What will the university of tomorrow look like?

Dr. Lou Anna Simon, president of Michigan State University, recently posted a monograph on the World Grant Ideal. There is a great deal of insight on the future of universities in it.  I have submitted the link.

Paul McConaughy
2:06pm 31 October 2009

Brilliant thanks for this Paul - I think this is a really important topic which all institutions need to be considering. I don't think we can assume status quo. Our own institution has a project called SocialLearn - I'll add a link - which is tackling some of these issues. From the website:

For 3000 years education has made the learner adapt to the system. SocialLearn [1] aims to reverse this and make the education system adapt to the learner. SocialLearn is a project initiated by The Open University to combine the best of the values and approaches found in the new social web technologies with those of higher education. This will create new modes of recognised and supported learning experiences for a wide clientele.

Gráinne Conole
2:40pm 31 October 2009

Thaks for sharing SocialLearn,  I will share it with others here in Michigan. I look forward to reviewing it more closely.

Paul McConaughy
3:12pm 31 October 2009

Open EDTech 2009, the think tank organized in Barcelona the 19thh and 20th October by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, just dealt with the topic "Create the university of the future". This is the WIKI in which collects the work groups'' recommendations and the Call for Action as the final product of all sessions.

Antonella Esposito
3:45pm 31 October 2009

Sounds really interesting - have added the wiki as a link. Seems like alot of people are beginning to think about this....

Gráinne Conole
3:47pm 31 October 2009

Thanks Grainne for adding it. Unfortunately I have also added it in the meanwhile ;-) and I have not permission to delete it. Sorry for the mistake!

Antonella Esposito
3:53pm 31 October 2009

No worries have deleted mine!

Gráinne Conole
4:10pm 31 October 2009

Isn't this amazing. This cloud hasn't been up for a day yet and look at it grow!

I found out about it on Twitter where I am @MiNutrition

Paul McConaughy
5:47pm 31 October 2009

I know I know it's incredible huh! Lots of good resources and links being added. Will go seek u out on twitter!

Gráinne Conole
6:39pm 31 October 2009

Talking with attendees and speakers at Sloan-C 2009, I heard a lot about the need to look beyond today's high demand for higher education, to tomorrow's needs. Here are some of the issues for them:

1) The need to quickly raise the perceived relevance of universities (and their research) to key groups that currently provide the money for universities to function - this is a necessary complement to today's petitions to agencies who fund university research, asking them not to demand higher relevance 

2) Related to 1), the need for universities to do a better job in anticipating the challenges facing society and telling the world about their successes

3) Revisiting the notion of "graduateness" to ensure that tomorrow's students are adequately prepared for a more challenging world, and hence to increase the ROI (return on investment) from higher education, eg  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/30/graduate-unemployment-to-soar

Paul Lefrere
11:00am 1 November 2009

All key points Paul - I do think that universities are going to have to really think hard about there mission and there place in society. I suspect there will be quite a shake up of the system, which may be no bad thing.

Gráinne Conole
12:17pm 1 November 2009

I think what's possibly interesting when you think about the future is the degree to which we allow other factors to impact upon education, eg climate change, economic forces, changes in work place. I don't know whether this is just a case of projecting and so looking for big things to hook it onto, or whether we think education will be influenced by these perhaps to an extent we haven't previously known.

Martin Weller
10:39am 2 November 2009

I think, Martin, that the other side of the question is important too... how will university influence/impact  other factors. This is an important question, especially for research universities.

Paul McConaughy
1:52pm 2 November 2009

An interesting article in the New York Times yesterday is entitled 'Teach your teachers teach well' provides food for thought on the educational role of universities. And certainly makes Cloudworks a living proof for addressing some of the challenges raised in the article.

Interviewing Cathy Casserly (from Carnegie Foundation) yesterday for one of our Olnet research projects, an interesting insight came about regarding universities, experimentation in an OER context and  'networks of improvement communities'. This relates to work they are doing at Carnegie to address what does not work with existing educational practices/methods in some fields/disciplines resulting to failure and student marginalisation. I don't know if this is totally relevant: Just a thought that perhaps the role of the university should be redefined not only to faciliate success, but also to address and alieviate failure and risk in the field of teaching and learning?

Giota Alevizou
10:17am 3 November 2009 (Edited 10:20am 3 November 2009)

just posted a blog post about this session of the jisc online conference jiscel09 and included the three videos from Martin Weller, Rob Howe and Graham Atwell.

http://beingnothingness.blogspot.com/2009/11/do-educational-institutions-have-future.html

I am also collating response videos aswell.

Do sign up to the conference http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/elpconference09/booking.aspx to join in the discussions there too.

If you plan on doing a response video or present your own version of the future do let me know as we will be giving three free places to the best videos.

Lou McGill
2:16pm 5 November 2009

Great thanks Lou - looks like being a great session! Could start a trend of people wearing silly wigs ;-)

Gráinne Conole
3:00pm 5 November 2009

I'm trying to grow a beard specially for the occasion; )

Lou McGill
3:13pm 5 November 2009

Yu know, I'm always amazed by unis not looking at demographics. The one 'take home' I got from this one?

"In the next ten years, more people will graduate (from unis) than in the history of the world" (and then go home to play video games :) ). A radical reduction? (in the number of unis) Hmmmm. Of course if you only speak English, you'll have to teach people from the largest Anglais speaking country = China.

OK. So the questions might be; "Are social attitudes towards education changing?" "Are unis about educating students with the disciplines of old professions or are are they about preparing students for professions which are beginning to appear?" (like web design, and I promise to say nothing about this narrow column on an half empty page)

Malcolm seems to have the right idea. But looking around at unis' web sites, and with Mr. White's comment in the back of my mind;

White says students will need to be schooled in new-media literacy so they can manage all the different streams of information and collaborate at a distance: "These are key skills for the new century."

The unis sure have a lot of learning and collaboration to do, before they start schooling. But at least we know they will market as inter-institutions. I'm just thinking; MITOUYOX does't quite work does it?

fenton-jones
5:25am 9 November 2009

Good points - have added a link to a keynote I heard recently by Keri Facer who was talking about students of tomorrow. My feeling is that there will still be  a need for educational institutions but that we need to adapt to a social context which is radically different to the context of the past.

Re: narrow column.... I know I know, we are working on it, it works quite weel if there are lots of links and references alongside, but in a cloud like this where it's mainly comments it doesn't look good. One idea we had was to tab between comments and links/references. We plan to get our graphics designer to knock some alternative layouts for us.

Gráinne Conole
8:35am 9 November 2009

I looked back at our starting questions, specifically at "In a world where increasingly both content and expertise is freely available, what does a university offer?" 

I suggest a mix of the following:

- easy access to many cultural and societal heritages and forums for discussing them, plus help if needed in engaging with those heritages (eg new media skills)

- included in the above, methods and networks that others have used to extend or limit their horizons, drawing upon knowledge that is consensual (accepted) as well as knowledge that may be emerging or prospective, contested, rejected, taboo or secret

- hence, ways to engage with other minds, assumptions and cultures, and to encounter and contribute to the world's content and expertise

- the opportunity to go where your mind takes you (time and space to think, plus freedom to think)

- the opportunity to apply what you learn to create wealth that you give back to society, eg by sponsoring scholarships and research

Paul Lefrere
10:04am 9 November 2009

Yes all good points Paul. I think for me though what potentially universities of tomorrow could offer, is pedagogically effective and rich learner pathways; ways of navigating through the complex spectrum of possibilities and choices. In a world which is ever more complex and fragment I think this is going to be really important.

Gráinne Conole
10:12am 9 November 2009

Yes, "effective and rich learner pathways" would be very helpful. Are universities likely to be the sole source or best source of those pathways? I expect to see alternative sources, fed for example by increasingly-smart versions of today's crowd-sourcing / open innovation, with contributions from students, employers and communities of practice. In such a world, universities need to augment their learning pathways with truly distinctive capabilities and roles. This is why I suggested looking again at what universities can offer. There is so much that universities can do to ensure they survive and prosper.

Paul Lefrere
10:55am 9 November 2009

Great set of reource Helen, thanks for these! Only just spotted them!

Gráinne Conole
12:33pm 9 November 2009

Tomorrow's universities may be more specialized than today, according to the first article in IRRODL's latest issue, (http://u.nu/3met3). The title says it all: "Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education" (David Wiley, John Hilton III). 

Sample: "we should soon expect to see higher education institutions making difficult choices to focus on developing truly world-class expertise in one or two of these [current] functions and outsourcing the others."

Paul Lefrere
9:53pm 9 November 2009

Just found an enjoyable parody of (American) universities in the next future: Peter Wood, The shape of (Academic) things to come, National Association of Scholars.

In this dystopia online education plays a key role (also as social and economic impact),: "the huge new demand for online courses and programs turned online education into something like the railroad boom of the nineteenth century". Interestingly, the author imagines online education as an entirely for profit sector, which will be able to replace the Ivy League universities.

Most of libraries would disapperar as well  while (paper) books that can't be stored a become fuel for jets. This sounds horrifying...

Antonella Esposito
7:24pm 16 November 2009

University as a “social wrapper around OERs”. Worth following the evolution of the Peer2Peer University , an open teaching initiative created by Neeru Pahaaria, a Harvard PHD candidate, and co-founded by Creative Commons. The university has just ended its first pilot phase, delivering 6 courses and enrolling for free 90 students. In their words, “The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs* for open educational resources”.
(*It comes to mind the Martin Weller’s post on book club as a course model


‘Hacking education’ is the core idea of Pahaaria’s project: she aims to test a sustainable model of cheap or even for free education.
The committment of Creative Commons  makes this initiative of particular interest for its future development: “P2PU is an initiative outside of the traditional institution that aims to provide the social learning structures, the “social wrapper”, around existing open educational resources.  Because P2PU is a true OER project, testing the bounds of what can work when you empower a community of volunteers and peers to learn for free from each other, CC Learn is interested in where it’s going."

Antonella Esposito
1:57pm 9 December 2009