Read this interesting article about US universities expanding beyond its shores, particularly in the Middle East. In principle, the concept of truly global education provided by an international university with a presence in multiple countries makes a lot of sense and is truly fascinating. However, it does raise a number of questions. Here are a few.
How does the University maintain the quality of its education?
Is it realistic to scale the number of faculty on a global basis?
Will the overall learning experience even come close to that offered at the main campus?
Are universities viewing global opportunities for growth as a money making exercise?
In the context of India, there are no shortage of collaborations between Indian and foreign universities (though very often its hard to identify which of these are real and which of these are purely publicity exercises). A collaboration is very different from a foreign university setting up shop in another country. Collaboration is easier to achieve and quicker to produce results but lacks the brand value and the potential financial upside for the foreign university. Hence the rush to setup shop overseas.
Saw this news report that the India Institutes of Technology (IIT) are in talks with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to help setup a virtual IIT. On the one hand it is a great forward looking move that deserves to be commended. It could certainly help tackle the problem of faculty shortage. On the other hand, one could easily argue that the IITs are further diluting their brand value. Having increased the number of IITs lately, there are bound to be plenty of challenges associated with doing justice to these institutions. Unless care is taken to ensure the continued high quality of IIT graduates, there could be a negative impact to the overall IIT brand. Are the IITs spreading themselves too thin by attempting too many ambitious projects? Hopefully, they can address the challenges of the new IITs, while continuing to explore new ideas like virtual IITs.
The challenges faced in providing basic education to India’s poor is not new. The NY Times did a long story based largely on a recent study of education made by Pratham.
Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India’s social ladder…Click here for complete article in today’s NY Times
In short, education at the grassroots level as well as at the college level in India has its share of serious challenges. The quality of education at various levels reflects in the output. Unless steps are taken to address these challenges India’s competitive advantage of having a young, educated work force is soon going to be lost.
One of the challenges faced by a number of India based companies who desire to have a website is the lack of content (or the inability to develop it). In this case we were able to develop both the content and the design with the co-operation of the team at Sun Projects India.
Check out this talk. Brilliant and humorous. The speaker is Sir Ken Robinson, an expert on innovation and creativity. A must see for anyone interested in education in general.
IIT Mumbai will be making their courses available via satellite as per this news report in TOI. This is a great step forward. MIT’s Open Courseware and UC Berkeley’s courses on Youtube are already available on the Internet. Sounds like Education is well on its way to becoming “OpenSource”. This move towards open source in Education does raise some interesting questions.
Are faculty members signed up to teach a class or to teach the world at large?
How do faculty members feel about their relatively private classrooms being broadcast to the world?
Are other universities going to follow suit?
Is Education going to be the next big use for Youtube?
Do student get to see videos of Prof. before the decide to sign up for a class?
Is teaching going to become more of a sales pitch?
Are we going to see competing lectures on the same topic from different universities?
What is in it for the university? Are they trying to educate the world from the goodness of their heart or simply marketing their services!
