When worlds collide
3 May 2010This year’s annual JISC conference was at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, bringing 750 delegates in from sun-splashed Westminster Abbey to the digital caverns of future media. The opening plenary was by Martin Bean, the kinetic Vice-Chancellor of the Open University (OU). Of course, the OU has a pitch to sell on the centrality of digital media to Higher Education, and it does a very good job of providing access to a large number of learners, to an enviable level of student satisfaction. It would, though, be a mistake to see Martin Bean’s message. His case is directed to universities in general, and needs to be taken very seriously.
A slide from Martin Bean’s presentation at JISC
In essence, Martin Bean’s argument is this: Our sector has three key drivers – globalisation, an ever-widening demand for participation (“massification”) and increasing recourse to privatisation as governments fail to keep up with costs and demands. At the same time, the world of work is changing rapidly and we are swamped with exponential increases in information, which must be interpreted through our curricula as meaningful knowledge. To an ever increasing degree, the students we teach have never known a world without digital media and accessible, and increasingly mobile, devices. They are accustomed to working across multiple challenges, expect resources to be free, and blend digital lifestyles with digital work-styles. In Martin Bean’s succinct formulation, education is colliding with social networking, which is exciting, fast and very disruptive.
This is a compelling argument, which either grabs the imagination or sends shivers of horror down one’s spine. The problem, though, is that it pretty well stops at this point. So informal learning is gaining momentum and force like a dust cloud sweeping towards a citadel. But what happens when open, byte-sized bits of knowledge come up against the need for sequence and structure, for curricula that build systematically on prior understanding and insight, and formal accreditation? And while potential students are indeed social networkers who can access open learning resources in a few keystrokes, they are still clamouring to enter the citadel of the conventional university, which is why demand for places is up more than 15% this year and some 200,000 qualified young people will be turned away from the doors of the academy in September this year.
And this lacuna in our thinking and planning is indeed Martin Bean’s point. He is asking us to connect the momentum and enthusiasm that drives the application of new digital media in higher education with the more traditional business of providing structure and organisation to learning and teaching. This, I believe, will be the key issue for the use of new technologies in higher education over the next few years.
___
JISC is the major provider of media services for UK Higher Education. Conference details, as well as Martin Bean’s presentation, can be found at www.jisc.ac.uk.
May 8th, 2010 at 6.08 am
I am very impressed with links between theory and practice of learning and teaching in the Open University (I attended a very enjoyable conference last week with many OU researchers and others http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/ ). However, it does strike me that we in ‘traditional’ universities have a potential advantage over the OU (who have a long lead time and product life – about 10 years per module I believe).The OU have an excellent track record in pushing out Open Educational Resources and using social media to connect their learners (OpenLearn). So what is our advantage? We can retain our agility in updating our curriculum, keeing it fresh by informing it with our own research and that from elsewhere. So we can not only produce Open Educational Resources for others but also use OERs in our content, and include our own openly published works in our curriculum. We can also use emerging technologies like location-based services that allow our students to gain traction from actually sharing a campus. They can find other members of the university who share an interest or problem and actually meet for coffee instead of on an online forum.
However, this agility depends on us retaining flexibility in how we offer our curriculum and engage students with it. We do need corporate systems that work together but ones that are permeable and flexible, allowing us to experiment and innovate, rather than systems that are closed and rigid. Let’s contrast USIR where you can link to your paper and video from ECE 2009 http://usir.salford.ac.uk/2344/ with our Blackboard installation where I can only share my resources with the students registered on the module in THIS year. The challenge of retaining agility, whilst maintaining professionalism and manageable systems, is significant, but we must do it else we’ll have all the disadvanatages of industrial HE with none of the advantages of being a campus-based research university. How can we do that? By adopting an open and flexible mindset across the university that gives us flexible systems to support and evaluate innovation. If you see innovation as innofusion “where users through relationships, feedback and the co-construction of different forms of knowledge innovate through contextual reshaping of what may be perceived as ‘generic’ technology in contexts of use” http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/technology/Hodson.pdf, then we need to involve ‘users’, not only in ‘big’ decisions about systems, but also listen to them. This listening implies changes in how systems are implemented over time, as well as implementing systems that are malleable. As I say, this is quite a challenge but if we lose our agility we’ll be neither one thing nor the other.