Rene’s Assessment

It is clear, and I think a matter of broad consensus that our succes and prosperity, and that of our society, requires increasing amounts of learning, reflection and adaptation. It is this assertion that makes widening participation, and lifelong learning so important. In particular in these difficult times, the investments we make now in our skills and competences will determine how strong we will arise from the ashes of this recession.

It is therefore rather shameful to see how the higher education sector is being driven to ruin. While government is advocating that we widen articipation, at the same time it cuts back funding for teaching by 65 million pounds in the next academic year. Earlier it had already stopt funding the education of those of us who already have a degree (Equivalent or lower level Qualifications). It is strange isn’t it, that on the one side we get told how important it is that we all keep learning, as the halftime of knowledge is decreasing so rapidly. Yet our funding system now seems to say that once you have learned something, no further investment or maintenance of that learning will ever be required. We spend billions of pounds on rescuing a banking system that few of us actually really want, but we cannot commit to even a fraction of that funding to guarantee us the learning and development we all so desperately want and need. Lifelong learning is on the verge of extinction, the Times Higher Education reports, but very few of us seem to really care. Or have we just become too numb over the past months to realise what is happening?

Our regulations and practices, both in education and professional bodies increasingly breed compliance in stead of creativity. Are we selling off Higher Education to corporations, and to those with the personal wealth to fund their own development? A system that should be about the development of critical individuals, which I believe to be in the long term benefit of society as a whole, is risking slowly transforming into a goverment sponsored corporate training ground. I believe that is the very last thing that we need.

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It seems that, after static content, the lecture has now definitely made it into the realm of ‘what you share for free’ in stead of what you ‘sell for money’. We’ve had Teachertube for a while now, but this always struck me as being a tutor-to-tutor resource:

Bu in recent weeks we’ve had a launch of two really great resources that provide world class lectures directly to learners. A few weeks ago we saw the launch of Academic Earth which is aspiring to bring us ‘Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars’ such as this lecture from Paul Bloom:

It seems from the embed-tag that Academic earth uses blip.tv, which is interesting. But what I really like about Academic Earth is that is often provides full transcripts and reading assignments, which makes these videos into a truly accessible and valuable independent learning resource.

And today I stumble on Youtube’s attempt to create an online iTunesU: Youtube EDU, which does not seem to have the high production value of Academic Earth, but will most likely develop very impressively in terms of sheer available content, such as this series on special relativity:

Other then being very grateful for these wonderful resources, I must also say that I am intrigued by the speed which with the traditional University is being dismantled. That information, content, and perhaps even knowledge have been commodotized is not really that surprising, but that, only a few years after that development, are already declaring the lecture dead in terms of marketable value, that does surprise me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I disagree, I am just baffled by the speed of developments. Either way, I’m going to wrap up this post, as I have some lectures to watch.

The lecture is dead: Long live the lecture!

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I must first of all thank Stephen Downes for his truly excellent post on the  Monkeysphere Ideology. It is a profound and insightful analysis of some unhealthy fundamentals in society, of which this banking crisis is perhaps just a single symptom. This post is about how the education sector perhaps is suffering the same symptoms, and so might actually be headed for a similar meltdown.

Fail

It is argued that the financial crisis is one of destructive incentives, and hyperinflation of quality ratings, that lead to a massive over-investment in what turned out to be worthless assets. A truly horrific oversimplification, but it will do for the purposes of this post. Higher Education also rates it’s products, and ironically it is a credit rating system. Attainment in the UK is measured in academic credit on levels 4 (first year undergraduate) to 8 (doctorate). Credit on these levels is highly valued, and often seen as key to successful participation in the modern information society. As a result there is a dramatic effort to widen participation in an attempt to get up to 40% of the population equiped with a level 4 qualification or higher. And in a similar way to how mortgages were handed out without ensuring clients had sufficient capital and earnings for repayment, we are now handing out academic credit without ensuring that when we hand it out, it represents adequate intellectual capital.

There is no need for this, as my case certainly doesn’t revolve around some elitist notion that the majority of the population is fundamentally incapable of learning and functioning on this level. The problem is that we are being given the wrong incentives. We are incentivized to pass, preferably with a first. Our funding, and our ranking in league-tables depends on it. And slowly but surely, this erosion is also eroding the value of Higher Education. And unfortunately, it erodes the value of all degrees, just as the credit crisis is devaluing all our houses, regardless of our credit-worthiness. And with the value of qualifications diminishing, and their cost increasing, inevitably the time will come that this eroded qualification is no longer worth the inflated tuition fee that is being asked for it.

The key for recovery to me is failure. We should be allowed to fail, learn from that failure, and let a phoenix arise from it’s ashes. We seem to have missed the point that success is a value that is relative, relative to failure. We forget that the greatest of successes have often come from strings of failures. Who knows what great innovative company might arise from the ashes of a bankrupt General Motors, but we will probably never know. Just like we will never know how great some of our students might have been after overcoming criticism, setbacks and failure, because in stead we have sent them away with only a marginal and ever decreasing  successes. Failure is the foundation of greatness, and we need to learn to embrace it.

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There is a lot of discussion at my University at the moment about intellectual property rights. The discussion has many dimensions, from our internal learning object repository, via access policies to course areas in our VLE, to the licensing and sharing of educational resources with the rest of the world; Open Educational Resources. The latest feedback that I received on this latter discussion is that the University is  “not in the business of creating open educational resources”.

…That is of course correct.

HP is not in the business of making printers, they are in the business of selling ink cartridges

Google is not in the business of creating a search engine, they are in advertising.

The reasons we create learning resources aren’t very different from the reasons for Google to create a mobile platform, or a web browser. They are means through which they can enhance their core business, or strategically shape the domain in which they operate in their favour. It is not however a way to make money. Google needs open, standard compliant browsers to promote a ubiquitous Internet. Chrome is a part of the strategy, and so is their support for Firefox, or the development of Android. These aren’t assets, they are tools. Universities need high quality engaging and accessible learning resources in support of teaching and learning. If they already exist, we should reuse them. Where we feel that there is room or need for improvement, we might choose to do so, if that supports our business. Because we are in the business of coaching and accreditation. Some of us might even be in the business of knowledge creation. We are not however in the business of building learning resources, open or otherwise.

Somehow though, I am afraid that is not really what was meant…

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Time for some reflection, and answer the big question for December 2008: what did you learn about learning in 2008? And in doing so, perhaps time to come clean about my own learning disabilities.

Geek Inside

I’m a classical geek: A bit of a recluse, overly rational and sometimes perhaps lacking a bit in some social graces. On most days I read more then my girlfriend talks. I will trust you to correctly apply the stereotypes in that sentence. They are characteristics that, for the most part, have actually served me quite well. Our education system has bestowed the most extraordinary amount of positive action on the minority of people like me. People that can, and are willing to, learn at least some things solely by engaging with the written word.

The problem is of course that this is not how most people learn, and it’s not how the most important things are learned. But it’s easy to stick with something that works, and so it has taken me quite a bit of time to really understand that. To understand that we only really learn by (inter)acting. And while the education system is still accepts, and even favours people with similar disabilities to mine to cling to their narrow learning habits, modern social and professional life make it increasingly hard to be successful with that disposition. Because this disposition is suited primarily for information gathering. And information is of course just another commodity, and an increasingly cheap one.

But aside from this personal realisation, this is something that needs to be translated to our practices, and our institutions and systems, which is not trivial. How are we going stimulate learning, if we are not teaching? How do we verify that learning has taken place, if we aren’t sure how create authentic and valid assessments for the competencies we are now aspiring to instil? And aside from solving these challenges on an intellectual level, how will we actually implement them and change the entrenched system of education in which we work. It’s a worthy challenge, one for after the Christmas holidays…

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