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

[euripedes923]

Don, stupid people won't be taking over the world anytime soon, despite what you'd like to think. "Doonesbury" is way ahead of you on this curve.

[elmerfude]

I agree with you about lectures if that is the primary teaching technique. Seminars based on the Socratic method along with labs and workshops are important in many fields. Having said this higher education is facing a major crisis. If there is an institution other than banks in need of major reform, it is higher education. But the reform is needed in the organization, management, funding and staffing of higher education. The ever increasing tuitions and costs of higher education are not sustainable. We have a state college system run by an incompetent president and board of regents, but it is very difficult to get their attention on reform much less get rid of them.

[Hunter45]

And that my friend is where you get it all wrong. You think because 21+ years of education at a few universities, then some lowly tech college is far beneath you. Truth is, some tech colleges gain applicable skills far quicker than any unervisity pretends to. That is part of the reason you spent 21 years at a few universities. Think about all of the wasted time spent on material that you can no longer recall to use, or even if you could recall it, never be comfortable enough to use it. I'm currently on a second degree myself working on engineering. It's a damn joke. Colleges and universities need to be reformed. Take out all of the useless fluff. Focus on aplicable skills that are useful in todays life. Lectures may still have their place in the learning environment, but less theory and more hands on application is needed.

[elmerfude]

Everyone should come out of college with a technical skill. But there is also a need for a liberal education in the arts and humanities. Everyone should have this at least as a minimum requirement. Why? Because products and services today have to be aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. (See Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind.) A liberal education is also needed just to be a good citizen. Many of the issues we face require a broad education. For one of my degrees I went to a technical college specializing in engineering. But they also required some good survey courses in the arts and humanities.

[ModernTimes1]

"Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates."

Neil Postman

Educational choices in hands of university administration and their corporate minders---shudder.

[rodsbadhairday]

has this guy ever taught a college class?

[ModernTimes1]

1.Critique of stand up teaching makes an error by assuming that availability of a chat room necessarily leads to greater interaction than that which takes place in a classroom. This is rarely the case. In my experience (as both educator and student) online class environments are far less interactive than a well managed "live" classroom. And require constant vigilance to preventing from veering wildly off course ( pun intended).
2. More professors now bring cooperative group instructional models to higher education.
3. The importance of social aspect of college education cannot be overestimated. And no, text messaging and Twitter rarely produces high quality social interaction dynamic.
4. Better case can be made for graduate online courses..Grad. students are far more efficient self-learners. Better able to transform raw information into knowledge.
Undergraduates ( on the whole) are not efficient self-learners, often lacking basic informational literacy criteria for evaluating sources and producing analysis.
5. Professors should be encouraged to develop more inventive and more tech savvy course content. The days of slapping together a rudimentary course website are over.
Certainly, more inventive uses of the Web must be developed, beyond email and basic recall research.

[pup sydney]

completely disagree
The teacher is way better than snippets of facts and factoids from google or WIki and the interaction with a human being is way better than interaction with web pages, A strcuctured logically built lecture, the Interaction via spoken academic level English is perhaps the LAST place where young Americans can listento what English should sound like to sustain real advanced educated thought in their briansand not the image based "culture"of the "Web"
Please, this is nonsense.
When will America understnad what reality is and how the "media" created a monstrosity?

[idledragon]

Certainly there are instances where the traditional lecture is still prevalent at many universities, but the need for a change away from this model is hardly a result of the digital age/google­/Wikipedia­. Google “Banking Model of Education”.

[standard]

"The old-style lecture . . . [is] part of a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process."

Not really. The lecture is just one element in a traditional approach to education that has served civilization quite well, thank you, for several centuries. Lectures provide context for, and explain and extend, the content of assigned reading. They provide immediate access to the teacher for questions during and after each class and forums in which students analyze the assigned materials and engage with one another.

Nor, in traditional education, is the lecture--albeit the predominant model of instruction--the only model. There are class discussions. There are after-class discussions. There are seminars. There are field trips. There are internships and research assistantships. There is independent study.

After 21 years as a student (during which I accumulated a few university degrees, including one taught primarily by the Socratic method), I consider the lecture a much-maligned but unsurpassed way to learn--not­witstandin­g the thoughts of a professional consultant or the librarian at a proprietary technical academy.

As for the internet? Scholars, members of the learned professions, students and average citizens alike already use it all the time--if not always to any particular benefit.

[IowaGirl]

What "standard" said.

Of course, the lecture is only as good as the lecturer. I would be happy to send my kids off to teacher-focused institutions if I trusted the teachers. The person who said parents should run if they hear the phrase "research university" is right. At these places--and I have taught at one and have a husband who currently teaches at one--the undergrads are piled three-deep on top of each other into large lecture halls, where it takes some combo of fear-mongering (over their grades) and grandstand entertainment to maintain their attention. They play poker and shop on their laptops, text, come in late and leave when they want.... emboldened by the size of the crowd. They sense it's not a good learning environment, and treat it accordingly. I would have done the same.

My own kids will go to four-year private colleges, in the hopes that they'll get smaller classes, where learning can actually take place, whether it come from lectures or whatever other mode fits the lessons being taught.

[ehlefttb]

What schools did this author go to? Did the author ever have a lab? Ever have a class taught by the Socratic method? In the 1960s we were encouraged to get together to solve problems. As a matter of fact, going it alone was a pretty sure way to wind up on probation, or worse. Worse was Viet Nam.

During the 1960s I audited a class taught (for credit too) on educational television. It was Physics taught by Edward Teller. In the 1960s it was said our technical education was good for about 5 years and that life was a continual learning process. This author is not saying a whole lot that is new.

Last night on television, the young historian David Brinkley commented that it was good people began to recognize and remember D Day when Ronald Reagan was president during the 1980s. I doubt that young David was old enough to remember when his father reported on the 20th anniversary of D Day in 1964. I remember Walter Chronkite interviewing Dwight Eisenhower on the beach, both sitting in a jeep of the period..

This was a story claiming to tell about the history of education. As they say, history is a joke the living play on the dead. Trouble is, I'm not dead yet. Jim

[LitDr2B]

This is a sweeping generalization about research universities.

Sure, some of the lecture classes are large, but they usually have discussion sections or lab sections that allow the students to engage more closely with an authority on the material.

And at some point, students have to take responsibility for their own learning. Why not close the laptop and -stop- playing Poker during a lecture? Develop a darned attention span. You can't blame this type of behavior strictly on the size of the crowd.