Re-imagining higher education
The rickety edifice of higher education: why it persists
That the edifice of contemporary higher education is a creaky, archaic, obsolete structure, wailing to be put out of its misery, has long been known to insiders: academics, administrators, and hell, yes, especially to students. Since as far back as when we were in college, the consensus among students (often witheringly dismissed) was that much of what they learned seemed to have little relevance to their lives after graduation; and worse, the manner in which they acquired knowledge was inefficient, unappealing and much of the time, torturous. Of course, students were told that the motto of education was, ‘no pain, no gain’, and lacking any alternatives, they sucked in their stomachs to obtain The Credential - a degree certificate - they would receive upon satisfying graduation requirements. And that credential - not the content and process of its acquisition - was what was valued most. And perhaps rightly so, for it was the credential itself that opened doors: to employment, to admission into programs of higher learning, to lives of dignity and respect.
It mattered little if the program of study which led to the receipt of the credential actually provided valuable knowledge and skills. Much of the time, especially for employment, only a relatively narrow spectrum of the knowledge acquired would be tested and deployed, and any reasonably sharp individual could acquire most other knowledge on the job.
Reputation and prestige
Institutions came to acquire reputations driven by the prestigiousness of the organisations that offered employment to its graduates and especially, the levels of emoluments they received; or by the selectivity of the institution into which their graduates proceeded for higher studies. Since the rise of the technology industry, league ratings of institutions - particularly those offering technology and business programs - also have incorporated the numbers of students that establish their own ventures upon graduation and the quantum of funds they raise from investors.
Of course, some alumni would later go on to become successful poets, singers, writers, artists, politicians, businesspersons, athletes, scientists, engineers, doctors, researchers, filmmakers and so on, and all this would naturally contribute to the allure of the institution. But this was icing on the cake.
But by the same token, many of these institutions that are elite are more like exclusive clubs - whether it’s Harvard in the United States, Oxford in England, or St. Stephen’s in Delhi. But in the US, the high fees they charge has little to do with the quality of instruction offered; one can obtain instruction that is of nearly as high quality at universities that are ranked far lower and are much more affordable. The fees of elite colleges are advance dues for lifetime membership in an exclusive club of persons of wealth, power and influence in society. Viewed in that light, the tuition is perhaps justified. Such a system of education, however, merely reinforces social, cultural, and economic disparities and does nothing to subvert the stratification of society.
The perniciousness of college rankings perpetuates that elite system while also creating a crisis of student debt for those working- and middle-class students who manage to gain admittance. The ranking of institutions by various organisations such as US News and World Report, Quacquarelli and Times Higher Education, reinforces the perception that high-quality education is available primarily at elite universities. The factors they use for rankings are loaded in favour of parameters that hardly contribute to superior classroom instruction and learning. Student debt would be nowhere near as high if these rankings did not perpetuate misperceptions.
Ultimately, the apparent rewards offered by gaining admission to reputed institutions - namely, recruitment into lucrative positions and/or by prestigious or highly desirable organisations, and admission into highly selective institutions - was reason enough for high school students to perform their best to be admitted. The years spent pursuing an undergraduate degree would no doubt grant some measure of knowledge and skills. Nevertheless, the current higher education system - in almost any country - does not do a great job in ensuring that a student has, in fact, acquired the requisite knowledge and skills to be functional and productive upon graduation.
Should colleges prepare students for gainful employment?
Indeed, the link between the knowledge and skills offered to students in college, and the demands made by the diverse and constantly changing requirements of the larger world into which the student graduates, is a tenuous one. And perhaps this is how it ought to be, since the original goal of formal education - as opposed to mere training - was to mould young persons to become cultured adults who would contribute to and help advance the larger society along many dimensions, and not merely to perform one or more specific tasks efficiently. Humans, after all, are not automatons - machines that perform a narrow set of tasks - but sentient beings who think, feel, love, create, exult, and grieve.
Education, its votaries exhort to all willing to listen, is not training! Education might involve the acquisition of useful skills, but it is so much more! Education broadens perspectives. Education makes one creative. Education helps one relate well to others, and to the larger world. Education offers one a vision that lasts a lifetime. Education is the backbone of civilisation. Look at the United States: if they have advanced rapidly after the Second World War, it is only because of their incomparable (and, perhaps, unmatchable) network of universities of every shape and size, that have educated people who went on to become world-class scientists, lawyers, doctors, industrialists, engineers, poets, artists, and presidents of the nation.
It is an argument difficult to counter: nothing succeeds like success, especially the visible celebrity of an institution’s most prominent graduates. But did those individuals succeed because of or despite their education? The easy answer, of course, is a bit of both.
India’s ramshackle education system generates graduates who shine in numerous professions, more so, when they relocate to the West, especially the US. Many major technology companies, including Microsoft and Google, are currently led by persons who were born and educated in India. Graduates from Indian institutions are accepted into the most prestigious institutions in the world and ascend to lofty heights in their chosen fields. A good institution helps good students succeed. A great institution helps outstanding students go on to spectacular careers.
The success of a few outstanding individuals, nevertheless, is not a reason to maintain the status quo in higher education. After all, Ekalavya became a star archer despite being denied formal instruction by Guru Dronacharya. The proper test of an education system is how well it serves the majority of those it professes to educate - The Great Middle of the Bell Curve - and the emerging consensus appears to be that it is doing its job rather poorly. Studies conducted in India some years ago determined that as many as 90% of the graduates of engineering institutions in India were unemployable. While this could be attributed to poor quality control at the institutions, or the induction of students without the necessary aptitude into the programs, it also calls into question the design of the programs itself. If an architecture of education works well for only the top 1-5% of students, it is definitely not scalable, and we probably ought to explore other models.
Time to move on?
That the prevailing system has outlived its usefulness has long been recognised and academicians and administrators have been tinkering around with the current model. Radical changes have not been made, save for the occasional experiment, of which there have been few. Krea University in Andhra Pradesh, Azim Premji University in Bangalore, Swaraj University outside Udaipur, and Plaksha University in Punjab are a few promising experiments. But these remain at the fringes as obscure curiosities, and they are new enough that we can’t predict their fate yet. More frequently, institutions eventually converge upon prevailing academic patterns in order to remain viable in the face of skepticism from a risk averse prospective student body, as well as parents and employers. The general sentiment is: we know the current system is bad, but we know exactly how bad (and good) it is, and have learned to live with and work around its limitations. Such is the attitude.
Fear of the unknown and the untested is the enemy of innovation.
But the pandemic has pushed mankind - however reluctantly - into the realm of the unknown and untested. Indeed, the abrupt shutdown of colleges was followed by a frenzied and frantic transition to alternative means of continuing classroom instruction employing information technologies. It was a resigned acceptance of the need to charge bravely into the unknown, deploy the untested, and do the unthinkable. And with this coerced transformation under extreme duress has come the opportunity to re-examine the process of formal education from the ground up and explore entirely new ways of accomplishing learning goals that satisfies the needs and aspirations of individuals and society at large.
Taking stock: So where are we now?
There has been no fundamental change in educational architectures in millennia. As mankind’s wealth of learning burgeoned, knowledge began to be divided into manageable clusters termed disciplines that had clearly identifiable centres and fairly distinct boundaries. Over the past couple of centuries, the knowledge contained in disciplines has been broken into chunks and packaged into courses that run for a limited term called by various names (semester, quarter, term, session). Each course has a curriculum that addresses the identified chunk of knowledge, which is imparted to students with its associated skills, and they are made to practice their learning through assignments and tests handed out during the term, which are then evaluated. The grade ostensibly measures the level to which the student has acquired the requisite knowledge and skills. The students typically assemble periodically in some confined space (classroom, lab, auditorium,) or even, perhaps, under a shady tree (as we have often done) and are addressed and engaged by one or more instructors on the subject of the course. Any student travelling back in time, say, 2,000 years, to attend a class is likely to adapt to any differences rather quickly. The key distinctions would be a lack of chalkboards and pen and paper. Some other differences would be cultural and attitudinal - the manner in which students relate to a teacher. Neither of these is significant or insurmountable. A willing and open-minded student would be able to fit in.
The most significant change over the millennia has been organisational and institutional: In ancient times, a student wandered about seeking a guru, and upon finding and being accepted by one, learned whatever was possible, before moving on in search of another teacher - often with the blessings of the former one. He or she would repeat this process as needed. There were no common standards and learning was idiosyncratic, driven by the values and knowledge of the gyan giver.
In an attempt to bring order, focus, and depth of inquiry, in modern times, individual scholars specialised in particular disciplines of study. Scholars of various traditions and fields have been assembled and clustered by subject and organised under the umbrella of a single institution (and campus) called a college or university. The institution has prefabricated labelled programs of learning called degrees which require students to learn multiple subjects under their respective instructors, all affiliated with the same institution. A credential called the degree is awarded to the student upon having completed the required sequence of courses with acceptable grades.
The modern university or college is a glorified intermediary agency specialising in aggregating knowledge and skill providers under one roof, and issuing credentials. No more wandering, or searching for students--they can stay put on a single campus and acquire credentials in specialised disciplines.
Credentials by degrees
College degrees in many parts of the world are established at three levels: bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate. The terminology varies, but these are the norm. The United States offers a shorter length credential of one to two years called an associate’s degree (for entry after high school) which emphasises the acquisition of vocational skills for various trades and clerical positions. In some instances, the student receives academic credit which shortens the length of a subsequent bachelor’s degree. In other countries such credentials carry the designation of a diploma, rather than a degree. Yet another credential is the certificate. The key distinction between a degree and the rest is one of legitimacy: the degree carries the imprimatur of an accredited university and is expected to have been rigorously vetted by an august body of educationists, while the others carry no such guarantee.
Beyond the issue of legitimacy - which is essential for validating the quality claims of an educational institution - the title of the qualification ought to matter little. The field of education has traded in labels for far too long and have lost their meaning. A certificate from a prestigious, trustworthy university, could offer superior learning opportunities than a degree from a third-rate institution.
It is about time we cast to the wind the terminology of academic qualifications and focus strictly on the outcomes of learning architectures. Credentials should mean something more than merely having completed a sequence of courses. They need to be applied to testable knowledge and skills that can be applied in the larger world.
It is probably time to abandon the college degree as we know it and create more meaningful credentials.
New vehicles for education
Just as one cannot change the wheels of an automobile while it is in motion, it hasn’t been possible to alter the fundamental architectures of education while institutions were incessantly engaged in teaching. COVID-19 has derailed education. Institutions have ground almost to a standstill, delivering where they can only on their core mission of imparting knowledge (or at least, going through the motions of doing so). Most are publicly declaring that they expect matters to return to ‘normal’ by the time institutions reopen, perhaps in another 6-8 months. Although there are colleges like Bennington in the US that have carefully and thoughtfully crafted a reopening plan. At most universities, administrators are engaging in wishful thinking or hedging their bets. More likely, the pronouncements are for public consumption to alleviate fears about enrolment, even while they scramble madly to construct contingency plans.
Matters might return to ‘normal’, but probably only after a year, at best. Few institutions can survive a hiatus of that length without receiving any income and many may self-destruct. It would be better to view this catastrophe as an opportunity, not only to change the wheels of education, but to design, construct and clamber on to an entirely new, and far more effective, vehicle of learning that is in tune with our times. And they might not even require wheels: they could lift off and fly!
Technology: it is here to stay and take centre stage
It requires almost no justification to claim that technology will be integral to nearly any new educational vehicle design, and would probably form the core of many architectures. Technology is already used extensively in most institutions, albeit primarily in a supporting role - partly because it is not yet mature enough to significantly substitute for prevailing instructional methods, but also because most instructors are not familiar or comfortable with using it.
In this time of COVID-19, however, institutions and instructors have no choice but to employ technology, despite its inadequacies and their own lack of preparation or competence. Technology is the saviour, as it were, allowing students to attend classes away from campus. As long as social distancing remains a requirement and prevents campuses from reopening fully, there is no option but to employ technology. Once we accept that technology is the only means of conducting classes in circumstances like the present, we will adapt, evolve best practices, and rapidly improve technologies for learning. One day, when COVID-19 is a distant memory, we will likely find ourselves both reluctant as well as unable to return to the pre-technology era. We are buying a one-way ticket to large-scale transformation.
The world has changed
There are various ways in which the world since academic institutions began incorporating its currently employed models.
Urbanisation: In the past 150 years, the world has gone from being largely agrarian, to industrial, to information-centric. At the start of this period, the majority of the world’s population lived in small, relatively isolated, well-settled, largely agrarian communities, with little contact or infrequent communication amongst them. Today, according to a United Nations report, between 40% and 80% (depending on the nation) of the world’s population lives in relatively dense, urban settlements that are highly interconnected through various modes (road, rail, air, sea) of rapid transport.
Aspirations: Two centuries ago there was almost no such thing as a middle class; there were a few wealthy families, and a larger population that provided services to them, and large numbers of the poor. Few people had access to education or even literacy and were reconciled to remaining mired in poverty. The then-prevailing system of education was created for and largely served people of means. Today, there exists a sizable middle class (although in many places, like the United States, a rapidly dwindling one), and there is a huge segment of those who aspire to improve their lot and become a part of the middle class and beyond. The world has a far larger literate, confident, and aspiring population.
Disparities: Advances in healthcare, better nutrition and hygiene have increased life expectancy but also led to a rapid growth in population. Improved education and higher aspirations for material goods and comforts have resulted in a massive and visible strain on the environment. There is widespread concern today for the degradation of our planet, and an emerging consensus that we must do all to stem and reverse the trend. Despite the improvements in gross socio-economic indicators, there continue to exist huge disparities in income, nutrition, and access to education, healthcare and justice.
Rapid societal change: Society has transformed far more in the past one hundred years, than in the previous two thousand and the pace of change is only accelerating. This change is reflected in new values and attitudes, as well as new art forms and socio-cultural trends; the emergence of entirely new skills and professions and the demise of others; the extinction of once successful and long-standing businesses and the creation of wildly successful new ones; and large-scale cultural, business, and knowledge connectivity among nearly all the peoples of the world. Lifestyles and needs change rapidly, typically driven by technological innovations; homes built even twenty years ago feel obsolete and unsuitable to young, new renters or buyers.
Obsolescence and re-skilling: The rapid and continual transformation of the world has led to a similar dissolution of old professions and occupations, and waning of expertise and skills; and the emergence of new careers and jobs requiring an entirely new set of skills and knowledge. This compels individuals to keep learning and developing throughout their working lives. As is increasingly argued, everyone needs to be prepared for half a dozen career shifts, some or all requiring entirely new knowledge and skills.
With all of these rapid, continual, multi-pronged transformations, how can we expect our current architectures of education to be able to deliver at all? In fact, they don’t and have not, for quite a while.
Our education systems were created in a different era when change, if it occurred at all, was quite slow, and almost never, radical.
Now is as perfect a time as any to re-imagine education architectures, build and test a range of prototypes rapidly. It is unlikely that a single, common architecture will emerge from these experiments in the near term, although we might converge on a small number of best-of-breed archetypes in the long run. After all, it took thousands of years for our current system of diplomas and degrees to develop. Such standards did not exist until a couple of hundred years ago.
The AATLAS Framework
With the benefit of hindsight and humankind’s collective experience with education, we propose the following foundational (but not exhaustive) requirements of NewEd - our term for any radical new proposal for academic architecture:
ADAPTABLE: It will adapt rapidly to changing as well as differing societal needs for new knowledge and skills
ACCESSIBLE: It will be accessible to people across abilities, socio-economic levels, culture, age, race, gender, and geographical location
TECHNOLOGICAL: It will have technology at its core, not just as a supplement
LIFELONG: It will enable and promote lifelong education and thus support for persons across the entire spectrum of maturity and experience
AUTHENTICATED: It will rigorously authenticate credentials received at varying levels of accomplishment and across the world
STACKABLE: It will permit combining and integrating credentials received from different sources and providers
In designing new architectures it is important that we do not - consciously or unconsciously - replicate the old paradigms while merely paying lip service to the AATLAS Framework. We need to completely rethink education for our current age, and redesign from the ground up, without being constrained by old thinking, even if we try to mine the old standards for useful elements. Our new designs should drive public policy so that large-scale structural changes are made to accommodate them. For instance, universal broadband internet access should become a fundamental right to make NewEd accessible to all. Internet Access Everywhere should become among the most pressing goals of national governments.
Let us explore a possible education architecture based on AATLAS.
AATLAS: A first attempt at a new educational architecture
Technology makes it possible for students to take classes from multiple providers during the same period. One is no longer bound by geography, or even time. Just as a college is essentially an aggregation agency that brings under a single roof faculty to teach a range of subjects, one can conceive of a consortium of institutions from which a student can take courses a la carte and stack them together to obtain a credential. Institutional members of a consortium will follow common standards and employ common content as well as share library facilities. It may no longer be necessary for a university to try to be all things to all people; instead, it can specialise in certain disciplines, levels of education or methods of instruction, for instance, doing what they do best.
This approach is not entirely novel: The Claremont Colleges operate as a consortium permitting students enrolled in one to take classes at any of the five other colleges - Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Scripps College, Pomona College, and Pitzer College. Here are some others:
The Five Colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
Tri-College Consortium (Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and the University of Pennsylvania)
Boston Area Consortium (Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Tufts, Wellesley)
The consortium tradition is even older: Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England are consortia of colleges. Technology finesses the need for institutional members to be located in close proximity in order to enable students to attend classes conveniently at member campuses: they could be located anywhere on the planet and do not necessarily require a physical campus.
In more recent times, the MOOC aggregators, edX and Coursera operate effectively as rudimentary university consortia, providing a standardised platform for courses developed and offered from participating institutions. What has been missing thus far is these organisations have not been licensed to issue credentials carrying the weight of a degree; at present they can, at best, issue certificates of satisfactory completion of individual courses or course sequences.
Coursera and edX piloted the idea of geographically distributed college consortia on a global scale, and COVID-19 is merely accelerating the process of consolidation. While there is no substitute for face-to-face (f2f) classes run by faculty, we recognise that only a fraction of instructors excel at their task, and many fare quite poorly. Under these circumstances, an excellent online class conducted by a master instructor would be far more effective than a poor-to-average f2f class. It makes good sense for universities to substitute best-of-breed online (BoBO) classes offered by other consortia members for their own offerings, and focus on what they can do best. Most undergraduates will agree that the majority of compulsory, large-size classes that they are compelled to attend in their first couple of years of college do little to inspire, and they might be better off taking BoBO courses to fulfill those requirements instead.
AATLAS combines BoBO with the best f2f that an institution has to offer. BoBO could be supported by learning facilitators affiliated with the college. Most of the first-year classes could be substituted by BoBO while some of the remaining classes to obtain credentials could be f2f.
If Digital University Consortia were accorded the imprimatur of a university, students could choose to affiliate with any individual college and take classes online from any other consortium member (or even a college that is not a consortium member if it meets requisite quality standards).
There will be consequences, of course. A few rockstar professors could create outstanding BoBO for standard bread-and-butter classes. We would no longer need instructors teaching the subject at every institution. They could serve as local facilitators and guides instead. This would be a good thing for students who might otherwise be condemned to sit through classes conducted by not so competent instructors, of which, unfortunately, there are far too many: sub-par in the subject area and/or pedagogy, or lacking the temperament and discipline required of the profession.
More importantly, this will reduce the cost of education to the student. Institutions have aggrandised power for much too long, engaging in often rapacious rent-seeking behaviour founded on brand and reputation in order to dispense credentials to students. It is time to call them out and establish the true cost of learning in modern times without in any way diluting the quality of learning imparted.
This model disaggregates the design and packaging of knowledge from its administration and dissemination. As new knowledge as well as new societal needs emerge, domain experts in association with the best instructional designers can rapidly create BoBO learning modules of the highest quality and make them accessible to consortium members for a fee. This can operate on a free-market model.
With the help of instructional experts, various gradations of classes can be developed for offering to students of different ages, experiences and maturities.
We need a better, more granular measure of credential than a degree, with a focus on specific clusters of knowledge or skills. In evaluating a degree, one often wishes to investigate the specific classes an individual has taken. NewEd credentials would be a combination of levels of knowledge and skill clusters obtained.
Course credentials obtained from different institutions ought to be STACKABLE. One or more independent organisations should audit each course for quality and assign ratings for the benefit of students as well as those who will evaluate a student’s credentials, such as employers.
Being enrolled in a physical college and attending classes on a campus for several years is not necessary for acquiring domain knowledge and skills. The benefits of a multi-year degree from a physical campus have to do with learning how to engage, build relationships and work together with persons of varied backgrounds, interests, abilities, ages and qualifications. While those benefits are critically important for personal growth and for operating productively in this world, we need to find other means of achieving that end.
But wait! There’s more!
There are several elephants in the room in the debate on transitioning from f2f to online classes.
Learning is both an individual and collective experience. Some learning is best done in an individual, unhurried manner, allowing new thoughts and ideas to percolate, simmer; for reactions to bubble up in one’s mind; and to reflect. But collective learning also has many advantages. Every individual in a group receives and processes information differently, and this results in a range of responses and reactions from them, which when they articulate, offer a richer, deeper, broader understanding of the phenomena and ideas presented for learning, for all in the group. Online learning in its current form, even BoBO, may not offer the intense, immediate, visceral, collective experience that makes for rich, vivid and powerful learning experiences. This problem needs to be addressed in online learning for it to come anywhere near matching the strength of f2f learning.
There are, of course, distinct benefits of online learning: interactions remain recorded for review, with the caveat that they may lack the texture of immediate verbal interactions. Personality differences result in some students engaging more often in a f2f context while the more reticent ones remain silent. Online classes, however, especially if interactions can be anonymised, encourage engagement from the entire personality range of students, sociable to introverted students.
Laboratory, field, stage, studio other learning experiences. The online paradigm is well-suited to passively, rather than experientially, acquired knowledge. Much of our learning, however, happens in the process of engaging with the physical world - through handling objects and by moving through the physical world. Such visceral experiences provoke observations, reactions and epiphanies that might be impossible to obtain purely through the receipt of information, even if delivered in visual and/or audible form. Then there are smells, tastes, and tactile experiences essential to understand aspects of the world that cannot be experienced electronically. The learner has no means to directly engage with and manipulate objects and discover concepts the way babies learn about the world. There are some courses that integrate these aspects of experiential learning with lectures and reading in the form of a MOOC, for example Future Learn’s ‘Soils: Introducing the World Beneath our Feet’ or Coursera’s ‘How Things Work: An Introduction to Physics’.
Outside the classroom and laboratory. Much of a student’s experiences in college relate to activities, events and experiences outside of class, many of which are incidental and accidental. Most of it is unscheduled, unstructured, unique to individuals; left to individual choice; appears nowhere on the curriculum; may have little or nothing to do with a student’s academic goals; is not promoted or guaranteed by the institution; not anticipated by either students or their parents; impossible to assign even a range of values; and its consequences for life are unpredictable. Ironically, it is these experiences from which a student derives the majority of the value of attending college and what they’re missing most during the pandemic.
Building relationships. A critical aspect of a student’s college experience is the emergence and strengthening of relationships with peers, faculty, and others, many of which are lifelong, and frequently prove critical throughout one’s life. Humans are not merely learning machines, but living entities who exist for, by and because of relationships which serve intrinsic and functional purposes.
Education is far more than curriculum delivery - a critical and essential function but nowhere near being all of it. Students will justifiably demand that we find ways to deliver these other experiences to them. These are some of the many challenges we must address.
Online education is an entirely different context from f2f, with differences that can never fully be erased no matter how sophisticated the technology gets. Each context has its distinct advantages and disadvantages that the other cannot match. The best we can do is to mitigate any shortcomings to the extent possible. Learning will change for sure, and to this we need to be reconciled. Over the millennia, formal learning has transitioned from being an idiosyncratic, one-on-one experience with a charismatic guru, to a standardised process founded on well-established and near-universal protocols, administered by a college or university. Some things were lost in the transition and other benefits were gained. There were many debates, objections and turmoil while the gears were shifted, but society eventually accepted the changes and today we believe it to be the gold standard not to be tampered with.
It is neither feasible, justifiable nor sensible to adhere to pre-online academic architectures. We are talking about an entirely new set of raw materials, learning methodologies, engagement protocols and media which will form the building blocks of NewEd. Instead of trying to find ways to replicate what is possible on an f2f campus we must imagine and explore what kinds of new things we can do with technology that might never be possible if it were f2f. We need to accept that we are constructing entirely new learning contexts and protocols ab initio, and not limiting ourselves to paving the cowpaths that physical campuses represent.
We need to charge bravely into the future because the plague is upon us, and we need to learn to live with it. Technology offers one such a path.
