By Derek Morrison, 7 February 2012
I like exploring the byways of what our national and international media have to offer; particularly regarding perspectives on the future of learning and teaching in an increasingly digital and globalised world. Consequently, I sometimes stumble upon something of particular note worth sharing. But before I share please indulge a brief polemic. Much as I like what the BBC has to offer it’s a real pity that this public service corporation didn’t invest some of our pre-austerity licence fee in creating transcripts for its educationally oriented output. The US NPR On the Media programme has a lot to teach it here with each item in each week’s programme being supported by a transcript. Polemic over, and now on to the sharing.
The BBC offers a permanent podcast/download archive of Peter Day’s World of Business. The episode Class Struggle of 21 Jan 2012 offers a consideration of whether the way we do education is now a problem or a business opportunity. The edition includes some pretty insightful perspectives about the advance of the private sector into all levels of education but also offers some thought provoking contributions particularly from people like Martin Bean, the UK OU VC. Since the BBC didn’t do the transcription job I’ve partially done it for them, so here are some extracts to whet the appetite for what I consider a thought provoking 30 minutes of listening time, no matter whether one agrees or disagrees with the arguments and opinions being put forward.
First up is one view from the corporate world.
“There is no such thing as too much involvement. I think the more industry can get involved with helping churn out employable grads who can work quickly and productively, preferably using technology to enable business, the better because we all need it … I think the education system for treating technology seriously needs a lot of investment. I think industry needs to step up and invest in it as well. I need skills. I’m clearly interested in the HP brand being used in universities as well so what we’re doing is putting our money where our mouth is and investing in partnerships with universities where we invest heavily in maybe jointly developed degrees, guaranteed jobs, bursaries … At a business level we need skills in industry and for the UK I don’t think we invest enough in technology … Our policy now for the skills we want we will only take graduates who have done a four year placement degree … not necessarily known by ourselves but they have had done some practical experience. What we are finding, and this is no decrying of pure academic degrees, but in terms of the collaboration and investment from industry I want people who are very pragmatic and have some experience and what we are finding, rightly or wrongly, is pure academics typically take eighteen months to two years to train … It’s very interesting watching an intern on the third year of their degree who have not worked before. They have a voracious appetite for learning. They don’t know the meaning of the word “it can’t be done”. So they arrive naive, bright eyed, bushy tailed and willing to learn … Most people have big clunky PCs sitting on a desk whereas they wander in with a phone or any device they like and say no I want to work this way …” (Nick Wilson, Managing director, HP UK)
And now from the Open University leadership perspective.
“Every decision that education institutions make at all times needs to have the student at the heart of the equation and where I think institutions lose sight of that often what it leads to is a higher degree of dissatisfaction of their students either because the actual quality of the teaching they’re getting is not fit for purpose of meeting their expectations or worse still the outcomes when they graduate are not realized … When I talk to employers often what they say they’re not getting from graduates are what are described as 21st century skills or the softer skills that are really about people, they are about the ability to collaborate, group problem solve, the ability to communicate effectively verbally, the ability to work in teams.
And our model as you know is based on practice based learning. So the beauty of embedding the learning in the workplace with the Open University model means that you are actually getting the best of both worlds. I think the fact that 80% of the FTSE 100 companies in the UK sponsor OU students is a pretty clear indication to me that that model overcomes some of that employer dissatisfaction … It’s absolutely clear that other more traditional universities are embracing more innovative practices that we have been using and I think that’s fantastic. That’s what students are demanding. These are students now that view technology, and access, and real time interaction as being an absolute necessity in their life. And Higher Education has to step up. It’s all about embracing the technology of the day. Obviously what’s on my agenda right now is to continue to leverage the Web and personalisation of the Web, but it’s also to fully embrace these tablet and mobile devices that are proliferating the world and directly link them into our virtual learning environment so that people can get as much out of a tablet or mobile device that they may do for entertainment today, that they can get a much, if not more from using it as Higher Education learning device …
The personal side of Higher Education is actually where the magic happens. What’s interesting though is the redefinition of what personal actually can be. We used to think of personal as being defined by physical, having to be in the same room. What’s interesting about what’s happened to the Web, moving from being very content-centric to now being people-centric is that its opened up opportunities for us to allow people to engage and collaborate in Facebook-type ways that really we just could not have contemplated probably even five years ago and I get very excited about that … I don’t think it’s fair to actually put the two [classroom v Web] side-by-side and compare. I much prefer to focus on great teaching. You can have really poor teaching in a physical environment and I’m sure students have told you that. Simply putting students in a lecture hall and have them listen to a lecture and take notes and regurgitate that in an exam is not a very effective way of teaching…. If you look at the massive growth rates of demand for Higher Education around the world there’s been a 75% increase in the number of students studying outside their native country since 2000. When you look at that hunger, that demand, for Higher Education it’s clear the only way you can do that affordably at scale is by innovating, but not sacrificing the quality of that student experience … There is absolutely no doubt that there is a tremendous amount of pressure to direct funding towards what are often called STEM-related skills in the UK right now … and there’s a lot of logic and sense in that for us to be able to bridge the skill deficits we’ve got in the United Kingdom, to fuel the sorts of industries that will create jobs for people and graduates of all types. There’s no doubt that at all levels of education in the UK we need to be focused on that … When we look at the arts and when we look at our other subjects that perhaps unless those ‘hard’ skills, those STEM-related skills, we have got to be very very careful that we don’t allow those [the Humanities] to be removed from the system. And the reason for that is it’s often in studying those other modules or disciplines that we actually develop those 21st century skills that employers are looking for.” (Martin Bean, Vice-chancellor, UK Open University)
And lest we are still too comfortable, here comes more would-be disruptive forces, emerging from a different forms of international synergy that challenges cosy assumptions that education necessarily has to have a west to east vector or that national boundaries and educational contexts are necessarily an insurmountable obstacle. For example, listen to the Tutorvista segment at ~22 minutes into the programme. Tutorvista, an enterprise arising from India, offers unlimited personal tutoring to the US for $100 a month on a wide range of subjects with a business model based on national variances in service provider costs. But, it’s also worth noting that Tutorvista is now majority owned by the UK publishers Pearson – again reinforcing the changing landscape of would-be new educational providers or existing players with a strategic vision that goes far beyond traditional publishing.
