Friday 10 July 2009

Future of Higher Education debate

This blog entry is a response to the Future of Higher Education Debate. I have developed the following document with Stephen Coller from Microsoft. Background to the government debate is available.


Response to Ron Cook Report
The Debate on the future of Higher Education

i. Introduction

This is a joint submission to the debate on the future of higher education from a member of the University of Oxford and a member of staff from the Microsoft Corporation. Sir Ron Cooke was asked to provide the Government with advice and recommendations on how the country can be one of the leading – if not the leading – centres of higher education learning in the world. The focus of this response is chapter 3 of the report, “On-line Innovation in Higher Education’.

ii. Response

Approach

Sir Ron Cooke was asked to provide a contribution on becoming a world leader in e-learning. In order to respond to this request, he defined a broad context [1.3] that encompassed: research and innovation, national e-Infrastructure, management and administration, integrated information strategies, and issues of scale. In our opinion it was essential to consider the higher education landscape [2.2] in the way he did; research and education are inextricably linked, e-Infrastructure [2.4] underpins research and education, and management of information is a unifying theme.

We support his approach, endorse his recommendations, but believe that it is possible to be more specific in defining a way ahead for the next fifteen years. Our response, therefore, is to build on the foundation laid down in Sir Ron Cooke’s contribution and elaborate plans further.

Personalized learning

Every student must be given access [3.4] to a world of relevant, personalized learning and strengthened educational opportunity. Today’s students come to education from diverse backgrounds, at different levels of preparation and with different learning styles. Diversity will increase over the next fifteen years.

Within traditional teaching settings such as Oxford and Cambridge, there is increasing emphasis on preparing students before they arrive at University. This will enable all students to arrive with the necessary skills, but also build relationships in advance of their arrival.

Complementing this there is a need to provide individualized learning experiences at low cost, wherever and whenever needed.

Teachers will need to be adequately skilled to deliver [3.6], and adequately resourced [3.7].

Through a potent combination of shrinking hardware costs, broadband connectivity, and a growing repository of digital education resources, it will be possible to prepare students before they arrive and to provide individualized learning. Through social networking and collaboration tools, as well as rich-media authoring software, students can create and pursue engaged, relevant learning that brings their lifestyle and classroom “learning style” together.

Providing the infrastructure required for world-class teaching over the coming years will require private public partnerships.

New Tools and Methods

Over the next fifteen years, inspirational traditional teaching will remain and define some of the world’s leading higher education institutes and the learning experienced by their students. In other segments of post secondary education facing pressure to improve retention while accommodating material increases in student attendance it will be necessary to adopt a different approach by tapping into ICT-enhanced teaching approaches that support educators in the design of inquiry-based learning experiences which are scalable, intuitive and replicable [3.19]. There will not be a one-size fits all pedagogy, and therefore the underpinning technology must support different approaches [3.20].

Students, therefore, will have a choice of the type of teaching and learning experience they wish to receive, but all students will have different experiences and different expectations from previous generations [3.21, 3.22].

Teachers must recognise the new requirements that students have, and will have, and have the tools and expertise to provide an environment which is suitable for students in the 21st century including teacher-student and student-student collaboration. At the same time it is important that we recognize the unreasonableness of such an expectation absent from the provision of deep professional development support and resources.

Teachers should be able to change their approach to assessment to take better advantage of modern data systems in order to achieve an effective balance between traditional testing and real-time insight into progress in the classroom.

One of the traditional features of education which is in danger of being lost is the concept of learning within a community of scholars. Students benefit when they have opportunities to participate in each other’s learning. Tutorials and liberal arts courses are based on this principle, and emergent technologies have the potential to make the opportunities more widely accessible.

Systems to Manage the Student Lifecycle

Current and future students will move from one stage of education to another, will experience different educational experiences, will need preparation before embarking on some courses, and may well leave education and return later.

Students, their teachers, and employers need access to a digital record of educational resources, and a means of storing educational outputs and recording and accessing the student’s attainments,

Using much of the same software that businesses use to be more efficient and productive, there is a unique opportunity to provide scalable support for enhanced learning environments, with longitudinal data stores. These will have the benefit of offering greater insight to administrators, educators, students, guardians and policymakers.

Investment

At a policy level, some key investments would accelerate progress:

o Ensure that every school, educator and student have access to the devices, tools and connectivity they need.

o Provide teachers the support they need to adopt ICT-based teaching methods.

o Provide students with digital resources that can enrich their learning experiences and improve their workforce readiness.

o Equip education systems with the same data, technology and communications infrastructure that businesses enjoy today.

o Adopt an integrated approach to achieving education reform and a “21st-century learning environment”.

Investment should be made through private public partnership. The sheer scale of the challenges faced by higher education to improve access and quality in conjunction, with the competing claims being made on the financial resources of the Exchequer by other segments of the economy, mean local solutions in some institutes will be limited in terms of their scope, scale and sustainability. Working together with both the for-profit and the non-profit sectors we can provide the data, resources and capabilities that will empower our educators and learners to realize their fullest potential in an ever more connected and competitive world.

Private Public Partnership

The Private Public Partnership (PPP) approach offers opportunities which can transform the use of technology to assist learning. In some higher education institutes this will have a profound effect by facilitating personalized learning . PPP will offer new tools, methods and capacity which are not available to individual universities including access to data-centre scale computational resources and collaboration platforms. One respect where PPP has the potential to make a profound affect across the board, however, will be in the provision of systems to manage the student lifecycle:-

Provision of digital record and ePortfolio – students will be able to store their information in a secure but portable manner – using commercial networks but subject to permissions being set by the user. These records will be owned by the students and persist as they move from one place of learning to another.

Provision of longitudinal datastore and repository – the commercial sector can host and manage learning objects and related data on progression of student learning for a fraction of the cost of it being done locally. Microsoft and Oxford are exploring the possibility of delivering learning objects and data for maternal health developed by the University to medics in the third world. Microsoft would hold the data in a secure infrastructure managed by Oxford, delivered through the Internet and mobile devices in a way that would not be possible for the University to offer alone.

Stephen Coller and Paul Jeffreys