Redefining the Meaning of University?
Posted on December 1, 2009 by Ken Udas
In our ongoing effort to spark a little conversation, here’s a recently published quote by David Wiley, associate professor in institutional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University in Utah: “I don’t know whether in [sic] future the people who answer questions, provide content and provide the degree will be in the same institution,” he says. “It’s likely that institutions will specialise in just one of those areas and then form partnerships with other institutions that play other roles.”
Is that a rather radical position? What do you think? It didn’t show up on some understated blog (although it has). Instead, these comments were part of an overall mainstream story published by The Guardian in the UK. Entitled, “Any student, any subject, anywhere,” and written by Harriet Swain, the story is about making university content freely available online. Ms. Swain sets it up this way:
New web technologies are driving a revolution, not only in the way students consume and institutions deliver higher education, but in the very idea of what makes a university. At its heart is a move to make universities’ educational materials, from seminar notes to podcasts and videos of lectures, available free online.
And, you may be surprised by the many voices from traditional institutions that seem to be coming around to this notion and, by association, to David Wiley’s prediction. Here’s one such voice:
Gilly Salmon, professor of e-learning and learning technologies at the University of Leicester, says many academics used to be highly protective of what they created. “As we started working with them, they began to see that it exposes their work,” she says. “And when they give us their stuff, it comes back to them in a much better format and in a way they can use themselves. I’m very keen for our academics to focus on being with the students physically or virtually, rather than spending all their time writing material.”
This seems like an example of at least partial decoupling of course design and materials development, which is pretty common in online learning, but far less so in traditional classroom-based environments. Distance education has historically decoupled certain functions within the traditional university. For example, distance education decoupled learning from the physical campus, and I think was largely responsible for the evolution of the learning design function, which dis aggregates the act of teaching with the act of course design and development.
So, David’s a pretty smart guy, do you agree with him? Is it likely that university services such as teaching, materials development, assessment, and student services will be disaggregated? And, what do you think are the implications?
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Very interesting thoughts. Having a background in business I have to say that some comments do bother me as it appears that this vehicle (education) has no driver (mission).
It seems to me that the goal of education was to go through a process where individuals would come in and sharpen the mind (as the Greek expression goes), become critical thinkers, analyzers and solvers. In addition to this you would specialize in some area to get some subject matter expertise (biology, computer science, art, sociology, etc.)
The disaggregation of content creation doesn’t bother me so much because instructors, in a sense, are like composers. They can take the parts that they feel are pertinent from a number of sources and put them all together to achieve those goals of Subj-matter expertise and of critical thought/analysis.
What does worry me is the disaggregation of teaching. Sure you can pick up facts from any instructor, but facts are facts. I can go to my public library, memorize the encyclopedia and call it a day. Do I now know a lot more stuff? Yep! Does that mean I got an education? Not really.
I think it’s great for instructors to collaborate, swap hints and tips, successes and failures, but I think that we need to avoid the pitfall of making education (any education - not just higher education) a cookie cutter.