JISC CETIS: What are the Grand Challenges facing HE and FE in the next 10 year
25 November 2008 10:40Well, here's a bit of homework for the JISC CETIS conference 2008. One of the sessions I'm attending is entitled the "Grand Challenges in HE and FE", and no one's about to tell me what those challenges are, I'm supposed to tell them. There's modern pedagogical practice for you.
Top of my list are grand challenges outside of my competence: the shift in global influence from America and Europe to Asia, and the aging demographic of European students.
It's likely a Chinese university will be heading the world research rankings in 10 years time. As the debt-supported economies of the West stumble and fail the money-men and women will take flight eastwards. Perhaps, like medieval peasants fleeing the plague, they will bring our sickness with them to the markets of Bombay and Shanghai. It's more likely, though - as Asia still actually makes stuff - that the speculation won't entirely bridge out over the void. Economies with vast agricultural wealth and human capital, burgeoning industry, and advanced capitalist expertise are surely in a good position, assuming the environment doesn't fold up underneath them. In any case, 10 years is probably not long enough for an internecine resource war to get started in earnest. So, I predict good things for Asian academe. In some subject areas, I think there will be a brain-drain from West to East, as the better funding of US universities in a previous generation encouraged a brain-drain westwards. Research priorities will change, and it remains to be seen whether our ageing population's preoccupation with eternal youth will be reflected in the priorities of the Asian academy.
And then there's the ageing population... I've just about given up on European democracy. Though the core European nations will no doubt remain more or less social democracies, I'd be surprised if the European Union as a whole addresses the demographic deficit over the next decade. This, as much as social and cultural differences within the Union (easy to overstate when we lack a common language), will continue to undermine the collective effectiveness of what could easily be the world's most powerful bloc. The western population will continue to age - but, it's possible that if the EU admits members from Asia Minor and the Levant that the eastern population of the EU will be both younger and growing. No doubt some sort of xenophobic quota system that already protects the wealthy western EU from the aspiring eastern Europe will be used to segregate the union if a significant enlargement into the Moslem world takes place. Although this is likely to bring about a cultural impact on an enlarged EU, I think Higher Education here in the UK is more likely to be challenged by an aged population that has different priorities and expectations from the school-leaver undergraduates, whether these older students are desperately retraining in a failing economy or indulging intellectual curiosity in an economie de luxe. At the very least, an older, more experienced and articulate student body is likely to - perhaps more politely, though definitely more effectively - demand value for money from its educational investment in a world of rising fees.
If the fee cap comes off, isn't it likely that universities begin to differentiate on costs, and a social (rather than intellectual) elitism that mirrors the class-bound economics of the public/state school divide becomes entrenched in higher education? In this way higher education will widen the gap between rich and poor that has proved an intractable feature of British culture for the last generation. Perhaps the wealthy elite will have less to do with trendy modern pedagogy, and perhaps they will have less to do with Leitch...
Anyway, I'm just making wild guesses.
In the medium term (that is, less than a decade), the confluence of the commodification of computing, mobile computing, and "the cloud" (in the sense of consumer-oriented software as a service) will once and for all put paid to the technological exceptionalism that is elearning and the VLE, and no one will believe any more that the "net gen" are supercharged superusers just because they can friend a few people on Facebook.
HEIs are beginning to get to grips with user-owned technology. Wireless networks may prove to be a transient device, to be supplanted by high-speed mobile broadband in due course. This may make institutional IT managers breathe easier, but it does imply that services be rearchitected outwards. Institutions could hold onto the LAN and grant access via VPNs, maintaining the enterprise/internet distinction, or they could adopt a web-based, enterprise 2.0 approach, with the web obscuring the distinction between the internal and extra-institutional system. In all of this, identity matters at a time when users' online identity is both fragmenting, and more personalised.
Equality of access - in both the economic and accessibility sense - are unresolved issues. An institutional computer lab is at least available to all, irrespective of means. Enterprise systems can specify accessibility on the feature list. The pace of technological change may obsolete economic concerns over hardware over the next decade (thought there will always be upmarket options), and better web development frameworks will surely address accessibility.
The challenge for pedagogy is to make effective use of ubiquitous readily available software. Consumer-oriented software exchanges utility for eyeballs. Social software converts the consumer into a marketer and recruiter. Nevertheless, these services have some utility to attract the eyeballs in the first place. You don't need to be a constructivist to see that learning is a social activity and therefore supported by social software. Making effective use of social software, and consumer-oriented web applications for learning requires some formalised bending of the software (in the same way that watching DVDs and chatting about them with your friends isn't a film studies course). Practitioners must find ways to bend "Web 2.0" to learning and teaching as it's an increasingly important part of learners' landscape. The popular, mass-appeal, social software services are in effect silos that are intended to capture attention. Their developers' platforms, though certainly offering opportunities for institutional integration, abet this capture. Other web services trumpet their openness, maximising their appeal by offering to integrate with everything. Services that integrate easily are perhaps more useful in learning and teaching: certainly learner tracking and assessment is an easier problem to solve under these circumstances. An interoperability built on OpenID, OAuth and RSS is promising for institutions wanting to take advantage of the realities of extra-institutional social software, but "data-portability" itself is not sufficient for data-ownership, and, surely, if data is worth users creating online, it's worth users owning.
Perhaps only a few now continue to believe that banning Google and Wikipedia is the answer to plagiarism. Though how useful is plagiarism itself as a concept or "anti-pattern" when information circulates freely and is easily mashed up? Original work is the currency of the career academic and researcher. Best practice is what everyone else is after, certainly at the vocationalised end of education.
I'm publishing this before the opening presentation at the CETIS conference covers all of my ground! As it is, I'm just writing free-form stream of consciousness.
I'm in Apostrophe (free wireless internet with every purchase), early for a meeting.
