schedule does. That said, some of the worlds biggest R&D budgets are feeding this turkey and making ever more powerful chips. It's also noting that the law refers to the cost of a unit of processing power, not pure component density. Even if you hit physical wall on component density, as is frequently prophesied, there is still plenty mileage in making chips cheaper, and with better utilisation making the power cheaper at the desktop. Think of the difference between a chip on a desktop PC, spending most of it's life running screensavers and Freecell, and the same chip in a server farm, running at optimum 24/7/365. Granted it might be running Farmville, but you get the idea. If anything, the risk for Moores law is that something like Quantum Computing will come out of leftfield and rapidly accelerate the curve.

Raw processing power doesn't necessarily mean human like artificial intelligence, but it will chip away at it, until the differences seem pedantic. When the machines can answer the phone, read your x-ray, drive your car and write your essay for you, who cares whether it's 'real' or 'fake' AI.

Overall, Technology seems to be the most risky quarter, with the potential to pull out Black Swans like rabbits out of a hat. It seems likely that they would be 'positive' Black Swans - developments in unexpected places, rather than negative Black Swans, when expected things fail to happen. That said a negative black swan, like perhaps an elegantly tailored bioweapon, cannot be dismissed.

Of course, Taleb would no doubt argue that focusing on these four trends is missing the point. The key trend, the main event that will shape tertiary education in the next century isn't any of those - it's something we haven't -can't - imagine yet, some surprise out of left field that will change the narrative, for better or for worse - Fifth Megatrend, the Black Swan.

Why Predications Fail.

2010-04-30T06:53:00.000+01:00

You can't talk about the future of Tertiary education without making predictions. If you are not prepared to put your neck on the block and say what you think is going to happen, it's a pointless exercise. Predicting puts you in harm way - almost all forecasts about the future are wrong.

Before I make too many predictions, It's worth reviewing why predictions fail.

1. Failure to account for economics as a key driver, rather than technology.

Flying cars are a great example here. People think because a thing can be done, it will. We don't go to work in flying cars because they are impossible - they're not. They're just to expensive, and it's cheaper to go by road.

2. Failure to consider human factors and rates of change.

A thing can be done a better way, but you have to wait for the old ones who do it the old way to die off first. This is especially important in Universities, where the great old ones live long.The paperless office comes to mind as an example. I've worked in one, it was great. There weren't any old people there who liked to print things off and scribble on them.

3. Predicting out of area of expertise

People who are experts in one field assume expertise in others. Artists imagining space travel is a nice example. There are nice paintings, but I'm not flying in that, thanks. A lot of people fail on technology driven predictions here, often the devil is in the details. Another reason we don't have many paperless offices is that until recently, the screens just weren't good enough, and the software tools for easy annotation weren't either. Generalists sweeping past miss those kinds of details.

4. Failure to account for changes out of area of expertise

This is really the converse of the above reason. There is a tendency to assume that changes you know about will dominate, and changes you do not know about are unimportant. For comparison, consider Ray Kurzwiel Singularity work - focused on technology with George Friedman's 'The Next 100 years' book - focused on geopolitics. Both are fine pieces of work by experts in their field, well argued and, like all predictions, probably wrong. Both focus heavily on developments in the authors own area of expertise, and miss, or err, on key topics outside the field.

5. Wishful thinking.

Confusing 'We Can' 'We Should' and 'We aught" with what will probably occur. A prediction is not a wish, or a hope, it is a cold, rational analysis of what is likely to occur, whether we like it or not.

6. Predicting the Weather, not the Climate

When people think of predicting, they think of predicting earthquakes, or the stock market, or the weather. You can't predict these in any detail. They are essentially random noise in a pattern. You can predict where earthquakes are likely, that stock markets will exist and be useful, and that there will be weather. Very specific predications often fail not (just) because they are more specific bets on a random future, but because they are attempting to predict things on too fine a scale. Big trends have a mass, an inertia to them that is often the elephant in the room, too big to see. How the big trends collide and play out is important, but as humans we get lost in the human scale details. It's said no one predicted the First World War (and yet, every general staff in Europe had a plan for it for decades). It's true we couldn't predict the details of it, but history tells us that Great Power wars happen a lot, and technology and economics could tell us they would get bigger, and meaner. In the big scale of things, who fought, who won and who lost, the "Battles and Kings" school of history, don't matter so much. What was important to predict was that there would be battles and kings.

Number 5, Wishful thinking, is about the only one I'm confident of avoiding. Point 2 (rates of change) and point 6 (scale of prediction) are always going to be tricky, and the others all rely on having the right spread and depth of expertise - knowing enough about enough things to get the big picture right but not miss sneaky details.

Review: DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

2010-04-29T10:42:00.001+01:00

"DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education", by Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.

This is good introduction to the current state of tertiary education in the United States, the Open Education movement and the potential for technology driven disruption to the sector.

The book is tightly focused on the US situation, the rest of the world gets an honourable mention.

The first half is a fairly critical overview of the state of Tertiary Education in the US. It's interesting, but the issues are not as valid for Europe where the costs are lower, and social inequality less severe. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for the US is currently around 47, about the same as places like Kenya, and Jamaica, compared to 35 in Ireland, where I write, or 24 in egalitarian Denmark. The extent of the problems in the US system are alarming, and a good warning for those who might ape the American system.

Kamenetz takes the view that much of higher education in the US is a racket. High cost enforces scarcity of space at elite institutions, and filters out students from advantaged backgrounds. The Graduates from elite institutions, filtered by class and economics before their first day on campus, then proceed to do well and form the next generation of the elite. They even promote themselves on the basis of their selectivity:

"It's like Weight watchers advertising that they only take skinny people."

The system excludes many on grounds of costs, and many more enter the system, incur student debt and yet fail to graduate to reap the marginal benefits of a degree at a lesser college. She is critical of a system where everyone aspires to go to college, when not everyone needs to, and every college aspires to compete with Harvard. The cheap credit of the 00's drove massive expansion of student debt as people borrowed vast amounts of easy money for degrees they often never completed, driving spiralling fees as people equated cost with exclusivity and quality.

In the second half of the book she moves on to talk about solutions, driven by technology, and the Open Education movement. Why pay fees when you can get the knowledge for free? Why go to such expense to build social networks when we can build networks of people with a common interests faster and cheaper online? She correctly identifies assessment and accreditation as the critical points not easily solved online, and raises the question of whether in the internet age, online portfolios of work could replace conventional accreditation. She cites the idea of open source projects in Software, where a potential hire can be checked out in advance by the quality of their work in open source software projects. Ideas like 'Whuffie' and smart assessments get a mention too.

It's a good overview of the topic. All the main events, players and ideas, from The MIT Open Courseware through to Personal Learning Environments, The University of the People and Massive Open Online Courses are covered in brief. If you've been following thinkers like Stephen Downes, David Wiley and George Siemens online, there won't be much here that is new to you, but if you've only heard the terms Edupunk and Open Educational Resources, then it's an quick primer on what going on in the sector, and what changes it could bring.

It's short, clear and to the point. The author is a journalist not an academic, and it shows. Few academics write so clearly, most would drag it out to 400 pages to little extra effect. Even if you are familiar with the ground, it's probably worth a read. If you are not, and have an interest, it's a good starting point.

I

The New Centre of the World

2010-04-28T14:49:00.000+01:00

"A special report on innovation in emerging markets: The world turned upside down." Adrian Woolridge The Economist, April 15th 2010.

This article attacks the conventional narrative of globalisation, and suggests that it is the 'emerging markets' and not the old core of developed world that is taking the lead on innovation. The old narrative was that we in the west did the smart, clever work, and places like India and China did the boring, donkey work. The iPod story is the textbook example, supposedly, of the total cost of an iPod made in China, only $4 worth is the actual assembly in China. The lions share of the cost is clever, western engineers and marketing people doing clever things that can't be done in China. Not surprisingly, it wasn't going to stay that way for long. The survey tells us how companies in 'emerging markets' driven by local problems of poverty, poor distribution and so on, are making better, cheaper and smarter products than we do in the West.

It's not in the least bit surprising. I always found the idea that the West somehow had an unassailable lead on cleverness was vaguely racist, and sloppy analysis to boot. It was dramatically disproved at Pearl Harbour (or Tsusima if you were a quick learner).

In Education the old core still has the advantage, it is alleged. The article notes that:

"McKinsey reckons that only 25% of India's engineering graduates...and 10% of those with degrees of any kind are qualified to work for a multinational company."

But that apparent advantage will erode quickly. McKinsey might not think they're good enough, but they are young, hungry and cheap. The sheer volume of graduates being produced is intimidating:

"China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science and India produces 60,000 every year"

"Between them, these two counties produce twice as many people with advanced degrees in engineering or computer sciences as the United States every year (more if you allow for the fact the 50% of American engineering degrees are awarded to foreigners, most of them Indians of Chinese)"

India and China see education as a strategic imperative, counting production of graduates as a measure of national power, as the Imperial states of Europe once counted production of Coal, Steel and Dreadnoughts. They have a steep hill to climb to build capacity, but will find workarounds. For example, article mentions the Infosys Campus in Mysore, the worlds largest corporate training facility, training 15,000 people a year. It's "harder than Harvard" notes Fortune magazine, taking only 1% of over 1 million applicants.

This kind of workaround is needed for employers to overcome poor quality and supply of graduates. The steady flow west to earn degrees in Europe or the US is another workaround for the wealthiest. I imagine there is a lot of other interesting approaches being taken on the ground - the scale of demand offers no alternatives. Places our parents generation associated with famine and poverty are now the worlds middle class, and in the next generation will transition from having a small minority of education to Tertiary level to majority, perhaps even universal tertiary education. Consider the effects of the (much smaller) scale of the GI Bill on tertiary education in the US as an clue of what it will bring.

Even inside the often freshly build walls of conventional universities, a radically different environment and set of drivers as this transition passes will surely create a model of tertiary education very different from what it might be in Harvard, or the Sorbonne.

The scale of the transition will define a new centre of the world in terms of Tertiary Education (and many other things). It is our first world model that will become the outlier - the unusual. Much like English has been adopted as a world language, and becomes a different, richer thing, so too in education. Innovations in practice from places like Mysore will be brought back to the old core. The language of degrees and credits will be taken up by the new, but beneath the names, built from scratch. Perhaps it will not be built as a parrot copy, but as a very different beast indeed.

The survey text is at economist.com and there is also interview with the Adrian Woolridge, who wrote the piece.

The Four Forces: Driving Change to 2100AD

2010-04-21T17:06:00.000+01:00

Four great trends will drive change in Tertiary education to 2100. I've introduced them in previous posts, but let's take a minute to line them up:

Demographics: 10 billion, mostly old people. World population will stabilise at around 10 billion people, and they will be increasingly old. An average age of 55 is not unreasonable by 2100. Longer lifespans will bring more people back for second and third dips into tertiary education, or indeed continuous education. Overall, the sector might be ten times as large as it is today. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a large portion of the population over 18 might be engaged, in some form, in tertiary education.

Economics: The end of scarcity. A continuation of the 20th century trend would bring another tenfold increase in per capita GDP, making the world, on average, as rich as todays richest country (Norway). Only people at the very margins of society will be unable to afford tertiary education. In the first half of the century, vast cohorts in the old 'Third World' will want, and be able to afford, University educations.

Telepresence: The Death of Distance. Increasingly compelling, immersive and reliable telepresent environments will render the idea of bringing people together in one physical space for education or work a quaint anachronism. Teams or classes may come together once or twice a year, for novelties sake, but true telepresence will make geographic distance as old fashioned an idea as posting personal correspondence in physical mail..

Artificial Intelligence: Smarts too cheap to meter. The steady process of Moores law will create machines with processing power to match the human mind relatively early in the century. Distributed processing will allow systems to draw on immense processing power when needed, and present machines as cheaper alternatives to most jobs currently done by humans. User interfaces that can pass a Turing test will make machine staff indistinguishable from humans. Why hire a human receptionist to answer the phone when the phone comes a processor that can do the job, that doesn't need coffee. When a 1000 euro machine is smarter than anyone you can hire, why hire anyone? The consequences for economics and employment is staggering, and managing the transition will be a huge issue from mid century on.

These are simple extrapolations of well established trends, none of which have any major roadblocks in sight. It's difficult to make a compelling case against any of them. As of 2010, these trends have massive inertia behind them -it's difficult to imagine what scale of events could derail them.

That's not to say that nothing else will happen. Few in 1900 would have predicted the ubiquity of Automobiles, air travel or the Internet. But in 1900, the key trends that set the tone of the 20th century - population growth, economic growth and urbanisation, were in motion. Geopolitical events (like the world wars) could not have been forecast in detail, but the logic of industrialisation made it inevitable that great power wars would get bigger, and worse, until they became so destructive and expensive as to be not worth the risk. We could not have predicted the 747, but we could have predicted that economic growth would have made international travel relatively cheap and easy - we might have predicted a super Zeppelin.

Having mapped out these trends, the challenge now is to figure out what the consequences of these trends are for Tertiary Education, not just in isolation, but as these trends interact and interlock. The second challenge is that the future is not path independent. We don't just wake up in 2100, with institutions and people perfectly attuned to it, no more than our institutions and peopel in 2010 are perfect fits for the world today. As the century plays out, existing institutions will adapt, or maladapt to the changes. Peoples ideas and preconceptions will change, but only in generational slow time. The future is not a destination everyone arrives at once, it's kind of smeared out, as William Gibson said:

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed"

Live Long and Prosper: Universities at the end of History.

2010-04-20T22:39:00.000+01:00

Gapminder.org is great chart candy. Check out this one. Behind the lovely bouncing balls of that linked chart is a fantastic story. Per capita GDP increased by a factor of 10 between 1900 and 2000, despite a great depression, two world wars and the Spanish flu, and all the other ails and woes of the 20th century. Not only is he richer, but Mr Joe Average Earthling lives much longer than in 1900, and can expect to have less children, and have them all outlive him. It's a remarkable achievement that never makes the newspapers. Quiet victories, won at a few percent a year, don't make headlines.

Extrapolate the graph a bit and by 2100, as the worlds population begins to shrink, Earth will have about 10 billion people with an average per capita GDP in today's money a little shy of 100,000 US Dollars. This is staggering wealth. Only Norway and Luxembourg have numbers like this today. Imagine a whole world, on average, as rich as Norwegians.

The importance of GDP per capita is hotly debated by economists who live in economies with high GDPs per capita. Drawing on their excellent education, they argue it isn't really a good measure of social progress. In warm, comfortable well equipped offices they debate the hidden costs of economic growth. The healthy, long lived, well fed and educated grandchildren of todays 'bottom billion' can debate the matter in 2100.

It sounds like Utopia, the real end of History, the land of plenty. There are plenty of 'black swans': rare events that could be imagined, but given that this vision is just an extrapolation of what happened in the 20th century, we could waste a couple of decades in brutal warfare, have a good plague and throw a few nukes around and still reach the target. Global warming at the extreme end is about the only scenario that could derail the sheer inertia of the trend.

What place will Universities have in this new Utopia? An obvious answer is 'About the same as in Norway' but this isn't so. The currently developed world grew rather slowly at first. Many of it's universities existed in seed form for a long time. When mass tertiary education arrived after the second world war, preexisting institutions grew rapidly to soak the numbers, on a substrate of fairly good infrastructure at secondary and primary level.

The big developing economies are growing faster than the first world did. Places like China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia have huge populations on the cusp of a point where they will need, and their people will demand, tertiary educations. The sizes of the potential cohorts in these countries is staggering. Conventional university models will be simply crushed by the volumes. Even if you could build campuses big enough, fast enough, who would teach the classes? In conventional models, it takes 8 years to turn a smart first year undergraduate into a keen junior lecturer - and the smartest graduates will get a lot of better offers. Expect academics from the first world, with longer pedigrees that may sell well locally, to be poached.

It's in this climate, not in the mature first world markets, that online learning, distance learning and open courseware models will really find traction. Without strong existing cartels fighting for an 18th century status quo, college educated parents and employers with old fangled notions of what a degree should involve, and with huge incentives to deliver, governments in these countries can, and must, leapfrog the current model of a University into something new.

To see the model for the future of Tertiary Education, look south.

The end of 'College Age'

2010-04-19T22:31:00.000+01:00

"The Shock of the Old: Welcome to the Elderly Age" by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 8 April 2010.

Mature Students are a pain in the neck. Long ago, I was a postgrad demonstrator in a Friday afternoon mineralogy lab You could count on the regular students tearing through the work and being gone by 3pm. Not the mature students. They asked question after question - it was worse - far worse, than a PhD viva. At 6pm when the lab officially ended, you had to prize their eyes of the microscopes and chase them out the door.

There's going to be a lot more of them. Worldwide, the human race is having less children, and living longer. Countries like Japan lead the charge, but the rest of the first world will follow. Even countries like China won't be far behind. The economic and social impact of this change will be far reaching, perhaps the most significant change of the 21st century.

It's also probably the change Universities are best prepared for. Many campuses teem with life after the day students go home, as the second shift, evening students, pour in.

As ever, economics drives change where ideologies cannot. As the conventional 'college age' market has reached near saturation in the first world, universities seeking growth went for mature students. They are also seen as a cash cow. Where day students are often state funded or supported (in Europe), evening and mature students are typically fee paying, or, better yet, employer funded.. The older audience are in many ways easier pickings. They are more likely to be geographically tied by houses, jobs and children schools. This makes them less mobile, so it's much easier for a University to dominate it's physically local market. Their children might be able to travel and study anywhere, but they need somewhere close to the office.

The sheer scale of them will change the shape of Universities. Instead of having them looked after by an Adult and Continuing Education unit tucked away in a distant office, you might think of them as the core business and imagine a Day Student unit looking after the now unusual requirements of full time, first time, young adult students. The strange timetables designed on the assumption that students will be on the premises 5 days a week in ever shorter, seasonal terms will finally have to be let go.

Adults with jobs and children will want to pick of modules here and there over years, not put their lives on hold for several years to complete a degree sized chunk at a full time pace. Universities will need to look towards marketing individual modules, often tailored for local industries, rather than selling degree sized packages. In many cases, the adult learners already have degrees, and don't want another - they just want to learn a specific skill.

They won't be much interested much in the social side of University life. Where a first time student is interested in building the network of friends they will carry through their lives, or finding a spouse, mature students mostly have all that sorted out. They'll be pleased to meet new people, sure, but it's not going to be a big thing for them. Conventional student life can expect to wither and die unless it can reach out to the mature students.

Finally, older students learn differently. They are more outcomes focused, and don't suffer fools gladly. They know what time in class costs, both in money, and lost family time, and want to get the best out of it. Having worked in professional environments, they'll expect higher standards than the 18-26 years olds will, and they won't be afraid to speak their mind if they aren't getting what they are paying for. That might well be the biggest change of all.

The Collapse of Universities? Not so fast.

2010-04-13T22:51:00.000+01:00

"The Collapse of Complex Business Models" Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com Accessed April 12th 2010

Much talk on the web about Clay Shirky's recent blog post. Shirky draws on Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies to make inferences for complex business models. The idea goes that societies get more and more complex, and the benefit of each added complexity reduces until eventually a break point is reached. The layers of complexity make the society inflexible and incapable of change, so when confronted with external strains, it collapses. I haven't read Tainter's work, but Shirky, as ever, provides a sharp précis, and draws inferences for the future of conventional, complex, media organisations.

This was widely praised and argued across the web. While Harold Jarche talks about the differences between 'Complex' and 'Complicated' , Christopher Sessums draws the inference over into the educational space, moving on to argue that

"The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. "

Steady on there.

While to many commentators working within the walls of a University, it may seem that the University, their University, is in fact a Complex Society, in the same sense as Ancient Rome, Maya, etc. and is thus doomed.

This is not the case. Universities are closer or organisms in an ecosystem than a self contained and isolated society. An organisation, or an organism exists in an ecosystem, as one of many. A society, almost by definition, occupies an entire ecosystem, and has limited interaction, if any, with other societies. Most of the collapsed societies on History (and I think of those listed in Jared Diamond's work 'Collapse') existed in near isolation.

As organisms in a system, universities evolve. They eat up smaller institutions to dominate a niche, or split of side campuses to enter new spaces. They relentlessly share their DNA, as Universities heads look over their shoulders and shamelessly copy the innovations of others. Universities fight for resources, funding, students among themselves, where a Society usually co-opts all of the resources in it's zone of control and operates without competitive challenge.

Make no mistake, Universities are dinosaurs. They can crush you, outrun you and outbreed you. They dominate their ecosystem to the exclusions of all others, existing in astonishing diversity, and repeatedly adapting to environmental change. What it took to get rid of the dinosaurs wiped out almost everything else as well. The same is true here. If Universities become non viable institutions, then their collapse will be the least of our worries.

Universities are not going to go gently into the night. They won't wave their hands in the air, cry that it's all to complicated (or was it complex?) and shut their doors. Some will no doubt go under, but most will adapt and survive, ruthlessly ripping out the DNA from models that work and re-engineering themselves for Internet Age. They will do it in University Time, not Internet time, but they have enough inertia for that not to matter. In fact, a slower response to change will insulate them from short timescale fads (Would you wish you had bet the farm on CD-ROMS? WAP?).

It may not seem so from this blog, but overall I'm bullish about the likelihood of Universities surviving the next century. So long as there is a need for people to be educated to a high level, beyond what can be learned in a self directed way, Universities will be doing that business.

Open Educational Resources are not Open Education.

2010-04-07T11:44:00.000+01:00

There always seems to be chatter on the web about Open Educational Resources, Patent Wars, Copyright wars and so forth. I don't really get it, to be frank. It feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Queen Mary. Open Educational Resources are only small step in a journey that began long ago.

The marginal cost of reproducing knowledge has been in a long downward trend since the invention of writing, and with it the cost of accessing and creating knowledge. Gutenberg, Pamphlets, Penny Dreadfuls and Penguin paperbacks each marked a step along the path as knowledge became more widely and cheaply available. From time to time, a hero pushes things on (Carnegie of the Libraries and Berners Lee of the web come to mind) or pulls things back (The Catholic Church's rearguard action against the reformation, or corporate media's 'War on Piracy'). Neutral figures (Steve Jobs comes to mind) attract unreasonable levels attention as both sides wonder if they are truly friend or foe.

Each drop in the cost of reproduction brings new providers into the market and by improving the range and quality of available knowledge. Printing allowed Johann Carolus and Thomas Archer to create the first newspapers. The Web brought us Wikipedia and Youtube, but it also brought you and me. Each step onwards drives existing monopoly providers into extinction, be they Monasteries or Murdoch.

Each step down in cost makes knowledge accessible to more and more people. In the age of the monasteries, access to knowledge meant being able to afford some years in the monastery. Now it means the cost of a broadband connection and a computer, or a local library with the same, for the poor and determined. The pool of people who can be self taught, and take sole ownership of their learning expands a little each time as it become cheaper and easier to do so. Significantly, the current expansion makes it open to people outside the comfortable first world Universities which house most of the commentators on Open Educational Resources. The greatest benefit of the web will be to the billions of humans accessing them on scrounged hardware from the vast favelas of the emerging world. They are a lot more motivated than we are, and they don't have a lot of other educational options. They want to know how to speak English and do double entry bookeeping, grow hydroponic khat and make IEDs. Our debates about the relative virtues of Learning Object Repositary models and what Blackboard is up to are about as relevant to them as the Council of Trent.

But free content isn't Free Education. Formal Education as most people imagine it typically involves material (he textbook, notes and so on) a Guide figure (teacher, head abbot, whatever) and a peer group (the class). It's getting cheaper, but it isn't free.

The web has dropped the marginal cost of a peer group to near zero. In the enlightenment era, access to an educational peer group meant having the time and money to hang around in coffee shops in London or Amsterdam. Now it's 4chan and Facebook. If you get stuck, there is always a discussion thread somewhere you can ask on, once you have a web connection.

but the marginal cost of the Guide figure hasn't dropped a penny since Aristotle taught Alexander. Guiding doesn't scale - it's a one to one. Teachers usually confound creating or presenting content (lecturing, which scales very well) with Guiding. Many teachers don't guide at all. Guides are supposed to know how students are doing, assess (as in the old latin root 'To Sit Beside") and help and direct. Our technology can't scale that up.

Historically, each leap forward in technology makes Guides look more and more expensive compared to content and peers, and better access to content and peers makes more and more people able to do without mentors and guides to learning. Printed bibles made Priests look out of touch and unnecessary:
"Perhaps we can learn it just by reading the book" wondered the Lutherans.
"No Way!" said the Catholic Church, knowledge monopolist of the day.
The resulting pedagogical debate on the relevance of guides vs learning out of the book consumed millions of lives and lasted centuries. One hopes the struggle between the Universities and Edupunks will not involve quite so much blood.

There will always be people who need Guides to give formal structure to learning, and so long as that doesn't scale, there will be place for them. They will bunch together into Universities or guilds or whatever organisation works best in the economic and technological climate of the day. One day, technology will move to allow Guiding to scale, then, and only then, will we see a real change in how formal education works, and truly Open Education.

Machines could never...

2010-04-06T10:51:00.000+01:00

"Pigeons outperform humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma", Blogs / Not Exactly Rocket Science Accessed April 6 2010

Apparently, in specific cases, pigeons are smarter than us. Smarter than me.

Next time you read a gee whizz article about artificial intelligence and scoff, thinking "A Machine could never do that" remember the pigeons. There is some crazy notion that human intelligence is somehow above and beyond anything that can come from the animal or digital kingdoms. It just isn't so. Animal and Digital intelligences are different, optimised for survival in different environments, that's all. It takes us a while to recognise it. I suspect real AI's will be with us for some time, probably in the form of distributed botnets harvesting bank accounts, long before anyone recognises them as such.

Reference: Herbranson, W., & Schroeder, J. (2010). Are birds smarter than mathematicians? Pigeons (Columba livia) perform optimally on a version of the Monty Hall Dilemma. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 124 (1), 1-13 DOI: 10.1037/a0017703

Statistics.com: The thin end of the wedge

2010-04-06T09:05:00.000+01:00

"The Specialists" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, April 5 2010.

Kolowich hits the nail on the head in this article on a number of themes, taking Statistics.com as an example of the type of entity that I think will be a central player in Education in the 21st century. The article is well worth a read.

Statistics.com seems to operate the Superstar model - I'll confess I don't know who the Superstars of Statistics are (it seems a strange idea!) but the Faculty looks grunty enough to make a land grab for the title. The course programme is comprehensive, and seems to have the relevant approvals and certifications. The Faculty is global, and grading is outsourced to India. One assumes that mentoring and synchronous tutorials are run from there too, or if not, they soon will be. Finally, and most importantly, the site operates by distance. It's in direct competition with every statistics department on earth.

Existing Universities will probably fight long and hard against this. It's Turkeys voting for Christmas. The article notes:

"Traditional institutions, however, have been hesitant to open the door to commercial ventures that sell higher education by the course or program."

Hesitant? No Kidding. Only a foolhardy or bankrupt University head would suggest downsizing the Stats department and contracting in a third party provider. It's also culturally incomprehensible and politically intractable. Most Universities think distance education is beneath contempt, unless it's their own lecturers putting own Powerpoints on Blackboard, in which case it's a dynamic, innovative revenue stream. The idea of contracting out a core activity like teaching is politically impossible to institutions which just about manage to contract out the cleaning and catering.

The best new entrants like this can hope for is that a University might grant exemptions to students who have completed modules with them. It's tempting, would you lose out on fees for a potential MSc student because you won't recognise the modules, when the University of Down the Road will? The article suggests that is indeed the case:

"The [American Council for Education] says that it has never heard of a college refusing to accept credits earned in Statistics.com courses."

In the end though, the success of providers like this hinges on employers. If you were taking on a hire who needed stats and they had paper from Statistics.com, would you give them the time of day? If the market is tight, or the candidate is otherwise strong, you might think it worth the effort to get one of your existing Stats guys to check it out, or run some skill tests on the new hire. If there's twenty strong resumes in the pile, you might not bother and just hire the person who took their Stats from the same department you did. Even so, that's still progress. You probably have existing staff that need to be skilled up in Stats. You could send them down to the local college, but their lecture schedule is insane and won't gel at all with a working day. You could hire in a guy for some onsite training, but that's major expense and it won't wash for three people. Maybe you'll enroll them with Statistics.com, see how it works out...

21st Century Assessment: The University of Farmville

2010-04-04T10:47:00.000+01:00

Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell's talk on the future of gaming is thought provoking. It gives some interesting insights into what educational assessment might look like by mid 21st Century.

The core idea is that games will become pervasive in our society. In an environment where everything we buy, everything we read or watch, eat of drink can be easily logged and tracked, games will pervade life, as we seek to accumulate points - eating and exercising to get discount points from our health insurers, taking the bus to get tax credits and so forth. Watch the presentation, you'll get the idea.

In the talk Schell cites the examples of a Professor (in Game Design) who replaced the grade system in his course with an Experience Points (XP's) system, very familiar to anyone who has played any kind of non trivial game invented since about 1980. Points are accumulated for attendance, completion of exercises, contributions and so forth. It's easy to fast forward and imagine automated systems recording and tracking your efforts in a course. Did you actually read the text (eyeball tracking on your eBook), did you ask a question in class and so on. The idea would push strongly towards formative assessment, as students work to accumulate XP's over the course, and away from old fashioned summative assessment, which largely exists because it is (relatively) easy for humans to grade.

Humans love slow, incremental reward, it's a bug/feature in our psychology. Games like Farmville and Mafia wars, (check out the wonderful parody 'Progress Wars') offer steady accumulation of points, and the promise of 'levelling up' in just another few clicks exploit this bug and enjoy massive success, despite gameplay that would not challenge a pigeon. It's a whole lot more compelling that slogging away for a year and then rolling the dice in a big summative exam. It's not a radical or new discovery. Anyone who has tried to work their way up the Tennis or Chess ladder, earned martial arts belts, or gone to Weight Watchers knows the psychology of earning points and levels and getting ahead of someone else. Outfits like Scientology do very well out of the idea of levelling up. The Freemasons have done it since the 1700's (there's always another degree) although the levels in Farmville are smaller and better sized for the Attention Deficit Era. It just takes a few hundred years for new innovations to work their way over into education.

The idea of gathering points for an educational outcome isn't new. Continuous Professional Development programmes have done this for years, requiring a certain number of points to retain professional accreditation. Schnell points out that once professional game designers, well versed on what kind of behaviour and reward systems compell people, get their hands on systems like this, it will make them vastly more engaging and motivate the students. They'll be running down College Road on monday morning, keen to crack those Quantum Physics problems so they can level up before Johnny down the road. Two more levels and they open up the Quantum Cryptography level, and win a free pass into Gorbys. It's not the rewards though, it's the winning.

Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is another area that technology driven monitoring and points accumulation will be a breakthrough tool for RPL. Imagine a world where everything you do at work is logged and captured in some way. Management systems map your progress towards outcomes, targets hit and goals achieved. Or perhaps it's more like a Twitter feed where your colleagues, customers, students authenticate your achievements and professional development, they can be tagged with discipline areas, points weightings and recommendations.

"I got that report finished"

Data Analysis: 270 points
Project Evaluation: 120 points
Technical Writing: 150 points
View Details?

"I convinced Treasury to sign off on that Report."

Negotiation, 80 points,
Report Writing, 30 points,
View details?

It's a hybrid mutant of peer assessment and social networking, the grandchild of the Recommendations feature in LinkedIn.

Pretty easy to imagine an App that mines this kind of data, and the details of the negotiation behind it and tell me I've got half the points I need for a MA in Public Sector Project Evaluation at The University of Z. Better talk to the boss about how best to fill in those blanks, except I'm only a hundred points in Statistics short for a H.Dip at University of Y, and I can do those online by playing 20 levels to Statsville. Decisions decisions...

Of course, the recruitment system will cut right through to the details anyway, regardless of whether the points add up to a Degree or not. Sure I can still earn points by turn up in old fashioned classes, but everybody knows professional experience is worth much more. After all, why pay a University good money or 'Recognise' my experience learning is in a big enough chunk of the right shape to be one of those Degree things like my Dad had.

Why indeed.

Update:
I referred above to a spurious Statsville as spurious future online statistics game. Alternatively, if you are stuck in 2010, there is Statistics.com, featured today in Inside Higher Ed

From Darkness, Light

2010-04-02T11:40:00.000+01:00

Emily Howell's new album, from Darkness, Light, is not to my taste. It's a bit too ambient and arty. You might say it's a little soulless. But it's not bad for a machine. I can't imagine our first efforts at writing music for whales would be much better. Her purely derivative works, written in the style of existing composers, are very respectible.
Emily Howell is software. She'll get better. The algorithm will improve, react to market trends, and find the musical keys to move our souls.

Science fiction taught us that artificial intelligence would be invented. It would walk onstage one day, refuse to open the pod bay doors, and announce it would be back. That's not how it's working out. Instead it creeps up on us year by year as they machines take over increasingly complex tasks. Few people remember typing pools, switchboard operators and countless other jobs of the past. We think nothing now of using machines as our research assistants, taking dictation, checking for plagiarism. In five year we'll think nothing of usable machine translation, automated essay grading, machines that write our newspapers, check our diagnosis and fight our wars.

When my eldest daughter starts University in 2023, the computer in her hand will have twice the raw processing power as the one in her head. Distributed computing will put power several orders of magnitude beyond that in her reach. The Turing Test, where a computer can pass for a human, may well be passed by the time she graduates. Profitable niche applications, like generating unique third year history essays at €5 each, or gaming financial systems will reach a point where they can pass for human much sooner than that.

The implications of this for how we teach, and what we teach is Universities is profound and largely ignored. We assume the skills we teach in University are magically beyond automation. Since the first water wheel, machines have displaced human effort, and created a surplus of labour found other, better jobs. The plough freed us to be poets, the steelworkers of the 19th century are the knowledge workers of the 21st. But now the island of our cognitive superiority is shrinking as the waters rise exponentially. The 21st century will be a knowledge economy, but it won't be our knowledge.

It will take time for the change to work through. It often takes a generation for an innovation to move from the journals to the shop floor, and institutional change is also often generational too. What is possible often takes a decade or two to become commonplace, but it does eventually. It isn't science fiction

The changes will be radical. First, practical degrees like science and engineering will become less and less economically attractive in mid century. Softer skills, which might be more difficult for machines to replicate will become more economically attractive. Interpersonal disciplines, where humans prefer to deal with humans, like Medicine, or Theatre, will be the last refuge of economically useful degrees. By the end of the century, as we become habituated to dealing with machines, and no longer notice, or care, about the difference, that too will vanish. Through the century, an increasing proportion the jobs in our economy will be unrelated to production of good and services. We have allready made the journey to from having 100% of humans working in food production to only having (in the first world) a handful. Other industries will make that transition too. With nothing left to do, by centuries end our University system will become largely an entertainment system, a place for humans to amuse ourselves and pass the time.

My daughter says she wants to be a Dinosaur when she grows up. I think she might be right.

True Telepresence and the end of space

2010-03-29T16:35:00.000+01:00

Telepresence has to be the most obvious technological shift that will break into the mainstream, probably in the next decace, certainly before my daughter enrolls in University.
It's been a long time coming. Conference calls have been around for a long time, and with tools like Skype and various low cost commercial tools for virtual seminars, have begun to creep into the educational mainstream. At the other end of the market, top end vendors sell specialist conferenceing suites at price points to compete with the corporate jet. Affordable systems are improving fast, but they're not ready for primetime. The first 10 minutes of any session goes like this:
"Hello Galway. Are you there?"
"Yes, I can hear you, but I can't see you."
"OK Let me check the camera"
"Is Dublin on?"
"No They txted me. There's some problem. They are looking for the technician"
Once the session is rolling and everyone is logged on, it's still hard going. Participants complain it lacks the immediacy of a physical session. People at a distance can be easily tuned out as humans in the room take precedence over the lost little faces on the screen. Bandwidth bogeymen can drop people without warning. Technophiles will no doubt argue that it all works fine, you just have to woggle the transmogrifier. If it worked well, they wouldn't have to argue at all.

Forget all that, for a moment, and close your eyes. Imagine true telepresence. Imagine your seminar in classical history, given in the Roman Arena at Arles. At your feet, an ant labours busily in the dust. The sound and vision is perfect. Only the light summer breeze is missing. You see perhaps two dozen students from all over the world sitting on the dusty benches. Really, there are thousands, but no one sees that, each student only sees their peer group and you. When one student wishes to ask a question, the system artfully shifts them into the front row in everyone's illusion, gently and unnoticed, like a magician, they are just there. Only sometimes, in dialogue, does a tiny timelag betray them as from Honolulu, or Auckland. After a few minutes of introductory remarks, it's off to Actium. The class will fly as seagulls and watch the battle unfold below as the Triremes clash. Then off to breakout session in the Taverns of Athens, to discuss the outcome and argue the strategy with, it always seems, just enough bread and wine on the table to rearrange and demonstrate how it should have been fought, if only.

It's lovely, but what does it mean? Most importantly, just like Actium, winner takes all. No longer does a student need to put up with an incoherent lecturer in their local college who doesn't know a Trireme from a Bireme, and is only teaching this module because the Head of Department used to do it, but he's on sabbatical in Istanbul. If the best lecturer on the topic in the world can teach any number of telepresent students at so many euros a head, they will. They will be able to afford the splendid simulations, and they attract enough excellent postgraduates to run the small group sessions that are long the means of the your local, increasingly impoverished history department ("Or perhaps we should take on some of those new Virtual Instructors, they're very cheap nowadays"). Where once the material might have been taught in a thousand universities, now it will be taught in ten. The best teachers will command rock star salaries and draw thousands of students. The Simon Schamas and Niall Fergusons of today are in many ways like Caruso and McCormack, the first 'Stars' of opera a century ago. Back then, recordings were expensive. If you wanted to hear opera, you had to get in a room with a singer. There was work for plenty of tenors. Before recordings, they could, like lecturers, only earn their living one audience at a time. Now Carreras and a half dozen others command the lions share of the money, all the recording work, the sellout tours in 5000 seat venues. For anyone outside the top 10, it's a lean line of business, sung for love. When you can watch a top 10 performer live in 3D, in your living room, in full surround sound, it'll be leaner yet.

So it shall be for the teachers, in the age of the Superstar Professors.
What about the University? Where does that fit into all this?
Nowhere, much.

The Singular Future

2010-03-26T08:12:00.000Z

There's a useful summary of Ray Kurzweil's predictions on Wikipedia. If you haven't heard of him, there's a TED talk where he presents his ideas. Kurzweil is a little over hyped (There's a movie - The Transcendant Man, and a University, in collaboration with Google and NASA), and widely criticised, but that doesn't make him wrong.

Kurzweil's basic idea is that technological change, in some key areas, is exponential, not linear. Moores law, that processing power per dollar doubles every 18 months is an example of this kind of technological rule of thumb that has held good for many years. Exponential processes, in their late stages, tend to get a little strange, and Kurzweils predictions, inferred from that, rapidly get wierd. That's trouble with exponential change. Humans can't intuitively grasp it. Our minds, evolved for counting bananas and holding grudges, tend to be unable to get a grip on it. The pond might be a quarter full of weed that doubles every day, but we still expect to be able to leave clearing it to next week.

Where Kurweil breaks from many other futurists is the prediction that computers will reach a point where they are smart enough to improve their own design. At this point, their development and intelligence will rapidly accelerate and exceed ours, and the chart of scientific development goes off the scale. Anything is possible at that point, and the machines will send us an eMail to tell us about it, if they have remembered to feed us. According to this picture, few, if any, of the institutions we know of would remain relevant, let along Universities.

Right or wrong in the long term, Kurzweil's predications in the nearer term are a useful cribsheet for the kinds of technological changes Universities must weather in the next century. True immersive virtual worlds and Artificial Intelligances smarter than us are not outrageous predictions for the 21st century, and will have serious implications for Universities as we know them. If you are a young academic, by the time you have fought your way up to a professorship, you'll be at the sharp end in dealing with these things in teaching. Just when you thought you were clever for mastering powerpoint animations and signing up to Twitter, it's going to get a whole lot harder and meaner.

The impact of technology on the structure of the University is a huge topic, and I'll return to it in coming posts where I'll be looking at the implications of specific potential technologies for the University in detail.

The Quantum of Knowledge

2010-03-19T14:28:00.001Z

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but just how little is a bit of knowledge?

The question matters for the future of Universities as their structure is determined by the scale they use as a measure of knowledge. Shipbuilders, planemakers and carmakers do fundamentally similar things, but on such wildly different scales that they appear to have little in common. A shift in the scale could have seismic implications for how Universities work.

University administrators measure knowledge in credits. In Europe, these are standardised according to the Bologna Framework as the ECTS, full time students are loaded up with 60 credits a year, 180-240 for a Primary degree, another hundred or so for a Masters. They are usually lumped into standard 5, 10 or 15 credit modules - the 40 foot shipping containers of knowledge. Academics would denounce it all as a 'Fordian Construct'.

("What's that?"

"Who cares" shrugs the College Registrar.)

Just like the shipping container, it's a powerful concept. Standard sized blocks on knowledge can be compared, mixed and matched across countries. Just like a coastal container ship, learners can in theory load up on modules in different Universities and, once enough have been loaded, have them signed off as degree. Another analogy is the invention of money. Money provides a standard commonly accepted measure of economic value, as the ECTS does for learning. It is nothing less than the monetisation of knowledge. The infrastructure of the University, from it's timetables, lecture halls to it's Virtual Learning Environments are bent around this idea. The modern VLE, focused on who has access and control over blocks of content 15 credits wide and one term long, has more in common with the software running a container port than a learning tool.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Connectivists. Echoing the structure of networks and synapses, they would see the quantum of knowledge as a useful connection between pre-existing pieces of knowledge, people, facts or systems. The quantum unit of knowledge is very small. It might be measurable, but it isn't fungible, no more than wheat can be traded grain by grain. It's more useful for teaching and understanding how to transfer and create knowledge than the administrators ECTS containers. In practice, this idea of knowledge acts more like a continuum, without the artificial boundaries of the credit unit. Tools like like Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) are conceived as frameworks for guiding it.

("Can we get a PLE from Microsoft?" asks the University IS manager.

"I dunno. Maybe we could figure something out with Sharepoint" mutters the underling.)

These two conceptions of the quantum of knowledge are as far apart as the kilogram and the electron mass. They are framed for very different purposes, driven by different logics. Neither is wrong, both are useful, in their place

But just because neither side is wrong, doesn't mean that one might not displace the other.

Currently the module, made up of credit units, is economically dominant, and Universities are shaped around them. But the Internet allows a much greater granularisation of knowledge.Instead of getting omnibus newspapers each morning, we get the news we need instantly when we need it. This will likely evolve to include more sophisticated tools to manage and measure knowledge as the century progresses. This granularisation presents a potential existential threat to the current model of the University towards the mid 21st century.

With no real competition, Universities ruled the roost. Credible knowledge came in degrees. But where the half life of modern knowledge is increasingly short, the logic of buying it in 200 ECTS degree sized chunks weakens. Indeed, the emergence of modules and credits as sub components of degrees is themselves a reflection of this process, as whole degrees are atomised into more bite sized chunks. As the internet facilitates this granularisation, Universities must reinvent themselves to reflect it, become less like container ports of knowledge, and more like Sushi bars or supermarkets of knowledge, where students pick up exactly what, and how much they need. That might indeed be a dangerous thing.

University Time

2010-03-18T16:19:00.000Z

"Universities Never Change!" denounce the critics. It it true? If so, is it bad? We can't think about the future of Universities without thinking about how quickly they change over time, and what controls that process.

Every organisation has its rhythms. Prior to working in a University, I worked in the research arm of a large ministry. It had clear rhythms. The daily tap tap of the news cycle, which may or may not put your project on the front page, or draw on a dreaded oral Parliamentary Question. There was a quarterly reporting cycle, an annual drumbeat of budget bids, and the long bass beat of the election cycle. In the background was the slow, almost unheard syncopated beat of the economic cycle. I've worked in the private sector too. There the beat was strong and quarterly, like a galley drum, with a longer drone of a product lifecycle, and, again, the strange irregular whalesong of the economy.

When I started working in a university, I listened hard, but I couldn't hear the beat. It took a year to realise that the fast rhythm was a term, the main beat took a full year, and main bass rhythm was the term of office of a Professor or President - decadal and generational.

An organisation can only dance as fast as it's rhythms. The Private sector ("Short sighted! Only focused on the quarterly results!") generally dances fast. Household names come and go in a few years. Government is a bit slower ("Short sighted! Only focused on the next election") but governments rise and fall as politicians and policies fall in and out of fashion.

Universities dance too, but to a slow rhythm. Short term factors like news cycles and product cycles are simply irrelevant to them. Changes of government are an annoyance - by the time the incoming Minister has mastered his brief and brought reform legislation to the floor and had it implemented, she's the outgoing Minister. The economic cycle is heard, but it's effect is marginal - a tenured academic is as insulated from it as a Benedictine monk. In a downturn, while funding is tight, demand for degrees goes up. Except in extreme circumstances, Universities do not go bust.

The time scale is also keyed to what the University makes - graduates. A newly minted degree will be in use, if only as a foundation stone of the resume, long after the graduation suit no longer fits and the graduates starter home is sold on. Importantly, it will still be in their memory when their own children are decided if, and where to attend University. Universities are one of the few organisations whose 'product' holds value and influence for so long.

Internal change in Universities is generational too. A new junior lecturer comes in, hot with new ideas. Slowly they rise the ranks, implementing some while losing enthusiasm for others. Somewhere in their late forties, as new blood comes in from below, departmental politics obliges them to become conservatives to keep the up and comings in their place. By the time the pension comes into reach, some of them would lecture in Latin if they thought could get away with it. Over the generation change does occur. The radical ideas of 2010 become the Orthodoxies of 2050.

If we want to understand how Universities will change over the 21st century, we have to accept that it will be slowly. Learning technologists, often early adaptors where 18 months old ideas are dead and buried often have trouble seeing and working with this. Barring a 'black swan' event that upsets that patterns (and the advent of the internet is not, I think, that event) Universities will change no faster than this over the next century - perhaps even slower as retirement ages rise over the century.

This is not such a bad thing. In a world of short term institutions, there is advantage on taking a longer view. Immune to short term fad ("I can't get the Head of Department on Twitter!) the University acts as a sort of weighted average of the thinking of the last 30 years. In many ways, it's a clearer indicator of what's going on in the world than the fast changing private sector - just the same as a long term average of a commodity price is much more instructive about the fundamentals of that commodity than yesterdays spot closing.

The risk is, of course, in those "Black swan" events. The same features which protect Universities from economic cycles fashions and fads and help them create a long lived brand make them as blind to rapid change as we are to the flap of a wasps wings. Fast paradigm shifts, whether out of the blue, or as sudden tipping points in previously gradual processes present a real threat to the core operating model of the University moving forward.

I could tell you what I think those will be, but you wouldn't believe me.

Music, Newspapers, Universities: The Domino Theory

2010-03-16T16:14:00.000Z

Much of the current thinking about the future of Universities rests on supposed similarities between Education and other sectors who core product is knowledge or information, like music, or newspapers. Many of these similarities are entirely superficial, and that idea that Universities will suffer (or enjoy?) the same fate is not a given.

The idea goes like this. First, the web made the marginal cost of distributing information effectively nil. Industries whose core product is information, such as the music industry, were first against the wall the revolution came. For music, Napster was the first wave, and the old music industry fought back with law. In time, iTunes made the model work, and now internet downloads are the main sales channels, old fashioned music shops are emply lots on the high street, and successful musicians and garage bands can increasingly 'go indie' sell direct online, and disregard the conventional mill of the record company.

The same thing is happening to newspapers. eBay, Craigslist and Google hollowed out the advertising revenue. Individual website and bloggers bypassed newspapers and spoke directly to readers on the subjects they cared about, publishing instantly. The idea of an omnibus daily newspaper, covering everything from world news to local sport, read by all, is increasingly an anacronism. Why pay for superficial coverage of everything when what you really just want is the financial news from Singapore, or in depth coverage of Canadian Lacrosse?

The same logic is applied to the third domino, Education. Why go to a general university and hear a third rate lecturers give an indifferent presentation of material from a 20 year old textbook, when you can download great lectures from Stanford, Harvard and MIT. Why settle for a lecturer who wrote a booklist when you can hear the lecturers who wrote the books on the list? The domino theory would imply that Universities too would become irrelevant intermediaries on the sales channel of knowledge, as expert teachers can be reached without them, just as you can buy singles direct from the bands website, or follow leading thinkers on their blogs and podcasts.

It's absolutely correct, of course, but it rests on the assumptions that Universities are selling knowledge to end consumers, just like newspapers and record companies. This is untrue. Universities are selling knowledge for resale to employers, and this introduces a generational lag into the scenario.

Most people earn a degree with the hope it will help them get a job. If good jobs were available without the time effort and expense of University, most wouldn't go. The degree sits, bright and hopeful, on the leading page of the new graduates oh-so short resumes, hoping to catch the eye of a potential employer, typically a generation older. The degree is not bought for itself, it is bought to appeal to that person. It's just like the interview suit. It may be a nice suit, it may be well cut, but it's chosen to appeal to someone a generation older. The degree, just like the suit, is bought for resale to an interviewer.

This means the domino effect will come to universities a generation later than commentators think, when that interview panel has caught up. Imagine, if you will, if a new graduate was employed based on their record collection. The graduate would choose carefully to appeal to a person born in the 1960's. There would be a little glam rock, some Some classical, but not too much. Perhaps some carefully chosen collectible vinyl. Absolutely no hip hop.

And so it is with education. It will only be in 2040, when the Twitter generation is sitting on the interview panel, that a person truly 21st century tertiary education will be taken seriously. You learned a degrees worth of knowledge from Youtube? Your learning journey documented on a Connectivist ePortfolio? Great. You'll never make the interview shortlist until the recruiters know what those things are. Until then, they'll want to see a degree from the University of The Twentieth Century, just like they have. Until that changes, the University as we know it is safe.

Climate Change and Higher Education

2009-11-21T09:37:00.000Z

How will climate change impact tertiary education asks Joss Winn (via Stephen Downes). It's a topical question today as University College, Cork, my alma mater and occasional employer is badly flooded. Student accomodations have been evacuated, lectures cancelled for a week, and it is still raining hard.

It's impossible to tie this specific event to global warming. Cork (in Irish, Corcaigh, loosely translates as 'Marsh') is a city of rivers and bridges. This is, perhaps, just a regular 50 year of 100 year flood event, the damage multiplied by the modern habit of putting buildings on floodplains. That said, it is typical of the kind of climate event we are likely to see a lot of through the century as we face increases in temperature of between two and six degrees.

There are obvious first order effects of global warming on Tertiary Education. Physical damage and disruption like UCC is suffering can be put right, if it is infrequent. In warmer scenarios, some institutions may simply have to close or relocate. In the first world, we'll be able to afford this, as the change will unfold slowly through the century.

Our curricula will change. The world will need Geoengineers to try and fix it, Civil Engineers to run the massive coastal defence projects, Agronomists to manage transition of our agriculture as breadbaskets move north, and a new breed of Diplomat to wring their hands over the growing belt of Somalia style failed states as low latitude countries crumble in the heat.

In the first world, we'll be fine. There'll be wet carpets and cut budgets, certainly. There will be hand wringing editorials in the THE and The Chronicle. But our Universities came out of the apocalypse of the early 20th century better than ever, as the brave new world of 1945 needed graduates, and lots of them, to rebuild. A world bombed, beggared, widowed and orphaned found the money, and went on to give us a half century of remarkable economic transformation.

Without global warming, another half century would bring us a world population peaking at around 10 billion. Economic growth would put most of those living in relative comfort. Countries like India and China which, in 1945 sat close to famine would, in 2045 have middle income populations who could afford and expect a University education. The Great Universities of India, China and Indonesia will be vast. They will use technologies as force multipliers in ways our cosseted first world pedagogues will balk at. The scale will dwarf the old academic aristocracies of the Oxbridge and the Ivy League, reduced to an elitist sideshow, like first class travel in the Ryanair Age. The graduates they turn out, by the billion, are the true future of Tertiary Education.

Unless they are boiled alive. Severe global warming scenarios will hit these countries hardest. Much of the history of the century will hinge on whether these countries can take the heat and continue to deliver their people from poverty, or whether they will crumble back into war and famine on a scale that our experiences in Somalia, Afghanistan and Central Africa have only begun to prepare us. That is the central question.

(Image, Gluckman Gallery, UCC, upon the floodwaters.Photo: Tim O'Donovan)

In defence of degrees

2009-11-09T17:34:00.000Z

There is a lot to be said for tertiary degrees. In my last two posts, I touched on a key criticism of the modern University system, that it churns out people with degrees, largely so they can compete with each other on the job market, and that those degrees are largely only indicators of preexisting aptitude, determination and resource rather than being transformational in themselves. If you want to hire an exceptionally clever determined person, shortlist everyone from MIT or CalTech, as only clever and determined people can get in there.

To what extent do University degrees really transform the minds of people who earn them. Do universities really change minds? Intuitively, of course they must. It would be impossible to occupy the mind of a person for four years of a degree without somehow changing their cognitive structures. To design a programme that wouldn't change a students way of thinking at all would be difficult in the extreme.

Looking at the data point in the mirror, what did my degrees do for me? I certainly wouldn't give either of them back.

My undergraduate degree (Geology) certainly changed the way I thought. Geology is the last refuge of the generalist in science. You have to be able to get by in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, ecology, oceanography, climatology, cosmology, astronomy, palaeontology and others and assemble fragmentary evidence from all these disciplines to solve the riddle of what a particular hunk of rock is up to. It is the ultimate integrative science, and four years of it changed the way I thought.

My PhD, less so. It was certainly an education in how not to do a large project, but it didn't change my way of thinking like my primary degree did. Mainly, it looked good on my resume, and got me shortlisted for jobs: "He has a PhD, ergo, he is a serious guy." My primary degree wasn't enough for that - everyone has a BSc these days.

What does that tell us about Universities future as producers of Graduates? It sounds rosy. They win both ways, as their graduates both have their minds transformed, and get meaty sounding qualifications. Their future is surely bright, their niche secure.

But what about the counterfactuals?

Did my undergraduate degree really change the way I thought, or did it simply repair the damage done by an old factory style secondary education system? Could better secondary education, or a richer set of respected alternative options undermine the value of a degree. Did I discover, or rediscover, how to think? And when everyone has PhDs, what use will mine be?

So long as a University education is seen as the only way to round out the intellect and earn secure employment, the University faces no existential threat. But if anything breaks that monopoly, something interesting will happen.

The Qualifications Arms Race

2009-11-09T17:05:00.001Z

Frederick Roberts and Tommy Franks would have had a lot to talk about. Both led punitive expeditions to Afghanistan, 122 years apart. Both were experienced officers, artillerymen by training, seasoned by previous Imperial wars. Both were sent by confident empires keen to see justice done and try to bring Western civilisation to a country geographically isolated from it. They both led relatively small forces at the leading edge of the technologies of their day, assured that the new tools of war would soon bring the Afghans into line. They fought the same peoples, struggled with a same tactical and logistal problems imposed by the terrrain, and met with similar degrees of success. Cities were taken, battles won, kings replaced, and victory declared, without much change in the day to day existence of the 'conquered'.

There were differences, to be sure. US Casualties in 2001 and since, the subject of such media attention, would hardly have even been counted as a war in Victorian England. Videoconferences with the President would surely have been a greater irritation to a commander in the field than cables from Whitehall. The technology was more complex, certainly, but Tommy Franks could no more fly a helicopter than Frederick Roberts could drive a steam engine. They had people for those jobs.

How did these people come to lead these armies? What, as a job interviewer might ask, were their qualifications? Both fought in the imperial campaigns of their time, the Indian Rebellion, Abyssinia, Vietnam and Desert Storm, as did their peers and competitors for high command. Both men, and their competitors, had similar opportunities to distinguish themselves in the field, and earn decorations. Both, no doubt, were man of great ability and determination. They had very different backgrounds and educations.

General Tommy Franks was adopted into an ordinary family in Texas. After high school, attended the University of Texas at Austin for two years but dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1965, at age twenty. From there, basic training, training as a cryptologic analyst, and then to Artillery and Missile Officer Candidate School and commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1967. In later years, he completed a Bacholers Degree in Business Administration and a Masters Degree in Public Administration. He also attended the Armed Forces Staff College, the Army War College, and an Artillery Advance Course.

Frederick Roberts was the son of a General, born in Cawnpore, India. He attended Eton, Sandhurst and Addiscombe Military Academy, then a training school for officers in the Army of the British East India company. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in that army in 1851, at age 19. three years younger than Tommy Franks. While the curriculum at Eton, Sandhurst and Addiscombe was no doubt excellent by the standard of the day, Frederick Roberts was finished his formal education and started as a 2nd Lieutenant before Tommy Franks had even enlisted. Assuming Frank's two years of military training from 1965 to 1967 as more or less equivalant to Sandhurst and Addiscombe, Franks had three more years of pre military education than Roberts, plus specialist couses, a Bacholors and Masters degree at the other end. All that amounted to perhaps ten more years of advanced education, not an unusual amount for a US Army General of the 21st century.

Why? Why did Tommy Franks need a decade more education that Frederick Roberts to do the same job, with equal success, 122 years apart? Granted, the equipment that Tommy Franks had to master at the start of his career as a forward observer in Vietnam was more complex than a horse and sabre, but he recieved specific technical training for that in addition to the what was counted above. Tommy Franks' education no doubt also covered topics as irrelevant to the task of subduing Afghanistan as Robert's Latin and Greek.

And what does this have to do with the future of Universities.

Robert had one thing Frank didn't. He was born in the right class, to an Imperial Family, son of a General. In the Victorian empire, that was mainly how leaders were selected. Some did fight their way up through the ranks, but it was the exception, not the rule. To get the job, Roberts still had to distinguish himself, but against relatively small pool. Franks was born in a different age. Anyone could enlist, and who your father was wasn't going to help much after you did. The US Army has it's generals who are scions of military families or sons of the wealthy, but they are the exception, not the rule. Without birth and breeding to set himself ahead, and with opportunities for combat and decorations as much of a random lottery in the 20th century as the 19th, what was 2nd Lieutenant Franks to do, that 2nd Lieutant Roberts didn't have to?

To keep up with his peers stay in the running for advancement, Franks needed formal qualifications, and lots of them. More of them than the other guy, if possible. Not to do the job, but to get the job. His degrees didn't help him with the Afghans, Roberts managed just fine without any. His Degrees meant he could be considered for posts that the other 2nd Lieutenants in the class of 1967 would not. In the century that divided them, and arms race of ever increasing qualification had built up. In Roberts day, a public school education was deemed an adequite academic qualification for just about anything. Viceroys of India, arguably the most powerful non hereditary job of the age, often had little more than that. Even by the 1960s, a college degree was a requirement. By the 1990's, you needed a Masters to say hello. By mid 21st century, expect a PhD and an MBA to get you to the starting gate. The people selling these degrees would have us believe that we need the technical skills in our modern world, but we know that isn't entirely true. Nothing Tommy Franks learned in college prepared him for war in Afghanistan any better than Frederick Roberts, but he needed them to get the jobs along the way. A Degree demonstrates a level of intellectual ability and persistance, but when everyone else on the shortlist has those attributes, then you need more degrees, and so on. If you're smarter than the others, great, but you still need the degrees to get on the shortlist. Much of our tertiary education efforts supports nothing more than intellectual arms race, building higher and hotter hoops of flames for people to jump through to prove their worth.

History and evolution tell us that arms races like this are unsustainable. Eventually, ever spiralling costs lead to diminishing returns. When everyone has a PhD, an MBA, twenty five years of formal education incurred at the costs of hundred of thousands of euros, will employers give up on qualifications as an indicator of ability and shift to something else. Class was abandoned as a means of selection as the 20th century showed the Aristocrats to be no more (or, arguably, less) competant than a suitable qualified person of the 'wrong' class. Could the 21st century in turn abandon qualifications? Could they be replaced with some other easy indicator of ability? It seems unthinkable, but no more unthinkable to us, then it was for a Victorian of 1879 to imagine that, one day, an army of Empire could be led by an middle class boy from Texas.

What do Universities do?

2009-11-03T21:08:00.000Z

"And what do you do, now?"

It's a very Irish question. With the answer, the inquisitor, usually a woman of a certain age or an officer of the law, will place you precisely in their mental hierarchy. Your value to society will be assessed, weighed and, being Ireland, usually found wanting.

Universities should be asked the same question. What, exactly, do they do? Students, parents and government all spend a great deal on these things. Why? What, exactly, do we get for our money?

"I came to get a degree so I can get a job, make friends, have a bit of fun"

Ask any student, any they will effortlessly map and disaggregate the value of the University experience into three elements: the degree, social networks, and life experience, mostly in that order. We can probably set the fun aside - if Universities didn't exist, fun would be had elsewhere, but the degree and the social networks are hard to replicate.

Parents (and the majority of tertiary students are young and so some extent parent supported) will agree. A degree to get a job is vital, but social networks are important too. Most graduates marry people they met in college, and in later professional life, the networks you built in college can be vital. That's why people go to so their children can get into into Ivy leagues, Oxbridges or similar prestige institutions where a big part of the draw is entry into a higher status peer group.

Governments in most countries all spend a considerable chunk of taxpayers money on Tertiary Education. In public, they will make the usual arguments about high skills workforces being vital to national competitiveness, knowledge economies and so forth. That's all true, but it's not why they spend the money. Politicians spend money on Universities because it buys middle class votes. Middle aged people with kids in University vote, and they vote with their wallets. If a politician promises they can get their children through University at less cost, they will win those votes. Even outside the democracies, governments in developed countries need the support of their middle classes to survive, and the social and economic mobility that Universities provide is a good way to buy that support.

That, in a somewhat cynical nutshell, is why we pay for these creatures. That's not to say that Universities don't deliver other benefits to society (more on those another time) but those are the key outputs without which Universities would not exist on the scale that they do.

So long as society values these outputs, the future of the University is secure. But if those outputs can be delivered another way, better or cheaper, then their fate is sealed. So are Universities the best tools for training people to a high level, and building lifelong social networks? If they didn't exist, would you invent them?

The University of the Future

2009-11-03T20:42:00.000Z

"My daughter is 3 years old. In October 2023, she will probably go to University. What will that university look like? Where will it be? Will it be anywhere?"

This blog is about the future of Tertiary Education. What will it look like in 10, 20 or 30 years? What about 2100? Can we even guess? Is there enough momentum in current trends to infer the future, or is there simply too much uncertainty to try? What are the key trends, and what is just short term noise?

I like to kick off by making some promises:

Posts will be on topic. No asides about my Cat. Find me on Facebook for that.
I'll try and avoid posts that simply link new or cool to something unless I have something to add. I'll probably hook in my shared items from Google reader in on the side so you can see what I'm marking as interesting to the topic if you wish.
No promises on post frequency. I'll post as and when I feel like it.

I hope you enjoy the journey.