We want our HE system to remain world class over the next 10-15 years: what are the key things we need to do to ensure this?
See some of the points and issues raised at the 24 February HE Debate conference in the presentation below at the following link HE Debate conference output.
The publication of the UK Universities report on student fees raises the question of whether the senior management in UK Universities actually comprehend the changing demographic profile of the UK student market, the increasingly competitive nature of the international student market, the impact of the recession on the international student market and the impact of the recession on the careers of UK students in relation to their future capability to permit students to make loan repayments. Whilst commercial organisations across the world are implementing strategies to respond to a global economic downturn by revising their product line and concurrently seeking to exploit technology to reduce operating costs (e.g. Home Depot article Financial Times March 17th 2009), the UK Universities apparently (a) wish to increase prices and (b) make little effort to examine how internal organisational change can be implemented to reduce operating costs.
In relation to the issue of organisational change, one obvious area is as recommended by Sir Ron Cooke’s report; namely to expand the utilisation of on-line education in the UK. It is interesting to note, however, that none of the contributors to that report or the subsequent blogs on this topic actually commented on a fundamentally important issue in e-learning; namely managed correctly one can deliver the same level of student satisfaction as on a terrestrial course but at approximately 50% cost of a terrestrial course.
Achievement of this level of satisfaction and lower cost is, however, virtually impossible within the context of the conventional administrative structures with most UK Universities, especially when linked to the strong objections/barriers which many academics present when being asked to consider a move from a terrestrial to an on-line world for programme delivery. The author of this blog, manages a company which is a spin off from a UK University created almost 10 years ago to deliver the institution’s part time distance learning programme leading to the award of a University Certificate and HE University Certificate. Currently there are approximately 950 students on the programme, most of whom are mature students in full time employment, seeking to access HE education and upgrade their work skills. Virtually all of the new students come via word-of-mouth recommendations. We do not dare execute any overt promotional activity because of the current cap on HEFCE funding.
In evolving this programme, in terms of concurrently achieving low operating costs and high student satisfaction, the company has identified some key operational attributes that are critical to the success of part time, distance learning scheme. These include:
(1) Employing tutors whose primary commitment and enthusiasm is towards teaching and who exhibit a strong desire for identifying new, more effective ways of supporting the student learning experience.
(2) Employ tutors who willingly accept their student support role does require evening and weekend interaction with students.
(3) Create a fully integrated automated, computer-based software system that has the sole purpose of being dedicated to activities associated with managing the student registration, learning, assessment and marking. Avoid attempting to integrate the system into the conventional main frame/microcomputer systems used by the typical UK University.
(4) Ensure that the course management software can automatically identify operating problems such as student e-mails going unanswered, assignments not being marked within a specified time (e.g.72 hours) and common errors being made by students indicating there is something wrong with either the learning materials or an assignment.
(5) Where common learning problems exist, immediately apologise to the students and implement a fix in the relevant learning materials.
(6) Never coerce students into interacting with each other (e.g. awarding marks for their inputs to the course chat room). Instead create a medium that generates benefit from interaction. At the moment text-based chat rooms are the most cost effective, technologically feasible platforms if by visiting these chat rooms students can be provided with very up-to-date guidance and support (e.g. a regularly up-dated FAQ section; tutors clarifying a common learning problem; facilitators regularly visiting the chat room; promoting the concept that students can put problems into the room to seek assistance from other students).
(7) Never develop new software applications unless these can be created by purchasing standard, existing, off the shelf, low cost, commercial software packages. If no package exists for a desired purpose, postpone development until an appropriate package comes onto the market.
(8) Avoid using on-line student delivery and communication systems unless these are standard packages that at least 90% of the students have installed on their own PCs.
(9) Utilise a commercial ISP for the programme Website because these offer fewer downtime problems and their server capacity/back-up capability is superior to most University in-house systems.
From the author’s experience, few of the above learned lessons are unique to the company. Our organisation, for example, has been involved with distance learning developments in Australia. In our opinion, their Universities are already some years ahead of most UK Universities in the field of e-based education. Hence one of the answers to the question “we want our HE system to remain world class over the next 10-15 years: what are the key things we need to do to ensure this?” is UK Universities need to examine ways of improving internal efficiencies that without reducing the quality of the learning experience, can mitigate the need for an increase in student fees.
Aren’t you aiming at an unknown target?
And if you are, a better paradigm may be listing what is already vibrant, monitor the turnover of the vibrant group allowing that to die which time has come and welcoming an equal number of new entrants, check that HE truly is vibrant and that you have the effective vote of the young & energetic?
In other words, a feeback system more akin to entrepreneurship - rapidprototyping rather than bureaucratic planning?
What’s Next for Higher Ed: The Lion at the Gate
Although they may not mean to, universities orient societies in certain directions, just as much as schools prepare young citizens. Our education systems, in the words of the late New York University thinker, Neil Postman, don’t prepare students for life per se. They actually create the new public. They are the holders of the society in waiting, making the ones that will take over in time.
This view raises some interesting and disturbing questions. If I were among that public-to-be, as are my children, I would have some hard questions for my elders and their great institutions. Everywhere you look there are messes: finance, manufacturing, the world economy, the environment, addiction to fossil fuel, violence and bloodshed. And the list goes on. Where, I might ask, does the university play in this world?
Are the august bodies (really collections of faculty loosely controlled by administrations) in any way complicit in the current meltdown? And, if they are, are they at all responsible for helping to find new ways out as opposed to beating a path back to the same door we are collectively exiting? Certainly, business schools turned out MBA’s and finance grads that populated the credit-gone-wild world, who did much of the bidding, and much of the fee taking, for elder bosses intent on fueling the fire who, themselves, graduated from many of the best universities.
The young middle managers and hyper-workaholics also populated the middle and upper reaches of the great corporate machines that make (made) the cars, planes, and buildings that moved and housed the phenomenal growth we just witnessed. They also populated and promoted the luxury brands that so much defined the magnetic attraction to all that glittered. While the post modernists, who occupy the same universities, can dismiss as a failed set of narratives the consumerism at any cost mentality and the banal need to outshine your neighbor, can they help create the next narrative? Is there one?
Many would argue that the university is simply a container, a crucible in which society’s gears are studied, replicated and improved upon, where many tiny levers are examined and toyed with from genetics to literary criticism. In this environment the university, in the common view, is both blameless for society’s ills and not responsible for generating its next manifestations. I don’t think this position is sustainable in the globalized society now in a painful search for a center of gravity.
Most institutions of higher education in the world are financed by citizens through tax dollars put in the trust of governments who pay it back out to institutions of higher education. In turn, those institutions, provide both the grounding for civil society – teachers, doctors, nurses, civil engineers, criminal justice workers, lawyers – as well as those who tinker with and fan the flames of change – researchers, economists, finance gurus, technologists, bio-engineers, political scientists.
The trust that passes in tax dollars from the employed citizens and solvent corporations to government and then to higher education is an unseen path where in many cases the largest amount of wealth passes from private hands to public purposes. If this is the case, the question remains is how is this investment made and what are the expectations?
The taxes of every fast food employee who may never walk on a campus are supporting students who go to colleges and universities around the world. In that sense, the debate is not “academic” or an intellectual plaything, it is profoundly serious. As a result, I believe universities have not only a responsibility to help envision a sustainable future but they have a duty to do so.
If you want to make it more direct, each faculty member, if they value not only their current academic freedom, but their ability to retire in old age, another form of freedom, they should think hard and fast about how they can contribute to the public good. An odd protest here or there or a solidarity rally against a foreign government is not enough. Re-construction in an uncertain world is an art form, uncertain, sometimes painful, but rewarding in its effort. Criticism is easier, it flows down hill easily, it incites others. But the herd will not build tomorrow.
Together with young people, both in school and out, the university needs to be a place that questions conventions, pretenses, and looks at the questions of how we might construct a variety of future paths through a myriad of problems, large and small, in order to have some methods to deal with the uncertainty that is now our lot. At a recent gathering of higher education leaders and government officials, conclusions were drawn that we live in a world that is now governed by instability and fear, a time for belt-tightening and weathering of the storm.
If the storm subsides, it is unlikely that we will be on the same shore. I’m not sure that the world we will return to can be built on the foundation that we once existed upon.
How, then, can young minds, hyper-connected to their peers, inside the institution, be focused with their learned elders on the opportunity and responsibility to construct a rational future? The young have all the tools at their fingertips, literally, and much of the energy necessary. The worst we could do is force them to re-create the past. The best we could do, is cooperate with them to explore the types of future that will allow adults to retire and young people to inspire us with their visions of a better world.
This will require a thoughtful university, one that sees itself as more than a collection of individual faculty organizing their singular careers. Many an administrator will lament that faculty will never rise above their self interest. I think at the root of great leadership is the ability to illuminate how enlightened self-interest shines the only light possible for a future that can hedge against instability and fear. The worst we could do not now is keep our heads down and pretend that it will all go away.
The National Center for Education Statistics projects that the greatest employment decline should take place in careers where the minimum educational requirement is on-the-job training. This decline only enhances higher education’s position as a national priority. In response, today’s higher education institutions are rolling out new programs in growing career fields such as business, health, and computer technology.
Post-secondary education institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, offer more work-related courses in health care than any other field. Business runs a close second, with 3,500 institutions offering business and marketing programs. This growing popularity is echoed by students taking classes in business and health care. In those fields, 32 percent of adult students took courses in health care and 35 percent participated in business courses in 2008.
Gordon Freeman writes:
The taxes of every fast food employee who may never walk on a campus are supporting students who go to colleges and universities around the world. In that sense, the debate is not “academic” or an intellectual plaything, it is profoundly serious. As a result, I believe universities have not only a responsibility to help envision a sustainable future but they have a duty to do so.
As universities are the “manufacturer” of minds running the economy and politics of this country I agree that university faculties have an obligation to change. Unlike at school, where there is a large focus on citizenship, although arguably not taken as seriously by many schools as it should be, universities have no focus on the wider sense of community and duty other than to create a network of “friends” that can help one get on in their chosen career through their alumni. This sort of self interested networking, developing relationships with those that can help in your career and dismissing any other kind of friendship as irrelevant, then carries on into professional life. The political system is one area where evidence of this can be seen, as is the media - like minded people gathering together to inculcate their views onto other minds.
Universities need to focus more on turning out minds that understand the importance of community and the wider world outside their own particular spheres and disciplines. The focus on self service and regarding oneself as above others because they have been granted privileged access to higher education needs to be halted and a move toward measuring the value of a person to society in more ways than the number of qualifications gained in an education system that has produced such self serving, greedy, uncaring leaders that are currently dominating press coverage.
As an aside, the current focus on qualifications as the means to improve the British economy is in some ways farcical. Forcing people who do want to attend college to stay on in the “prison” of education or to “prove” they can do the job with silly paper qualifications that are meaningless to someone who has been doing the job very competently for many years is a joke. Cleaners at my place of work were recently forced to undertake an NVQ in “cleaning” - in their own time, not in work time that is. A waste of their time and our money that amde them feel that their many years of experience counted for naught. Someone who has been carrying out a job for years and doing it well should not have to write about their experience in order to “become qualified” to do the job.
As a later years graduate, who CHOSE to study for a degree to prove to myself that I was as clever as many others and as intelligent as many of the graduates who had dismissed my ideas when they discovered I had not attended a university, I believe that people should be allowed to study if they choose to do so. But we must recognise that for some people it is not the way - hands on learning, taught by someone who knows what needs to happen can in some ways be more valuable than theoretical knowledge that is often forgotten and put aside when starting in any job.
The current state of affairs in the country and indeed in the world, highlights the fact that we need more than book learning and worthless paper awards to develop a new future in which everyone should be rewarded for what they do POST EDUCATION - not what they know. I fear that the current focus on getting qualifications for those who neither want them or need them is taking funds away from those who want to improve their knowledge - as in the EQL debacle.
We all know that if we all focused only on our self interests the human race would quickly die out, yet we fail to take account of this in our daily lives these days. And sadly those that spent their formative years in higher education institutions, those now in power, seem to be much more professional self servers than many other members of society who lack a university education.
Sue Fewster
The keys to maintaining and developing a world class Higher Education System are as follows.
Publicly recognise the non market values and ethics of higher education as Michael Sandel so eloquently sugests in his Reith Lectures.
1) Repair the morale of academics by reviving their status and ability to influence internal university policy. Remove all unecessary reporting and paperwork.
2) Pay heads of department a substantial extra stipend for undertaking this job.
3) Create a respected scholar-teacher career route for individuals who do not normally undertake laboratory and other non library based research. This would increase contact hours available to undergraduates
4)Award research grants on the basis of good ideas not just applicability to the commercial world.
5)Make research promotion more dependent on publication than on obtaining research grants. many of these grants do not contain full overheads anyway. There is no credit given to a research combining high quality publication and low capital and running costs.
6) Remove the link betwen funding and the exact number of students. There should be no penalty to the university for weak students being excluded if they fail their first year exams. Currently weak students are retained because of financial pressures on departments
7) Return plain english to all higher education documents
9) Publicly value imagination scholarship and discovery whether it is of immediate benefit or not.. “Universities are the great engines of civilization” They are about primarily about culture , discovery and growth of the individual as a person not just as an efficent worker.
A member of the University of Oxford and a membert of Microsoft Corporation have written a document which contributes to the debate on the future of higher education, and Sir Ron Cooke’s report in particular. See -> http://dirit.blogspot.com/