The future of…

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The future of universities

Most people are now aware of the idea of remote education, in the sense that a teacher does not have to be physically in the same room as the students. The Open University wouldn't exist if this were not the case. Its opponents cite loss of contact with the lecturer, solitary learning difficulties and loss of interactivity as major problems.

While it may be better to have one to one contacts with the teacher, economics dictates that this is not possible all the time anyway, that's why we have lectures today. These lectures could just as easily be substituted by videoconferencing technology and shared spaces. Real interactivity isn't possible most of the time even in a real lecture theatre, so any reduction in interactivity caused by larger audiences would only be a small loss. The use of shared spaces with all their visualisation capability will far more than offset any loss. But since far fewer lecturers would be needed to give lectures, there would be more available for one to one tutoring, while the best lecturers would be able to devote more resources to making even better material too. The students gain by getting better lectures and more personal tutoring, so will need much less time to learn the same stuff. They can devote this saved time to their social lives. So it seems that the bulk of education does lend itself to networking, with better economics, better lectures and better tutoring. Everyone wins, even the taxpayer.

Shared spaces will greatly enhance education. In cyberspace, physics is user specified. A tutor may remove air resistance to illustrate the effects of gravity more clearly. A student can be completely immersed in a computer generated environment and gain a new insight. Students could help one another understand, as they will see the problem from a more naïve perspective.

When benefits of IT are mentioned, one of the first objections raised is always 'the haves and have nots'. This is really a non-issue, as students already need a computer to do their degrees, and the cost is falling rapidly. In any case, a degree obtained in the absence of any IT literacy is almost worthless, purely academic. Graduates are expected to be able to read and write. The medium for these is now a computer and driving one every bit as key a skill.

The social side of university is very important, as students learn independence and gain personal confidence, knowing that whatever life throws at them, they can exist on beans and water if necessary. So students will always want to leave home to study, even though they could do it from their bedroom at their parents' house. Fortunately, technology permits the student to attend the lectures from anywhere. Having lectures networked will not make lecture theatres obsolete if students are still coming to campus. Rather, the populations will fall. Some students will prefer to stay in bed and attend a lecture later on, and global telecomms will let them do so, as there will always either be a suitable lecture coming on stream or one in the digital archives. They will be able to structure their lives more flexibly. Taking the geography out of education will change things dramatically though. The best lectures may come from Universities spread all over the world, so the students will pick universities according to other issues, e.g. social life, accommodation cost etc. Universities will lose students much more easily if they don't get the overall package right. Local lecture quality will be a much reduced factor.

The network will also allow students to make friends around the world. Chat rooms are full of students from different universities sharing ideas and playing knowledge one-upmanship. As these become more visual, they will become more popular. Students chatting on the net can ask each other questions that they may be afraid to ask in front of their own class. Anonymity can help enormously.

But we are living in the age of mass customisation. If a student can attend any lecture anywhere in the world, why can't we have completely personalized degrees. Provided that there is some way of assigning a value to a particular piece of knowledge or experience then it should be possible to mix and match until a degree's worth of points has been accumulated. The OU does this on a module basis but there is really no reason why it can't be quantised in lecture sized chunks. Future computers could easily structure and mark tests from available material depending on lectures attended.

If education can be mass customised in this way, then potential employers could offer corporate degrees more easily, gaining graduate entrants with exactly the right blend of skills for their company. Also, it would be possible for that company to produce modules of their own material and have them assessed. Standardization would be both essential and inevitable if education becomes networked. But whatever the student graduates in, lifelong education will mean that they will continue learning throughout their career. At least they will have started with a useful blend of knowledge and skills appropriate to the market place. With a closer match between industry and education, there may be more sponsorship.