hile in 2020, higher education institutions were wrapping tight bandages—in the forms of online platforms—around their wounds, an awakening was becoming obvious to even the most reluctant of university leaders. The patient did not need a bandage, it needed vital organs surgery.
Much is being discussed about the state of education post-pandemic, and the virtues of in person learning and the vices of online learning, or vice versa, with the majority agreeing that hybrid learning will prevail. This is a marginal discussion as where we teach is hardly the fundamental issue that ails higher education. If university leaders look to the future, and do not now examine and transform what, how, who, and, yes, where they teach, chances are that by the time they do, it will be too late. While the World Economic Forum coined the term The Great Reset to imply a new start, universities need more fundamental change than that. A reset button may clear your memory but will reload the same programs. Universities need to keep their memory so they learn from it, but transform their curricula, pedagogies and student assessments and the operating model that will go along with it.
The top-tier universities may not feel the need to do so, however, as the reset strategy may yield expected results in terms of campus management, enrollments and international students. But now is the time to hold these institutions accountable for their very raison d’etre: they are the institutions that are responsible for creating better decision-makers for our governments, our businesses, and our societies.
Many of us, including these same university leaders, lament the state of affairs we have reached, in terms of populism, lack of ethical leadership, and a broad disregard for science. And yet, we are disinclined to admit that it is our education system, starting from schools all the way to college, that bears the lion’s share of the reasons that led us to this state. And it would be foolish to believe that the future would be any better unless we fundamentally transform that education.
So, the question remains: what should we transform our education system to? If we were to project what kind of education we would need in 2070 or beyond, it seems impossible to identify, as none of us—not even futurists—can predict what the world will look like in 20 let alone 50 years. And while most sectors have the luxury to wait to see how things will pan out, the education sector does not. It must decide now what to teach so that students are productive over the next several decades. And this is why education should be preparing students for exactly that—the unknown, rather than for 21st century jobs and societies. In order to do that, whatever knowledge, skills or behavior, students are learning today should not “expire” within their lifetimes. While easy to state, fewer than a handful of universities today, intentionally teach future-proof skills.
One of the tenets of a “future-proof” education is that of transferability, meaning that a person can transfer knowledge from a known, learned context to another which is unknown and unlearned. This cannot be done by teaching discrete subject matters, as the de facto curriculum in higher education stands today. It can only be achieved by teaching core concepts that transcend particular subjects and known contexts. For example, rather than conveying information, universities should be teaching concepts such as source credibility, plausibility, and correlation vs causation and then deliberately re-contextualizing those concepts over and over again. This kind of cross-contextual scaffolded curriculum will allow students to make better decisions, when confronted with new societal, economic, and technological challenges, in whatever form they appear in the future. In addition, if we agree that we want to form better leaders who are fearless decision-makers, our education system should change from a passive, information feeding machine to an institution which relies on active learning, self-directed, and self-motivated study. Rather than treat students as customers, we should transform them into responsible adults, enabled to forge their learning, their careers and futures by giving them the tools and skills to do so.
The ultimate responsibility of a university is to ensure that the education it claims to convey is actually instilled in its students. Today, universities assess what information students retain in the short-term and grant them certifications for the long-term. It is well known that our ability to retain information decreases drastically over time, as demonstrated by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting curve. The solution to this is to deliberately build intuitions and applied generative ideas in every student. Therefore, not only should we adopt active learning pedagogies that do not rely on memorization, universities should completely transform their curricular, assessment and certification methodologies.
We tend to think of the future from a technological perspective, trying to predict how technology will enable us or hinder our societies. When it comes to education, technology alone will not solve the issues of quality nor impact. The transformation needed is much more profound and long-term. And a reset button will not be enough.
a global affairs media network
Why a Reset is Not Enough to Save Higher Education
Photo by Oleksandr Baiev via Unsplash.
October 5, 2021
Universities need more fundamental change than that implied by the post-pandemic "Great Reset", using this disruption as an opportunity to refocus on their raison d'etre: creating better decision makers for our governments, businesses, and societies, write Minerva's Ben Nelson and Diana El-Azar.
W
hile in 2020, higher education institutions were wrapping tight bandages—in the forms of online platforms—around their wounds, an awakening was becoming obvious to even the most reluctant of university leaders. The patient did not need a bandage, it needed vital organs surgery.
Much is being discussed about the state of education post-pandemic, and the virtues of in person learning and the vices of online learning, or vice versa, with the majority agreeing that hybrid learning will prevail. This is a marginal discussion as where we teach is hardly the fundamental issue that ails higher education. If university leaders look to the future, and do not now examine and transform what, how, who, and, yes, where they teach, chances are that by the time they do, it will be too late. While the World Economic Forum coined the term The Great Reset to imply a new start, universities need more fundamental change than that. A reset button may clear your memory but will reload the same programs. Universities need to keep their memory so they learn from it, but transform their curricula, pedagogies and student assessments and the operating model that will go along with it.
The top-tier universities may not feel the need to do so, however, as the reset strategy may yield expected results in terms of campus management, enrollments and international students. But now is the time to hold these institutions accountable for their very raison d’etre: they are the institutions that are responsible for creating better decision-makers for our governments, our businesses, and our societies.
Many of us, including these same university leaders, lament the state of affairs we have reached, in terms of populism, lack of ethical leadership, and a broad disregard for science. And yet, we are disinclined to admit that it is our education system, starting from schools all the way to college, that bears the lion’s share of the reasons that led us to this state. And it would be foolish to believe that the future would be any better unless we fundamentally transform that education.
So, the question remains: what should we transform our education system to? If we were to project what kind of education we would need in 2070 or beyond, it seems impossible to identify, as none of us—not even futurists—can predict what the world will look like in 20 let alone 50 years. And while most sectors have the luxury to wait to see how things will pan out, the education sector does not. It must decide now what to teach so that students are productive over the next several decades. And this is why education should be preparing students for exactly that—the unknown, rather than for 21st century jobs and societies. In order to do that, whatever knowledge, skills or behavior, students are learning today should not “expire” within their lifetimes. While easy to state, fewer than a handful of universities today, intentionally teach future-proof skills.
One of the tenets of a “future-proof” education is that of transferability, meaning that a person can transfer knowledge from a known, learned context to another which is unknown and unlearned. This cannot be done by teaching discrete subject matters, as the de facto curriculum in higher education stands today. It can only be achieved by teaching core concepts that transcend particular subjects and known contexts. For example, rather than conveying information, universities should be teaching concepts such as source credibility, plausibility, and correlation vs causation and then deliberately re-contextualizing those concepts over and over again. This kind of cross-contextual scaffolded curriculum will allow students to make better decisions, when confronted with new societal, economic, and technological challenges, in whatever form they appear in the future. In addition, if we agree that we want to form better leaders who are fearless decision-makers, our education system should change from a passive, information feeding machine to an institution which relies on active learning, self-directed, and self-motivated study. Rather than treat students as customers, we should transform them into responsible adults, enabled to forge their learning, their careers and futures by giving them the tools and skills to do so.
The ultimate responsibility of a university is to ensure that the education it claims to convey is actually instilled in its students. Today, universities assess what information students retain in the short-term and grant them certifications for the long-term. It is well known that our ability to retain information decreases drastically over time, as demonstrated by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting curve. The solution to this is to deliberately build intuitions and applied generative ideas in every student. Therefore, not only should we adopt active learning pedagogies that do not rely on memorization, universities should completely transform their curricular, assessment and certification methodologies.
We tend to think of the future from a technological perspective, trying to predict how technology will enable us or hinder our societies. When it comes to education, technology alone will not solve the issues of quality nor impact. The transformation needed is much more profound and long-term. And a reset button will not be enough.
