Portrait of Henry Ford (ca. 1919) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I'm not sure whether the story is true or not, but it makes a great illustration. In the early days of the automobile, long before Henry Ford got the machine to work properly, his son was being teased by his peers. One of those doing the teasing was boy whose father was a horse-shoe-smith. And his comment was something along the lines "There will always be a huge need for horses, even if your father gets that silly machine to work. We all know he was soon to be proved wrong. Talk about eating humble pie!
Are we entering a phase where we are saying "There are always going to be traditional universities"? Let me qualify this by saying that I do believe that there will always have to be certain universities for certain degrees. Medicine for one is going to always need some degree of formal training, but even this is undergoing transformation world-wide. Nothing will replace the clinical experience of working in the hospitals literally hands-on. In South Africa we as medical students are incredibly fortunate to have practical experience that is the envy of the world. Medical students world-wide travel here during their Electives just to get some of that clinical experience. We get to do procedures that only Professors and Specialists do in Europe.
However, for so many other forms of education, we are at a watershed. And I believe there are
five main contributing factors.
Image by ivanpw at www.flickr.com/photos/28288673@N07/
Social Media
Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg in their book
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age suggest that social media is deeply embedded into our culture now that "participatory learning as a practice is no longer exotic or new but a commonplace way of socializing and learning". So, social media is going to be an integral part of future learning. Homework assignments, websites to research amongst other uses.
Al Gore via www.freakingnews.com
Internet
We all know Al Gore did not "invent" the internet, and his fanatical adherence to his very own religion of Global Warming (despite definitive proof that the mean temperature in Antarctica has been dropping by 0.7 degrees Celsius per year over the past 15 years and that the glaciers in the Himalayas are growing, not shrinking - but I'm going off on a tangent!) is questionable. The internet is going to affect learning in two significant ways. First, increasingly, knowledge is becoming more and more
freely available. And not just any type of information, reputable information. Reputable universities such as Yale have made many introductory courses
available free of charge, but not for course credit......yet.
edX is a collaboration between M.I.T. and Harvard, and in their own description they say
An open-source online learning platform that will feature teaching designed specifically for the web. Features will include: self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories. The platform will also serve as a laboratory from which data will be gathered to better understand how students learn. Because it is open source, the platform will be continuously improved.
Interestingly enough, in 2009, Davidson and Goldberg in
The Future of Learning said
The future of conventional learning institutional is past - it's over - unless those direction the course of our learning institutions realize, now and urgently, the necessity of fundamental and foundational change.
The second reason the internet is going to change education as we know it is because the internet has changed the way we think. We assume that if we don't know something, we can "Google it", or check it up on Wikipedia". As a result, we are losing our ability to integrate knowledge to solve problems in real life. This is where circumspection and care needs to be taken in the way that online courses are introduced, and we need to be given in depth instruction in how to integrate knowledge properly. This is where collaboration and participation comes in in the form of social media.
John Piper - take one (Photo credit: Micah_68)
Global Reach
I like to believe in the philanthropic side of people, and when I read through the reasons for the creation of programs like edX, it warms my heart to think that Harvard and M.I.T. are wanting to reach the world with their quality education. Never before has such accessibility been possible. In Christian circles, we already have instant access to tens of thousands of sermons, thousands of books and manuscripts. Dr John Piper at Desiring God Ministries has made almost all of his books free of charge at his website
here. One of Christianities deepest contemporary thinkers has made literally thousands of hours of hard labor of writing freely available. His ability to reach a global readership for the glory of Jesus Christ is unparalleled. The same can be said for people such as
Dr John MacArthur,
Tim Keller,
Mark Driscoll,
Al Mohler, and my own
pastor,
Dr Clint Archer, amongst many others. around the world.
Image by needoptic from www.flickr.com/photos/needoptic
Shifting working environments
We are moving from a predominantly industrialized economy in the West to an information-driven working environment. In the USA, the industries used to be the main driving forces behind the economy, but now the information and education fields are set to take center-stage. The expectations of these changing working environments are set to change as well. Experience and less formal "qualifications" will carry more weight than they currently do. The certificates received from courses done through edX, for example, will become far more valuable than they will be initially. Formal degrees will still be valuable, but continuing education will be emphasized more and more.
Costs
The costs of formal education at the major universities and colleges are rising drastically. I have been a qualified medical doctor for almost ten years now and I am still paying off my student loan - I still have about 30% of it to pay off. Our Obstetrician was chatting to us about a month ago and he was saying that here in South Africa it is so expensive for a newly qualified O and G set up a private practice. They need to buy at least one Ultrasound machine costing around R1.5 - 2 million ($250-300,000); a more detailed ultrasound scanner for high-definition scanning at double that price; office equipment including computers, chairs, desks, examination couches, instruments etc; hiring staff; sometimes buying into rooms at a hospital; and their malpractice insurance here in South Africa is in the region of R250,000 per year! They have to pay staff salaries. And they have their own student loans to pay off as well. Compare that to someone who can start an online business while in high school, save money from that, expand that into creating multiple online businesses, and then take free online courses in linguistics, writing etc, and by the age of 25 have published a book, written thirty apps, three of which have sold more than 50,000 and become a millionaire. Brendon Burchard is an example of something like this. He went from being flat broke to making $4 million in 24 months. I highly recommend his book
Millionaire Messenger.
HOWEVER
I'm going to give you a twist in the tail. Personally, I think that universities and colleges will adapt rapidly and that they will continue to be centres of academic excellence. Already schools are starting to implement experimental changes and coming up with very good results. One such example is
Flex Academy in San Francisco. True, this is high school and not university, but things are already under way. The school structure is still there. There are still teachers, "classrooms", assignments, tests, grades, assessments, and the parents can follow their children's progress much better than in a conventional schooling environment. But they are adapting to the future.
Perhaps one day I shall write a post describing my ideal university................
In a group environment, it is essential to experience as many different roles as possible. When I do my Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support courses every two years or so, each of us rotates through each role when we are practicing a resuscitation of a specific type of case. In the Academy that I did my last course, the classes are typically only about 10 to 12 students in size - just enough for each person to play a specific role during each practice of a resus. We would practice the same resus 12 times, but we would change over each time so that we would each get a chance to have a go each role. I can tell you something - it worked brilliantly. At the end of the course, the team leader was the one being marked on each resus, but the comforting thing was knowing you had the support of your team, and you had practiced each type of resus so many different times.
