On Higher Education

I was talking with a colleague (Dr Margot Kaszap) last Friday about the upcoming crisis in education. She is a researcher in education science at my home university (Laval University in Quebec City). It was obvious that she sees the crisis coming in education the same way I do, which is reassuring to me. Most colleagues seem to have their heads firmly buried in the sand, convinced that life will go on as it always has, the universities along with it, and their jobs and livelihoods are assured for a career lifetime (i.e. the next thirty years). Those of us who are concerned see change coming down the tracks with the speed of a bullet train, on a collision course with the current organization of most educational institutes, and that our current career positions may not survive the coming decade.

It is not just the reorganization that results from the internet that is at the root of this coming change, the so-called "flattening of the world", to use Thomas Friedman's terminology. Dr. Kaszap points out that the generation of children that grew up with the internet is only a few years shy of entering our universities, and this cohort of students will require radical change in the way education is offered. This is a consequence of the flattening effect Friedman describes, albeit across a twenty-year time span.

Now, it is true that universities are changing. They are increasingly developing on-line curriculae, although there is still much discussion and controversy around this among university teachers. However, the majority of on-line courses are still structured as they were before they went on-line. For students who grew up with traditional classroom organization, this is still acceptable, but this will change over the next few years.

There are two likely sources of competition for university-level training currently emerging within the global community - private businesses that deliver training and what one might call "open source classrooms", that is, freely available learning materials accessible via the web. Sometimes the latter are developed by university-level professors and teachers who are rebellious with regard to the institutional mentality of attempting to control access to pedagogical content. As more sophisticated development tools become available via the web, for example, to build dynamic 3D virtual environments, the ability to "package" learning materials into kinaesthetically engaged interactive experiences will evolve and democratize.

Learning is becoming one of the primary preoccupations of all members of society - whether this learning be technical, social or communal, professional or just for the sheer pleasure of it. Learning opportunities are developing by leaps and bounds, and learning environments and methods are diversifying as the public becomes more engaged in the process. For example, I take part in an "Open Source Sewing" community, ( the Burda Style community), created in 2007 and which recently topped 100 000 members. This community is sharing learning tools for sewing, pattern creation and use, and fashion design. Today, you can sign on for a course in sewing, go to fashion design school... or join an online learning community and figure it out on your own. There are growing numbers of people doing precisely this.

Likewise, an industry is emerging for offering training and education in parallel to the university system. Some of this arises from perceptions that university-trained students may not have the right preparation to enter the highly volatile work environment, others from the need to offer learning materials in more flexible ways than universities provide. Businesses that offer training will mix both on-line materials with hands-on learning. Universities, on the other hand, are struggling to develop training programs targeted towards professional diplomas that serve better the needs of the work environment. However, the nature of work itself is also changing, making the development of stable training programs even more difficult. Universities for the most part are fairly conservative organizations with a great deal of inertia - their ability to offer learning materials that must change, adapt and evolve to a constantly shifting work environment is limited.

Changing demographics is also affecting higher education. As the birth rate drops throughout the world (the change in population dynamics discussed elsewhere in this blog), newcomers to the education system shift from young people to the elderly and to the immigrant populations, which are both on the rise.

The Crisis... A Year Closer

In the year since I last posted to this blog, a whole slew of changes have occurred, both worldwide and locally. However, none of these contradict what I have been saying, all of them further reinforce the strength of the arguments I have laid out. People are more aware that "something is going on" today than they were a year ago. Also, many doomsayers are predicting a massive, global economic crisis within five years, an even more draconian time frame than the prediction of 20 years I had read about before.

I got stuck writing more, not because I had little to say, but because I had so much to say and it was so complex, I found the blog format difficult to "fence it in". Since then, I have had a number of opportunities to speak in public to these issues and to evolve my own understanding of how to talk about them, so I'm going to make another try to get down some of the impacts and issues that the process of "peripheralization", the term my colleagues and I have started to use to refer to the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy, engenders.

Also, when I wrote up the blogs originally, I had identified a number of key sectors that would need to gain awareness of the changes in progress and learn new ways to function. These included the museum sector, in which I have become professionally active, issues in relation to the aging population, disability and identity, another area in which I have become professionally engaged, and the education sector, about which I have a lot to say that is urgent but have been unable to articulate clearly and neutrally. Because I work at a university, I have found I am emotionally caught up in the issues of education and that this makes it hard for me to step back and talk more neutrally about this area and the crisis that I believe is coming.

Like the doomsayers, I believe a major economic crisis is coming, but I think its scope is as much about social change as it is about economic change. I also believe the crisis is necessary to "get us past the hump" onto a different incline, a different set of dynamics. Crises are the means by which transformation occurs. They are always painful, but they are absolutely necessary to move past a knot. So I don't count myself among the doomsayers, who say crisis is inevitable, it is coming and it will be disastrous. I agree it will be painful, but that is it both useful and necessary.

On Baby Boomers, Peak Oil and Climate Change

Three arguments currently dominate social thinking about change and society - the impacts of an aging population of so-called baby boomers, the increasingly urgent idea that our climate has entered a cycle of human-caused change, and the idea that the energy supply will pass through an economic crisis in the next few years (the so-called "peak oil" crisis). These ideas are so compelling, that current national research policies, when they are not focused towards the issue of technology growth, are dedicated to increasing our understanding of their nature and their impacts. It has become apparent that tremendous socio-economic forces are being engaged to deal with these problems. As a result, focus on longer term issues, whether these be the paradigm shift I have been discussing, or problems such as ongoing poverty and inequality in the world, often take a back burner.

These issues, as important as they are, are obscuring deeper issues that will have consequences at least as profound, perhaps more so - the process of peripheralization and the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy discussed here. In some ways, the aging population, the peak oil crisis and the environmental crisis are major challenges that are tying up resources in such a way that by the time our attention frees up again, the other changes in progress will be sufficiently advanced that the transformation risks being well underway. It behooves us to pay attention to these deeper issues while dealing with the current crises ... paradox management means being aware of the many interconnected forces in play and maintaining an open active stance towards them all. The era when we could focus our efforts exclusively on one or two issues is gone if it ever existed - policies that try to simplify the world go awry. From a systems perspective, it is important to understand and maintain a set of "nudges" aimed to making changes to the system flows - it is the collection of all such nudges that constitutes a program for change, not one single effort. The world is not an object that needs to be shifted, it is a complex collection of systems and flows, and change is brought about by nudging those flows.

Fortunately, it is possible to address the deeper issues while focusing on the current crises. The result is a modulation of our actions, a change in focus when appropriate, rather than a radical change in what we do.