The Impending Demise of the University

Last week I wrote a substantial essay for the Edge arguing that the universities are entering a period of crisis.

I argued that is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn. The reaction on Twitter, mainly from students has been enormously positive. So far two academics have written critiques of my views at the Edge.

However because the Edge does not enable readers to comment, I'd like to know what you think. Please read a summary below and then check out the Edge article and let the world know what you think here on HuffPost:

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still common. It's part of a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education.

Students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities are to remain relevant, they will have to change.

Professors will have to abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students -- shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one. They should be encouraging students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor's store of information. They need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Finally, they need to tailor the style of education to their students' individual learning styles.

Some leading educators are calling for this kind of massive change; one of these is Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says students are smart but impatient. They like to collaborate and they reject one-way lectures. While some educators view this as pandering to a generation, Sweeney is firm: "They want to learn, but they want to learn only from what they have to learn, and they want to learn it in a style that is best for them."

This is not fundamentally about technology per se. Rather it represents a change in the relationship between students and teachers in the learning process.

In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for life - just "keeping" up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you're set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.
This challenge to the existing order raises a deeper issue -- the purpose of the university

"The time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, our model of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest of the world," says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.

He asks a provocative question: Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending. True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around the world through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, why shouldn't a student be able to take a course from a professor at another university?
Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world's greatest minds in their area of interest - either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online. This is a beautiful example of the collaboration I described in the book I co-authored, Wikinomics.

The digital world, which has trained young minds to inquire and collaborate, is challenging not only the lecture-driven teaching traditions of the university, but also the very notion of a walled-in institution that excludes large numbers of people. Why not allow a brilliant grade 9 student to take first-year math, without abandoning the social life of his high school? Why not deploy the interactive power of the internet to transform the university into a place of life-long learning?

Read the full article at The Edge.

Don Tapscott is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. On Twitter @dtapscott

Comments

[JohnnyWalkerBlueLabel]

Profs should be required to give more than 1 hour a week in face time to their students. If they want to engage in research, they should go to work for a corporation.

[superstition]

It's not a matter of wanting to. It's a requirement for their career. "Publish or perish."

[LitDr2B]

Right. And each new generation of professors claim they want to change the system, and each one gets lulled by job security and it's just business as usual.

I can't foresee a change happening anytime soon.

[leff]

How do we set up a grading system to allow each student to do their own thing and still gain the knowledge and skills from the course? The answer is Contract Grading. ONe has genres of points and many activities, each which gives so many of each kind of points. Students can then pick and choose the activities that meet their goals (and schedule).

www.wiu.edu/users/mflll/GRADCONT.HTM

I have been using this for decades and it works great!

[Christine Noble]

I have found myself excited about the potential the internet has for learning for some time now. Some of the old model should be done away with, and professor's worth the name have been adopting newer techniques that utilize these new tools. As far as I could tell from my own experience, almost all professor's encourage independent learning. There are a few that fit the stereotype of droning lecturer, but the best of them want you to think for yourself.
I look forward to the changes ahead, provided we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Individuals well tested in their fields will always be needed. We must make sure that the highest criterion are held in mind for anyone claiming expertise, and that all documents used in the learning process are worth a damn. Wikipedia is an excellent jumping start for anyone seeking to learn about a new subject, but anyone can edit any article, without having to prove they know what they are talking about. It will be interesting to see how we will improve on, and use these newer devices in the coming years.

[LTCKal]

I have just retired after 40 years of college teaching. If there is anything I bring out of that experience (and most of it was good for me) is that the average "research" university is totally uncommitted to undergraduate education. Funny, because undergraduates comprise the group that provides most of the hard revenue for the university, both as students and as alumni. The last time anyone had a serious discussion about undergraduate education was in the l950's; since then professors have gradually vanished into graduate schools and research. Sure we need research, but we need more than 20-year old graduate assistants teaching classes of 200-300 students. I'm just surprised that the students (and their parents who pay the bills) don't insist on a better value for their investments. In short, when I meet parents who are wondering about which university to choose for their children, I say, "if the place says 'this is a research university'," run the other way!

[booksnmoreforyou]

Community Colleges - focused on teaching, small class sizes, usually high quality faculty, less cost.

[LitDr2B]

I don't know where graduate assistants are teaching classes of 200-300 students. My experience has been graduate students teach labs or discussion sections, while professors teach the 200-300-student lecture classes.

Graduate students have to play a role because this is how they learn to teach. This, in turn, allows universities to produce -teachers- and not just -researchers-.

[Don Tapscott - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks everyone for the interesting discussion. You'll get a way better appreciation for my argument and the case for changing the university if you read the full article at the edge. http://www.edge.org/

Thanks!

Don Tapscott

[smebird]

I have read your entire article and I found it very interesting. I have just one question.

I would love to see a world-wide university, but how would that function, given the number of non-English speaking students who are equally deserving of a quality education?

[superstition]

Classes that feel like Apple's 1984 commercial don't encourage learning. I dumped Chemistry and switched to English because I went from having an engaging Ph.D at my High School and Advanced Chemistry to a General Chemistry lecture class that had a professor who read in a monotone directly from the textbook and told us that anything he didn't include in his lecture that is in the book may be on the exams. He said we don't have to attend the lectures and can simply read the book and show up for the exams. That sort of "teaching" makes the class format irrelevant. One may as well learn from books at home and then take an exam somewhere.

However, I came to realize that the highly interactive English classes that I desired are worth less to me than a duller and more technical education, because, despite assurances otherwise, some degrees do not lend themselves well to the job hunt. Also, literature is built atop a foundation of interdisciplinary thought, the components of which need to be learned first. Even in High School, we teach students literature without them knowing much if anything about Philosophy, Politics (other than a mostly historical and bloodless survey of American politics), Logic, Psychology, and world History. It's unsurprising so many students don't understand it and dislike it. Psychology 101 should not be an optional course in college. Everyone needs to understand how the mind works.

[Ammie41]

Actually, there will always be a group of students who want to be spoon fed the material in lecture style. They are unable to learn through the conversational style. It requires speed in thought and response. Added to that, if the students do not do the required reading, they are very much out of the learning loop.

[Max Wood]

I agree. In college my grades were ok because most of the time I was bored to tears in the lecture format classes. The other side of the coin is that I had friends that couldnt carry on a real conversation that made great grades because they could go home and take a bunch of aderal and comb through the pages of boring drivel the professors spewd out during the lectures.

[trimom]

This reminds me of the "new math" model for middle and high schools in the 90's. What a disaster that was.

[Cato1730]

Just read the brief here.....I never sat in a lecture hall being broadcast at. In all my classes we argued constantly about how the news is produced and covered. My thesis was about press coverage for terrorists (this was in 1975). Everything was interactiv­e......I went to the Evergreen State College and to the University of Iowa J-School.

My big question now is do you propose this for medical students as well?

While the idea of a university of "stars" is attractive, will it be affordable?

[booksnmoreforyou]

Problem Based Learning for medical students is successful.

[Ladyrantsalot]

Your depiction of university-level education is over-generalized and ill-informed. Lecture courses do not simply involve professors yammering on. They also involve discussion sections, student reading, and a lot of give-and-take in the lecture hall itself (and science lecture courses inevitably involve many more hours in the lab than in the lecture hall). Lecture courses are usually the gateways to seminar courses and are not ends in themselves. They compensate for the inadequacies of K-12 education in the United States and are simply an efficient way of bringing American students up-to-speed. One thing I've noticed in 15 years of teaching at an elite university is that students are growing increasingly resistant to long reading lists and reading long books. Their ability to concentrate for long periods of time (and to enjoy that intellectual experience) seems to be diminishing. Google and Wikipedia are useful in their ways, but they are emerging as a substitute for intellectual engagement.

[freeethnkr]

I would just interject that your experience in university-level education was very different from mine. I attended reputable schools for undergrad and grad school and the vast, vast, vast majority of classroom hours were spent listening to lectures. Even in the smaller classes, class time was usually tailored around the prof's lecture and would simply allow for some response/f­eedback/qu­estioning. I think the idea to change things up is important, regardless, because teachers at all levels should constantly be striving for new ways to connect with their students.

[Ladyrantsalot]

Well, the world's a big place. One of the big complaints I get from my most intellectually engaged students concerns students who obviously don't do the reading but are perfectly happy to blather on and on. I am usually grateful to such students (even when it's clear they haven't bothered to do the reading) because the most challenging part of teaching is keeping discussion going and they at least keep discussion from sinking into a Q and A session. But the better students want to discuss the ideas and implications of the primary historical sources we're discussing and it irritates them to watch the BSers suck the energy out of the room.

[JustThisGuy]

Freeform learning is great, but it does not replace the rigor, and coverage of a planned curricula, on a class basis and in the arc of an education.

Science, math, engineering have essential building blocks. It can take several weeks, months or even terms to get from the initial concept to the applied endpoint.

Lectures do ensure that students are exposed to every word the professor presents, and can ask questions as they encounter the material in real time. Different people do learn in different ways, and that helping to be flexable to adapt to that is a good step, but we need to ensure that people know the raw information they need in their field.

Computers may go faster, there may be new languages, but the math behind how algorythms behave is not going to be obsolete. Any class that is teaching material that will expire within 4 years is teaching a trade, not a skill. The tools you learn to use to explore the concepts may change, they don't matter.

I work in engineering, and have a 10 year old copy of a reference book on my desk. There are newer ones out there, they are cheap and easy to find. Math has not changed, steel has not changed. The programs on my computer let me do impressive things. The 10 year old book and contemporary classes let me make sure the computer makes sense (and it does not always do so).

[arualis]

I'm not sure that students should decide what they should learn and how. If that is the case then we can eliminate professors altogether and it can be a free for all. The idea of learning at any level is that someone else knows more than you do and guides you in developing your thinking, skills, breadth of knowledge etc. Why do students need to know only "technical" skills and nothing about literature, history, or civics? This seems like an impoverished view of what education should be.

[davism97]

I'm not convinced that the new generation of kids represents some mutant breed of humans that can't learn through the same method as their parents.

On the other hand I've never had much patience with the lecture format (I prefer to just read it myself). I would welcome new approaches to education, but not for the reasons this article puts forward.

[DrFitz]

The breakout between straight lecture courses and seminars, group based project-oriented courses, etc. is class size and cost. The fact is that universities invest relatively little in instruction vs. research. All the incentives for tenured and tenure-track professors is to excel in research and invest as little time and effort as you can get away with and still be adequate in teaching. Universities manage costs further by having very large lecture courses for basic subjects in the first couple years and reserving smaller classes to advanced years, and further use heavily graduate students and adjunct faculty to cover many courses. There is absolutely no room for much experimentation in the large sized courses. It would truly take a revolution in priorities and business model to allow for much innovation in instructional style and method. The internet and other technology is a fringe component relative to human resources issues. Many others have pointed out the shortcomings of online tools for providing a rich learning experience.

[LMPE]

My college professors always interacted with the class. I mostly use Google and Wikipedia to find out about the obscure stuff.