By Pieter Steenekamp*
I have a dream that South African universities will embrace high quality, low cost, online tertiary education. And it is very feasible to provide not good, but truly excellent education at a fraction of the current cost.
If you cut research from teaching universities, if you use available online teaching material and not pay expensive professors to compile and update them, if you use “grannies” instead of professors as teachers, if you adapt your material specifically to offer what employers want and use modern teaching methods then you can provide excellent vocational university education at a fraction of the current cost. Then the youngsters will be employable when they graduate.
On the one hand there is the obvious need to provide good education at a low cost. I don’t think it’s good to ask the taxpayer for more than currently contribute and there are poor students who just cannot pay. On the other hand there are abundant high quality low cost online resources available.
First the issue of what is a quality education?
I really support the quest to go further than just vocational education. But I do not support asking the taxpayer to fund the students wanting to learn basic knowledge like philosophy. I discuss MOOCs (massive online open courses) below and those wanting to study knowledge for knowledge’s sake can use these free online resources, and other, without asking the taxpayer for financial help. To solve the crisis, let’s focus on vocational education – ask the taxpayer to support what is required to educate our young people to get jobs.
There could be many definitions, but let’s settle for a simple one: I want to define quality education as providing the skills for a student to be educated to get and to do a suitable job after graduating.
The course contents must be based on what employers want. And there is only one way to make sure you have this right – and that is to ask the employers what they require. Develop a well-publicized and open system where employers are approached and both their requirements and their feedback on their experience of recent graduates are captured.
The universities can then measure themselves against the feedback of the employers.
As simple as that.
To “steal” some ideas of how to do it, one can look at what the online, for-profit educational organization Udacity is doing. They offer low cost online “nano-degrees” with a guaranteed job offer. If you complete an Udacity on-line “nano-degree” and don’t get a job within 6 months, you get 100% of your tuition fees back. Just to be clear – I do not suggest copying the Udacity model exactly, all I’m suggesting is to evaluate what they are doing and take some of their ideas and adapt it for the South African model.
Second is the issue of what is available in high-quality low cost educational online resources.
I’ve already mentioned the free online courses from Udacity, their free courses are MOOCs (massive online open courses). But let me focus not on Udacity but on MOOCS in general and then secondly on MIT’s open course ware initiative. For now I’ll stick to these two (it’s a concept proposal only), but keep in mind that there are many more resources.
Let’s start with MOOCs
Some of the world’s top universities (amongst them MIT, Harvard and Stanford) are adapting some of their popular courses for free online learning on the internet. Not only are the video lectures included, but all the course material is also available for download at no extra cost. Thousands of courses are offered in humanities, science, computing technology and IT, business and management and many more.
The MOOCs are designed for online learning – they are not merely a video recording of a lecture and are a great way to learn complex subject matters, at university level, for free.
Personally I “audit” many MOOCS. “Audit” means I enroll in the course, I download the video lectures, watch a couple of lectures and then decide whether I want to spend the time to work through the material or not. I mostly decide it’s not worth my while and then don’t do anything about that specific course further. If you want a certificate, there are a small cost involved. I never bother to get a certificate, for me it’s only about learning the material. But if you want to put it on your CV, I guess it’s better to pay the small cost and do the certification.
(Just for interest sake, I am currently auditing a Julia programming MOOC offered by UCT. I’m not aware of any other MOOCS offered by a South African university – I’m sure there are?)
The second high quality online educational resource is MIT’s initiative to make all of their course material available online for free. I quote from the MIT open course ware website: “The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.” When I looked there were material from 2340 courses available for free download. These are less users friendly than MOOCs, but it is the course material that one of the world’s top universities available for the world to share.
I realize that there are much more to a quality education than good course material. It is a necessary but not sufficient requirement. What follows is my contribution of how to change the University’s’ model to do this.
A concept proposal to redesign the South African University model
My conjecture (I like to use this fancy word when I mean “guess”) is that you don’t need the highly skilled, highly qualified professors to provide the highest quality education. They are just too expensive, and not necessarily good teachers. There are better and much lower cost options available. What you need are the following:
To separate research from teaching. With the conventional model, you needed the highly qualified professors to teach the students. To keep the professors “saws sharpened” (to use the late Stephen Covey’s phrase), they also needed to engage in research and publishing their research to prove their worth.
With the model that I propose this requirement disappears completely. Having a teach-only university the cost per student can be significantly lower.
If society requires it the taxpayer can fund research as a separate action. Graduate studies can then be part of the research universities.
The second requirement is qualified people with not necessarily good academic records, but good “common sense” skills that can translate the requirements of the employers and search for available resources that can provide those skills in a cost effective way. A team of these people can provide a service to all the Universities in the country.
Then you need teachers with no (as in zero) required skills in the subjects that are taught, but with very good interpersonal skills and ability to motivate a group of students. With apologies to Sugata Mitra I call these people the “grannies”. They will look at what a student is doing and say “I don’t understand a word of this but it looks awesome”. A “granny” in this sense could be a young man.
The cost of using “grannies” instead of professors can also lower the cost significantly.
Use the flip teaching concept. Conventional teaching is done by giving a lecture and then the students go home to do their homework. With flip teaching the students watch the video lectures at their own time and place and pace and come together to work on their homework. Significant interaction between students are encouraged with stronger students assisting and helping weaker students. If there are questions that none of the students can answer, the students must go online to seek help in the cyber community. The granny is there to look after the human interaction and motivation of the students. The granny is not there to assist with the contents course material.
This model has the dual advantages of developing interpersonal skills and the skill set to use the internet to seek help in a professional way. It also helps the students to establish a professional network worldwide.
The last one is the concept of mastery in teaching. Every individual must master each module before continuing to the next level. Apart from the required course material that all students must work through, there must be a wealth of optional material to occupy the minds and hearts (they must enjoy the optional material – very important) of the faster students while they wait for the slower students to finish a teaching module. The important part is that even the slowest student must have mastered every module before the class moves on to the next. The class must be synchronized. Much effort must be placed on supporting, without pressurizing, the slow students. But there must obviously also be a “soft” way for slower students to fall out without affecting them negatively.
Inspiration for my beautiful (modesty is not one of my strengths) education model.
My first inspiration comes from the work that Sugata Mitra has done since 1999. His conjecture was that kids will, if you provide them with the right environment, support and infrastructure, teach themselves. He used the “granny” model I mentioned above and got excellent results.
The second inspiration comes from Salman Khan of the Khan Academy. It’s not limited to maths, but his roots has been to provide free online maths video lectures for high school kids. I got the flip-teaching and mastery concepts from him. Salman Khan’s story is also very fascinating and there’s also tons of stuff about him and his work on the web.
And then lastly Ken Robinson’s TED video on why education is broken.
- Pieter Steenekamp is 65 years old, not retired, and worked as an engineer his adult life. He’s currently involved in a high-tech startup company and enjoys keeping up with the latest software technologies. Doing self-study using available online resources to keep up, he’s convinced that there is a model to solve our tertiary education challenge.
