What is the future of higher education?

During a lunch conversation, focus turned to the future of universities and colleges. The question was essentially: Are universities capable of adapting to today's climate? Can they adjust to reflect the needs of learners? Many have expressed skepticism. Several years ago, in discussion with a university president, I was informed that the concepts I presented with connectivism made sense, were valid, and largely reflected the changes required by universities. But they weren't going to happen. Why? The system of policy, funding, research, tenure, and mindsets were to rigid to result in the quantum change needed. I've heard of several prominent thinkers recently who share this concern.

I personally hold a more hopeful view. Effectively predicting the future is often more about luck than deep insight. But we have a few models that we can consider in trying to anticipate what may occur in education. We've seen content-centric, closed structures like news/information services, the music industries, and others begin to restructure and rethink their models. Some have been successful. Others have failed. Some are still in transition.

Our interest in education goes beyond simple degrees. While I imagine most individuals attend school to get a degree...in order to get a job. We don't generally attend just to learn. However, as with most "good habits" - regulating our diet, working out, reading, critical thinking - the value is of a future nature. As teenagers, it was our job to have disdain for jumping through the hoops required "by them". But the degree isn't the only part of education - the connections, the dedicated time, the mentoring, the social experience, the coming of age, the formation of a more holistic world view than we often hold as we emerge from our teenage years, and so on. In particular, I am concerned with the "function focus" of learning. Self-directed learning works well for certain learners and personalities...in certain environments. But life is about more than getting a job. We need to develop moral/ethical character learners - to think critically, to think creatively, to understand differences between people. It's not only about how do we better educate people, but as Postman states, for what are we educating our learners. If universities are only about teaching, then I suspect they have a short life - for-profit ventures have more cost-effective models of "teaching". To do education (as a function) better is only part of the task. To better understand the "why" of education, however, requires metrics beyond doing education better (however that is defined).

Research is an additional key university function...but this is increasingly corporate funded. In Canada, according to the Canadian Council for Learning, corporate investment in R & D exceeds the public sector funding - a shift in position that occurred in the 1970's. We need as neutral a research system as possible. If society's institutions become largely an extension of corporations, we end up with a model that strips neutrality from scholarship.

Society needs universities for many reasons (research, coming of age, social maturation, broad-based knowledge)...but the organization itself will become a dramatically different institution than what we have seen in the past. Tim O'Shea suggests many changes are forthcoming, impacting smaller colleges/universities in particular.

So what's happening that produces my optimism? Well, we are seeing a variety of areas of change:

• Open access scholarship - like www.plosone.org
• The conversation is happening (slowly) at leadership levels
• Educators (at least from conference I've attended over the last year) are borderline optimistic :)
• Open courseware is a model that is gaining momentum
• Individual educators are adopting decentralized, social tools
• Individuals from "digital childhood" are beginning to take teaching positions in colleges/universities
• Change pressures continue to assault universities...and the combination of declining enrolment, learner expectations, advances in technology, increased understanding of the value of social software (driven by research), and case studies of adoption in businesses...is increasing the urgency of dialogue

Those who suggest that universities have no future forget the one basic principle of any organization: continual change, experimentation, and evolution. IF universities stay as they are today, yes, they will lose relevance. But, once change pressures are significant enough, even the most rigid structures change (who would have thought, even a few years ago, that the NY Times would consider going completely online - as in no print version). If colleges and universities do what they are supposed to do (namely assist in forming a better society through the creation, dissemination of knowledge)...then they have a strong future if they can sense and react to the substantial change in learners and flow of knowledge. If universities and college move too far from this significant focus, then I imagine businesses will offer better  opportunities for ongoing learning (defined as more relevant and functional). If we hold to our dual role as a change agent in society...and a filter for trends, I think my optimism is well founded.

Comments

[Javier Marti]

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[Nick Carbone]

Regarding tenure and promotion . . .

Sunday night I had dinner in Columbus with Dickie and Cindy Selfe and Scott DeWitt of OSU.

Cindy's been an advocate for increased recognition of scholars and educators who work in and with computer technologies and in computer-networked scholarly settings.

She was talking about how it should be possible with search engines, link counting, and other tools to develop a way to measure participation in the connective network George described in his presentation. So if you edit a Wiki entry, contribute to an online discussion about an area of your discipline, comment as a reviewer on an open source evolving article, publish research data on the WWW for other scholars to analyze, prepare useful YouTube videos that other instructors can use, and so on, you're leaving trails of participation. Finding ways to help tenure and promotion committees see and understand summaries of those trails, seemed to her doable and worthwhile, a necessary next step.

The change in how participation is measured is in fact shifting. Scholarly presses, for example, are encouraging T&P committees to consider alternatives to the monograph because those are becoming too expensive to produce and publish.

It will take a combination of leading institutions, established scholars with tenure leading the way, shifts in how accreditation agencies work, and some funding to study how to make these changes work. In the coming years, many of those pieces will begin to fall into place if only because more and more scholars and students will in fact be working in these new spaces.

[Rich James]

The process Nick describes above sounds like measuring a person's "wake" as they move through the digital sea. We need to build into that measurement some feedback on the value of that movement. Are the individual's contributions received favorably. Just as there is Google bombing, someone could conceivably fake their own buzz. We could learn from Amazon, eBay and others about reccpomender systems.

Regarding the ability of higher ed to change, I am hopeful. My optimism is a necessity in order to keep doing the work I do. Higher ed is an institution that has evolved incrementally over hundreds of years. It has persevered through many external upheavals. I think it is external shocks that will push it to evolve some more. The shocks may be a global conflict, global climate crisis, the economic power of China and India. We can't predict the outcome. Whatever the shocks are, they have to be met creativity, and ideas we have not yet thought of and tools we have not yet invented. So it seems like what we need to do to thrive in the future is to develop these creative skills top meet any challenge.

[Darren Cannell]

When I see entries like this, I am always curious why they restrict it to higher education? Should it not be "What is the future of education?" I think Pre-University education will have a larger impact on society then a change in higher education. Pre-university education impacts everyone unlike higher education which is a select portion of society that tends to spend time studing themselves.
Open up the research, study education.

[Tom Kinsey]

As I think about the future of Higher Education, I have thought about the recent books by Tom Freidman and Dan Pink; and about Perry's model of intellectual development. I have a blog where I have posted a couple of things. If you are intersted please check it out:

Vantage46@blogspot.com