Phendrana Drifts

I could not imagine a more succinct challenge to what people think post-secondary is, what it actually is, and perhaps the reasons why we need to change how we provide it.

Many of the revelations will be news to many (and while few individual ones were a shock to me, taken as a whole really showed me how the college and university world needs to adapt and change). The video (and student feedback on post-secondary in general) should not paint a dreary and hopeless situation, but it does demonstrate some key and systemic flaws.

Relevancy - is it a student's fault they don't do 50% of the readings, don't go to class or bother to crack open a $100 textbook? Of course, at one level it certainly is. But it isn't because they are lazy and don't read - 2,300 web pages and 500 pages of e-mails (not to mention 1,200 plus Facebook profiles) show that when the material is relevant students who make it into university apply themselves with vigour. Post-secondary education is not a dinosaur but we need to do more to modernize the campus. The video itself was pretty good at pointing out technology alone cannot solve this - nor can funding (regardless of whether it comes from the student in the form of tuition or from public funding). Systemic change is required to make campus more relevant to students - students are not consumers and closing the sale is not a sign of success, engaging curious minds is the goal, or at least should be.

Curriculum - You can't teach directly to the modern day. It isn't that the university and college are teaching outdated information (although I think in many cases they are). If a student in class today is going to graduate two years from now and get a job that does not yet exist, how do train the student for that job? You can't, and that's the point. Bright, curious, inquisitive and reasoned minds are what are needed for the societal challenges two years, a decade from now and half a century from now. Training an open mind is what is needed - take Wikipedia for example. The core technology was available years ago to do it - it was not a new processor or a faster modem that made Wikipedia, blogging, file sharing and the ongoing revolution online. Technology is always a part, naturally, but being open to how technology interacts with knowledge is what made those advances possible and relevant. Closed minds need not apply in the economy of today, let alone tomorrow.

Creation vs. consumption - The classic undergraduate degree is not about consuming knowledge - reading it, retaining it and regurgitating it on demand. That was the first thing that was told to me when I stepping into my first undergraduate class in 1996, and it should be just as true today. It should be about teaching you to think. Despite being told that, it is the easiest way to give the appearance of an undergraduate degree, and I fear more and more professors, departments, faculties and institutions are encouraging that approach either overtly or subtly in favour of other priorities. The "real world" taught me that people valued thoughtful collaboration well-above individual competition. My university degrees did not prepare me for that. On a side note, the "real world" taught me that brevity was a good thing, my degrees certainly did not do that either. If training you to think is the key to a solid education, and if the best way to teach is to do, should our education institutions not be focusing on production rather than regurgitation? I think universities do a much better job at it than K-12 schools, but the production barrier is gone. Why didn't every university class demand a similar project to the anthropology one that this video was 30 years ago? Because the technology was unavailable to allow 30,000 students on a given campus to do so. More importantly, why did few university projects make it into the public consciousness like this one has, with 1.2 million people watching it in a month? Because technology has made it possible for me to share stuff like this with the world. Do rather than study, and share rather than protect information, new or old.

What did you find interesting in the video?

Labels: education

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