Last Sunday, Jeffrey Young wrote about the use of the Internet to deliver lectures in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article centered on the work of Salman Khan, who posts home-made lectures on YouTube:

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube’s education section.

Young…

[...] called up one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief executive of 37signals, a hip business-services company, who recently gave an undisclosed amount to Khan Academy, to find out what the attraction was.

“The next bubble to burst is higher education,” he said. “It’s too expensive for people—there’s no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.”

A review of the comments appended to the article suggest that many readers agree that higher education faces serious competition from online knowledge repositories. What the article misses however, is consideration of the conversion of information acquisition/collection to personal knowledge. Schools such as MIT, through their support of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, have demonstrated their understanding that the real value of higher education is not the downloading of knowledge through texts and lectures, but rather through the production of new and personal knowledge that their unique environments offer. This tacit, added values provided by the institutions are what define quality higher education.

European colleges and universities are notorious for having embraced lectures over other course formats (i.e., seminars, laboratories). In these environments, student learning does not occur as much within lecture halls as it occurs outside of the classroom — through interactions with other students, individual and informal study groups, independent or directed research, etc.

In the age of YouTube lectures, universities need not worry about their bubbles bursting, but rather, what they should be doing in the classrooms instead of lecturing.

Are the old basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic relevant in the 21^st century? Or, is it time for an upgrade?

Arthur Harkins and I assembled a list of New Basics for education that can help us leapfrog to an education paradigm that is both innovative and relevant for the 21^st century and beyond. These learning outcomes are not intended to be definitive. They are, however, designed to serve as starting points for conversations on how youth-oriented human capital development systems may become more innovative and encourage learning that is more meaningful.

Youth will…

1. Think systemically: Perceiving existing patterns and constructing alternatives to them. This means that youth will think comparatively, through patterns, develop understandings of the underlying systems, and leverage the systemic patterns to meet their goals.
2. Think simulationally: Conducting “what if?” thought experiments and mental rehearsals using controlled imagination and projections. Applying imagination to simulational thinking, youth may create eye-opening stories both within and among patterns.
3. Thrive in the midst of changes, challenges, and unknowns: Developing perspectives, knowledge, and choices to cope with and leverage complexity and uncertainty. This means that youth will produce new thought tools to help them cope with increasing chaos and ambiguity in the modern world.
4. Create and manipulate alternative pasts, presents, and futures: Creating and managing virtual time; developing flexible definitions of social and personal time; and, selectively associating alternative pasts and futures with multiple presents. This means that youth will counter the tyranny of traditional perceptions of clock time through their personal time constructs, including conceptualizations of history, the present and future that can be strategically compressed and stretched.
5. Develop and respond to goals and challenges: Setting goals and objectives; detecting and anticipating impediments to success; and, designing solutions to impediments. This means that youth will take charge of their lives in more and more ways, in particular through energetic applications of their values and intelligence.
6. Understand and effectively utilize existing information: Accessing and selectively employing information in pursuit of opportunities and problem resolutions. This means that youth gravitate toward the acquisition of new information, rather than shying away from it; and that the abundance of information will be valued as a socioeconomic resource.
7. Construct and utilize personally applicable knowledge: Purposively transforming information into personally usable knowledge; building a personally styled capability to add intellectual and other forms of variety to the world; and, enhancing their decision-making options through the formation of new understandings. This means that youth will devote their lives to the construction and application of meaning, both explicit and implicit.
8. Construct and utilize new knowledge related to contexts, processes, and cultures: Perceiving, designing, and constructing real and virtual contexts suitable for specific tasks; compiling and utilizing many perspectives on given subjects; and, enhancing decision-making options. This means that youth will become increasingly capable as designers and architects of alternative knowledge foundations to improve their lives.
9. Effectively utilize current and emerging ICT systems: Staying atop the technologies that permit modern learning and economies; and, being at the forefront in the adoption and effective use of new technologies. This means that youth will expand their efforts as digital explorers and developers, and facilitate the technological adoption of technologies throughout society.
10. Acquire and assess knowledge of various global trends: Constructing “big pictures” of the world using different resources for each picture; becoming a global thinker and citizen; and, employing these viewpoints to help contextualize relatively localized problems, opportunities, goals and means. This means that youth will participate in the development of new and compelling visions for the planet and beyond.
11. Write and speak in a unique voice: Developing and utilizing personal uniqueness; applying uniqueness alone and with groups and teams; and, developing identity and character. This means that, through open, creative expression, youth may develop into exemplary representatives of democracy, freedom, and the courage to act on both.
12. Take personal responsibility for intentions and performance quality: Ethically accepting accountability for personal actions and inactions; and, constructively responding to personal and social assessments of performance quality. This means that youth will not only enjoy learning from their mistakes, but also aim to turn mistakes into successes.

The list is a bit conservative in scope, so I suggest a 14th reason to liven it up a bit:

Colleges have failed to establish a bold strategic focus and direction in reshaping higher education.

Rather than reorienting themselves on becoming institutions centered on innovation and creativity, they have latched onto 19th century production models. In many universities, this is best represented in the growth of central administration regimes, which seek to better manage the products and services that universities produce. How might universities leapfrog their contemporaries to provide meaningful inputs in the 21st century?

Leapfrog institutions relentlessly disrupt themselves to compete successfully in the global knowledge and innovation economy. They work ahead of the competition in teaching, research, innovation, and service. They avoid playing catch-up.

More at the EF Leapfrog memos archive…

• People are a university’s competitive advantage. Furloughs help reduce the possibilities that valuable employees will be laid-off. Also, it provides an incentive for underperforming staff to seek employment elsewhere, while maintaining healthcare and other benefits.
• Furloughs help fulfill the university’s land grant mission by encouraging staff and faculty to seek additional engagement with the communities they serve. This could include consultancies, secondary employment, or broader volunteer involvement.
• Deadweight and under-performing faculty will be encouraged to leave or retire through reduced financial incentives. This could help address one critical failure of the tenure system where many tenured faculty underperform and consume greater financial resources than the value they contribute.
• Likewise, furloughs encourage faculty who are productive, yet more engaged outside of the university, to leave. For faculty members that spend more of their time consulting or engaged on outside projects that provide little benefit to the university, furloughs provide an incentive for them to formally sever their relationship with the university.

By incentivizing departures, rather than forcing them, land grant universities can re-invest in (new and continuing) faculty and staff that will enhance their competitive advantage. In an era of economic distress, furloughs also can send a message to the community that the university is committed to retaining their investment in the community through jobs and continued or expanded engagement.

Last month, IBM took out a two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that touted their vision for a smarter planet. They believe:

The world continues to get “smaller” and “flatter.” But we see now that being connected isn’t enough. Fortunately, something else is happening that holds new potential: the planet is becoming smarter.

That is, intelligence is being infused into the way the world literally works—into the systems, processes and infrastructure that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold. That allow services to be delivered. That facilitate the movement of everything from money and oil to water and electrons. And that help billions of people work and live.

Furthermore, they write that the smarter planet is powered by three drivers:

• The world is becoming instrumented. By 2010, there will be a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent.
• The world is becoming interconnected. With a trillion networked things—cars, roadways, pipelines, appliances, pharmaceuticals and even livestock—the amount of information created by those interactions grows exponentially.
• All things are becoming intelligent. Algorithms and powerful systems can analyze and turn those mountains of data into actual decisions and actions that make the world work better. Smarter.

What does this mean for the futures of our various institutions?  For our hopes in quality of life?  IBM examines these questions in their blog, Building a Smarter Planet. They don’t provide answers, but they get the conversation going.

With the world becoming increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, what new opportunities and challenges are presented to education and human capital development systems?

Now in its seventh year, the annual survey of undergrads captures their opinions on different aspects of their university experience from quality of teaching, course availability, and academic reputation to campus pubs and bars, food services, and facilities. This year’s Report reflects ratings on 19 different topics, provided by 43,000 students from 55 Canadian universities

The Canadian University
Report also includes articles and interviews on topics related to the current university experience including:

• the pressure from students to improve universities’ environmental policies and practices and examples of how universities have responded;
  
• the impact and potential of iPod technologies for teaching; and,
  
• the push for commercialization of university research and the resulting creeping influence of the private sector on campus.
  

The 2008 Canadian University Report reflects the opinion of more than 43,000 current undergraduate students.   The results are derived from the answers to more than 100 questions. In total, students considered more than 77 different factors in the survey. All ratings are available at www.globecampus.ca with the Campus Navigator tool. A mean score for each university is calculated based on the responses of students who attend that school.  Universities are assigned a letter grade that matches their mean scores.  For full details on the methodology and scoring, see the Canadian University Report (pg. 52) or visit www.globecampus.ca.

Cut-and-pasted from the article’s abstract: University of Lagos (UNILAG) lecturers, Prof. S. A. Balogun and Dr. D. E. Esezobor in this piece from African Regional Conference on Engineering Education (ARCEE) examine the factors affecting the quality of engineering education at the tertiary level and ways by which the decline in quality may be stemmed.