(Gordon Freedman, Blackboard’s Vice President Education Strategy, spent a year working with a team from inside and outside Blackboard to examine broad trends in higher education globally. Earlier this summer, that report, titled “Unlocking the Global Education Imperative: Core Challenges, Critical Responses,” was released. Freedman has spoken about these trends at a variety of global forums. Below is one in a series of periodic, reflective posts by Freedman on the changing global education landscape.)
It is not particularly easy to write a report about what is occurring with education globally. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
First of all, who has the authority to write such a report and command respect for the outcome? If a government produces the document, an international organization, a think thank, a labor union, a publication, a corporation or a university, each has its own perspective and, arguably, its own interests.
So, why would a technology company venture down this road? Certainly, there is a sales and marketing angle. Then there is “thought leadership,” the new form of technology evangelism. Corporations have credibility in this area because they can sum up what they see in the field far beyond what an individual institution or government could, and from a much more practical level. In the case of Blackboard, an academic technology provider, the motivation for the research and interviewing that led to the “Unlocking the Global Education Imperative: Core Challenges & Critical Responses” white paper was somewhat deeper.
While Blackboard certainly is in business to sell academic technology solutions aimed at student and institutional success, in the beginning of the company’s second decade, we can only do this well if we have a deeper sense of the direction of education. This, in itself, is a difficult task. Inherent in the project is the assumption that education is in transition, or will need to transform itself, as a result of the change in times – specifically, globalization brought on by the expansion of finance, the communication, information and higher participation rates in education.
The changes in the world, many brought on by new technologies, are, in many ways, responsible for Blackboard’s growth worldwide. Like other technology companies that have grown in parallel as the Internet has expanded over time, Blackboard is now sharing a wide acceptance of its solutions, a reliance on those solutions by many institutions, and an interest by a number of clients and government units for the company to help them plan their own education evolutions. As the company enters its second decade, the question arose: what have we learned from our client base, now numbering over 3,400? Could we begin to generalize what they have done with Blackboard’s solutions to make life better, richer, more rewarding for students and faculty, for institutions and funding bodies, and for economies?
Implicit at the outset of the second decade is the question of changing the company from purely a technology provider into an education company, dedicated to helping to solve daunting academic, education, and training problems with technology and knowledge. To make this transition, it is essential to gather enough information to make generalizations about trends, to sense changes, and to intuit what this might mean to individuals, institutions and governments.
We had a couple test runs at this approach, first in higher education in North America (the U.S. and Canada) and, in a more limited sense, in the U.S. K-12 world. We even had taken a look at what is known as K-20 in the U.S., a spanning of school and college. In each of those cases, the idea was to have conversations and review literature to spot trends. Most important was not to ask about technology, but to ask about challenges, about what keeps leaders up at night. The answers had an uniformity to them. Engaging students and accounting for institutional success were at the top of the list.
The question arose, could these trends be tracked and generalized around the world? Was what was happening in the U.S. and Canadian higher education, in schools, and between the two similar to what was happening elsewhere in the world? A year or more later, the answer is “yes.”
In summary, the reasons are pretty simple, though in reality and in historical reality, they are anything but simple. However closely linked the changes in finance (increased ease and scope of investment), changes in communication (widespread use of cell phones and the Internet), changes in commerce (from eCommerce to supply chain management, to shipping), and changes in information (Web site proliferation, Web destinations, portals, software development), their combined effect is world changing.
Together, these forces have brought down the metaphorical Berlin Wall that separated the past, highly structured and regulated societies and governments with the present and the future, a world were national borders were much less significant for the passage of funds, information, communication and travel. As a result, globalization has come to mean the change between the various boundaries and border characterized before the liberalization of finance, communication, commerce, information, and travel and the world we live in now.
These are significant changes and they touch every corner of the globe. So, what do they mean for education?
Education systems have grown up around the world in the last 100 years as systems of primary and secondary school, and further education, technical education and university education. In simple terms, schools provide the basic rudimentary knowledge of written and spoken communication, analytic processes, human history and civic engagement. After school, depending on the nation or region, several options appear: direct to career, training for careers, limited higher education focused on employment or university. These systems, globally, heavily resemble each other. There are no real national departures from the model. Some do it better than others. Others have greater resources. Yet, the process is fairly universal.
The process for researching the white paper was comprised of first-person interviews with institutional leaders, government agency staff, international organization members, education experts, and researchers, and reviews of other reports, monographs and research studies. The effort was not a formal academic research paper. Rather, it was more of a journalistic or trend-gathering project, whose results tend to sum up attitudes and actions so they can be compared and contrasted with the past and cast against future concerns.
As with the North American study, certain commonalities presented themselves almost immediately. Foremost among them is what is termed “student engagement,” but what, in reality, is a catch-all term that tracks the change in how students take to their studies now compared to how they did in the past. In some studies, there are formal research methods attached to detecting changes. Whether, formal or informal, the surveys point changes in student attitude and action in terms of college and university attendance. It is no longer a matter of entering higher education and staying until a degree is completed. Except for the most elite institutions, students pick and chose, come and go, or do complete at rates that are troubling to planners and funders of higher education. This is made especially acute by two facts.
One, in many places in the world, higher education attendance is up both in terms of percentage and in terms of raw numbers of students. This is both costly to anticipate and manage, and it requires investment. Two, there is an increased need, universally felt, that each nation, region and locality needs students who have completed college or university to fuel economies.
Economies are now run by raw brain power. The studies are clear worldwide. More education equals higher earning potential. Higher earning potential equals more vibrant economies, in terms of current employment needs and in terms of innovation leading to new forms of employment. So, the fear is that more students going for higher education degrees is costly because of the numbers of students, but is doubly costly if those starting higher education do not complete degrees. This overall concern is part of the shift of globalization. Economic competition, except in the rare case of mineral wealth, will be based on innovation. Education levels the playing field. If a student in Vietnam can compete with one in San Francisco or one in Johannesburg, the employee pool has suddenly shifted.
The idea of “unlocking” the global education imperative emerged as the project continued. There are any number of people, organizations and government officials making pronouncements about this type of competition. For the most part, these statements in the past were rhetorical, aimed at getting attention, but had not yet sunk in as reality. In the course of gathering information for the report, it was clear that it was necessary to “unlock” or release the concept that this was no longer a discussion item, but was an imperative, a necessary element for every society. There was the sense, globally, that nations are at a turning point, both positive and negative.
To move forward socially and economically, governments must succeed in increasing their human capital so that individuals can compete in the global economy. At the same time, they don’t want to create highly skilled labor flight. They want the brainpower to be applied locally. How can governments know what is occurring in education institutions that they fund with taxpayer contributions? The second largest finding was that there is a bookend to student engagement, accountability or transparency. Governments, funders, and individuals want to have a barometer of performance available to show institutional progress in engaging students and producing human capital.
While the U.S. places tremendous reliance on periodic accreditation of institutions, many nations have no counterpart to this practice. In a number, there are quality measures and in some there are measures that look at teaching and learning on one hand and research production on the other.
Australia places very clear distinctions on measuring and making public both forms of human capital improvement, the first (teaching and learning) that contributes directly to the labor pool and the second (research production) that contributes to innovation and technology transfer to create new types of businesses. In nations that are rapidly developing their higher education potential, like China and some Middle Eastern nations, the investment is in research. Providing global leadership in science, math, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and technology can lead to vibrant economies and new forms of wealth.
What became clear in the course of this work, was that “unlocking” is what is occurring. Education in the past was a cottage industry, now it is becoming a national and regional engine.
International organizations such as the OECD (Organization for Cooperative and Economic Development), which service the developed nations and through those nations helps developing nations; the World Bank and UNESCO, which assists developing nations; and a number of membership associations with global reach, such as the International Association of Universities and the Association of Commonwealth Universities, are playing a profound role in carrying the message forward. The equation is simple: education equals individual and national competitiveness.
What does this mean for individual institutions?
What does it mean for large, globally competitive research universities like Melbourne (Australia), Manchester (UK), Arizona State (U.S.) and McGill (Canada)? What does it mean for regional universities in Spain, Botswana, Thailand or Colombia? What does it mean for urban universities in Sao Palo, Singapore, Rome or Mumbai? What does it mean for the thousands of local community colleges or further education sites around the world?
In each case, it means a search for funding and funding models to keep the labor force willing to step up to the education realities of today’s world. This means that technology must enter the picture in ways that have not been envisioned in the past. It means learning how to accommodate students so that they can learn.
In the case of Blackboard clients, institutions have created many different mixed menus of how technology for teaching and learning, community building and managing outcomes can change the nature of the institution to better fit the times.
Just as the need for increased national and regional brain power to fuel economies, there is a need for increased use of technology, for strategic education infrastructure, to create the access, persistence, and accommodation for teaching and learning, and for stimulating and making more efficient the learning that will power research and innovation.
What we learned by the “Unlocking the Global Education Imperative” report, beyond the largest trends, was that any institutions and governments are making strong strides. Those strides we saw as “critical responses” to the “core challenges” faced by institutions. Again, there were commonalities in the responses globally, as there were in the challenges. These are spelled out in the white paper.
Finally, we saw a desire for institutions to cooperate in a multitude of ways at the very same time they compete with each other. This finding, and its continued push from institutions to link up on an institutional, programmatic and individual basis, is a reassuring sign in a world that is challenged by energy, environmental and economic challenges.
The role higher education plays in both the quality of life and the quantity of education received will only become more significant. As energy costs go up and repercussions are felt, technology, education and national policy will fuse into a new form of education that will alter the issues as we know them today.
