Today is International Women’s Day, and the media will be chock full of articles bemoaning the plight of women the world over, trotting out the usual string of platitudes about the pressing need to address the deep-seated structures in society that contribute to gender inequality.
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Image: SAIBSA Workshop, 6 February 2016: ‘What is the professional responsibility of an early childhood educator?’
Even those who do not follow the education industry closely will be aware that all is not well in the higher education sector right now. Type the words ‘disruptive innovation in higher education India’ into Google and you get 390,000 results. Type in ‘crisis in higher education India’ and the number of results rises to 22 million.
A number of metaphors have been used to describe the momentous change foreshadowed for the higher education sector. ‘Paradigm shift’ is quite conventional, but ‘disruptive innovation’has become quite fashionable as Clayton Christensen’s theory has been applied to higher education. ‘Tsunami’ is another firm favourite, but the recent report published by the British think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), has introduced the word ‘avalanche’ which, according to Michael Barber, one of the lead authors of the report, was inspired by an interview with the renowned historian Norman Davies in the FT late last year:
Historical change is like an avalanche. The starting point is a snow-covered mountainside that looks solid. All the changes take place under the surface and are rather invisible. But something is coming. What is impossible is to say when. Norman Davies
The Report (uploaded to Scribd and embedded below) runs to 77 pages, but is easy-to-read and contains some important messages for institutions looking to insulate themselves from the turmoil.
There was an excellent piece in The Conversation a week or so ago written by Beverley Oliver (@DVCEdDeakin) entitled, Proving knowledge by degrees: MOOCs and the challenge of assessment. The reference to MOOCs in the title is a useful device for attracting attention, but the content of the article focuses on the quality of assessment design, and has broader applicability beyond the context of MOOCs.
The design of assessment tasks is critical to the creation of authentic learning environments. Student engagement and the deep learning that ensues, is far more likely if students can see the point of what they doing (see, for example, Lizzio & Wilson, 2013). As Professor Oliver notes:
Perhaps instead of focusing on how we test students, a more purposeful question might be: presuming we know what outcomes we need students to achieve, and at what standard, what evidence will enable us to judge that this student is ready to graduate? In other words, assessment tasks are opportunities for students to create evidence of learning achievements in an array of formats.
In other words, if we look upon assessment as learning, rather than of learning, the approach taken by the learner (and faculty) takes on a completely different complexion, as Dr Adele Flood describes in this video clip.
I presented at the Australia New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM) institutional members meeting in Sydney this morning.
My key message — in the wake of the Georgia Tech-Udacity tie-up — is that business schools ought to be preparing for a top 100 business school getting in on the act in the not too distant future by offering an MBA for $7000.
A good risk management strategy would be to digitise the MBA curriculum to provide greater flexibility, and take steps to promote digital literacies among faculty.
In the recently published NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis, Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-18, it stated (p.3) that (shock, horror) there is a need for more faculty training to improve digital media literacy ‘before being asked to teach, and for more professional development opportunities once in the profession’. More significantly, though, the report points out that:
While a lack of adequate training opportunities is a part of the challenge, ultimately a change in the mind sets of disciplines and individual faculty will be required, along with cultural shifts within institutions, before emerging tools and technologies are routinely adopted and implemented as a matter of course.
After almost a decade away in the corporate world, I don’t think I could have picked a better time to return to mainstream academia. Universities are changing — largely because of external pressures it must be said — and I can sense an openness to new thinking about pedagogy that wasn’t in evidence before. A key driver, I think, is the ubiquity of technology.
Whether we are talking about desktops, laptops, tablets or hand-helds, access to ICTs is no longer strictly the realm of the geek. Walk into any classroom in a university these days and its like a technology park. The big question, of course, is the extent to which all this hardware is actually serving to enhance learning.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00GPvns31U]
This classic clip from a Father Guido Sarducci stand up routine was shown a couple of times as a conference I attended recently. Unfortunately, this caricature of the extent and depth of learning at university is not too far from the truth. Ideally, learning experience should translate into competence, but so long as assessments focus on testing memories rather than skills, the probability of this happening remains low.
This problem has become particularly acute in recent times as the gap between university curricula and the knowledge and skills required in a digital age has widened. It has been a hot topic in India for a while now, but as a quick Google search demonstrates, it is a global problem.
The solution? Well, Father Sarducci may have the right formula. Start by asking what a graduate should be able to do once they finish.
Hopefully, this should take longer than five minutes.
I have blogged about Singapore’s FutureSchools projects in the past, and this latest clip from Edutopia would seem to indicate that serious progress is being made. The true success of this initiative, of course, will be the extent to which these practices will be rolled out to all schools in Singapore, and in this respect, professional development will be critical.
An interesting point to emerge from this video is that the approach taken to professional development in the FutureSchools project is to embrace the same participatory learning culture they are nurturing in their classrooms. Using technology, there is group peer observation of class sessions with the dual objective of learning from one another and providing constructive feedback.
More formal education and training in the use of ICTs in the classroom (in K-12 or higher education) is not that widely available. The Asian International College in Singapore is aiming to fix this with the launch if its Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Digital Pedagogies) this year.
