ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-02-01
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfRoM21qHtE
like I've been in higher education for about fifty years L. almost fifty years and last one of our students how old he thought I was in the set eighty years old I thought while I wonder how many eighty year olds are running universities I don't I don't think there are many I'm I'm gonna tell you two stories I probably shouldn't be telling you this but I
have an interesting beginning in an education I'm I'm from New York and when I was in kindergarten we're playing musical chairs and the teacher said to us well whoever finishes and is still exceeded blast would win the game so at one point in musical chairs I got to a seat with a this other student and I knock them off the chair fearing it odd how to
win that way so the teacher would let me play anymore when I got home I told my mom about it and the next day I'm sure they don't have these anymore a truant officer came to the door and I was hiding under the kitchen table and does she said no no he's not gonna come back to school anymore so I didn't go to kindergarten which follow
explains a lot of my behavior and then %HESITATION in first grade we had moved and we are in first grade I decided with a friend of mine Jerry bread love's gonna play hooky the first day of school pretty amazing even amazing for me when I think back on it and I got a %HESITATION a toothache about in the afternoon about two thirty I decided to go
back and of course as soon as I got back to the house my mom knew that I didn't go to school and so she was pretty upset about that so the local kids were to get a little ride and kind of a wagon or something if she would let me do that so that's kind of my beginning my whole beginning in education but %HESITATION when I
was in Saint Louis I had this transformational experience in college and I decided at that point that that was really an important thing for me and I decided to commit myself to higher education that's hal when here today so this is a cellphone and this is the future classroom apart ducation the cellphone I'm gonna explain what I mean by that %HESITATION I didn't realize when until
I did the research for this project that there are seven billion people in the world roughly and there are seven million cellphones it's only taken us twenty years to bring the cellphones together now a lot of this %HESITATION that we're talking about today has to do with the developing countries because of course everything that we need in higher education is here in our country but the
fact of the matter is that a very small percentage of the population of the world is educated even in the United States they're only about twenty five percent of the population may be a little bit more who have a four year or more to great so there's a lot of work to do in their lot of people to educate click Christiansen who is a professor of
business at at Harvard talks about the fact that disruptive innovation is a key to how organizations change if you look at the steel industry or the newspaper industry will know about that and he wrote a book a couple of years ago called the innovative university where he says but the internet will be the disruptor for higher education now if you think about this every industry has
usually two problems it's got a problem of a resource releasing resources in their organization and then and then a scaling problem so in the auto industry it saw it was speed that was a resource problem and the scaling problem was the odd the way they manufactured the the cars in higher education is the faculty member in the classroom that's the resource problem and the US scale
is the internet that's how we get this all this education to a lot of people so what I'm gonna talk about today's amid talk about three aspects of higher at a good begin by talking about Harvard sixteen thirty six and then we talk about where we were after World War two and this will be as painful as it sounds and then we talk about where we
are presently and then what what might happen in the future so Harvard sixteen thirty six harbor was founded and I don't know if you realize this or not but are the original university model was really kinda fashioned after a reality of the agrarian culture so young men mostly ministers would be dropped off there was no transportation at Harvard and in in September at the end of
the growing season then they would usually stay there for the sixteen weeks because how could they get back and forth would take four five hours or three or four days so they would stay and study there and then they would be dropped off after the holidays and come back in may because they have to go back to the form again but a lot of us think
that on led the way higher it is structured United States has something to do with some kind of scientific reality about education but the fact of the matter is it really does it has to do with practical realities and that's helped orbit was kind of formulated and I think it's an important thing to keep in mind because as I get further down this it'll sound like
I'm really talking about heresy but there is really no real basis for what we've done except tradition and then the traditions have become regulations the regulations have become the way we operate in higher education the second phase of what happened at higher ed believe it or not then think about Harvard we're still operating the same way worldwide still faculty members who were doing the research and
doing the study lecture gonna classroom at cetera and a lot of what we do is lecture method you know seventy percent probably what we do selection method the second big change though in terms of trying to switch things around came after World War two and World War two really %HESITATION the only change that took place where we had the commuter university the cars were available then
people move from the city to rural areas they were able to get to a university but it wasn't really a very dynamic change I'm sure you would bed because the fact of matter is the only thing that we did was the student was now able to get closer to Harvard by car it is a consequence they could study in a way that they couldn't study before
because even in the eighteenth century and in Cambridge and Boston across the country there are there are no dues no train transportation so you had to get there another way the other thing that happened during after were too was we did have the arm we did have the %HESITATION the correspondence schools came about you probably know university Maryland was offering correspondents programs to the veterans and
then the open university in England which is also kind of a distance learning university began to offer courses in England so that's the second phase and then the third and final phase where we are right now is the internet phase the internet university now the internet has not been really it has not been taken up in a very significant way although it's expanding but it's a
very very important development it's a real paradigm shift in higher education the reason it is is it's a synchronous in that you don't have to have a faculty member in the classroom to be offering the course it also gets aggregates the curriculum it takes all the courses apart you know at the present time in general if you gonna take a program you have to go for
the whole sixteen weeks usually unless you're in a part time program but now with distance learning you can actually take a Shakespeare course we could really take one activist a spear course if you wanted to the problem with the online learning in the distance education right now is it slightly better than a lecture method in that arm in that you can repeat the lecture but it's
pretty much it's a very linear type of experience it really doesn't bring all the full of body technology that's available for us today and that brings us to the present time in terms of the cellphone so just consider for a minute we've got seven million seven billion people in the world are we I don't think I mentioned before but they're only one billion cars in the
world and only one billion TV sets compared to seven billion cellphones both think so think about that so a lot of what's happened in the past is %HESITATION universities would design programs for desktop the consumption and of course our students for example Stevenson or not even using the desktops anymore Balibo ratio twenty to one they're using the cell phones cell phones are cheaper there easier you
know I have one line in my pocket they're easier to deal with so I'm going to kind of describe three different types of of developments that might take place over the next twenty five years the one is a simple one where you just get three universities together let's say we get Penn state Maryland and I were together and they would offer a stated your agriculture program
and that state of the art agriculture programs could be offered now in a different way know most of us will develop a program in our own campuses at a very low cost it's gonna be a little bit of a better program they're gonna collaborate on this gonna make it a better agriculture program everything from one hour lecture to a PhD another good offer that to a
variety of organizations including schools so crop trial like Microsoft %HESITATION developing software they might offer a They Might license it to a variety of schools now there are in the world there about five hundred seventy million farms believe or not so agriculture is one of our largest industries is not by dollar volume but it's a very significant industry so there's an opportunity there to do something
really really important another kind of idea that could come about is the %HESITATION notion of where an organization would develop come look at NBC like a television channel it might be not for profit or it might be a for profit organization where they would bring together and again this was not possible to do before in any significant way but bring together say all of the world's
mathematicians two one single location and those mathematicians would work with %HESITATION two hundred fifty video type people and they would develop again degrees in mathematics from the one hour lecture to a PhD they would develop the programs that were license them to organizations the government's ecologist universities so in our case we have a mathematics degree but we don't have a an agriculture degree so it would
be much easier for us to come to have confidence in this agriculture degree that might be offered by these professors than to try to develop it ourselves because of their expertise the same thing would be true for mathematics so what's really going to happen the point that I'm making this whole things which we're gonna happen in the world over the next twenty five years is structure
of higher education like the newspaper industry like the retail industry is going to change dramatically and I think for the better it doesn't mean you know they're always his concerns about what about engagement will engagements not gonna go away actually engagement is not really a big part of traditional higher ed today anyway because the fact of the matter is most of what we do our lectures
this was I think the challenge of the newspaper industry for example when you think about the fact that %HESITATION seventy percent of newspapers information thirty percent is commentary so it wasn't a hundred percent commentary in the same is true for higher read so I think there are many benefits in many outstanding things that can happen and a lot of this is going to happen because of
this self cellphone penetration it wouldn't be a what we would be able to do this in any other way China for example has leapt over all the technology and they're putting wifi everywhere in the country and the only thing that people are using primarily are things like the cellphone so I want to wrap up and conclude by showing you two final slides and one is a
slide on that is answering a basic question whoops basic question that you may have especially in developing countries is how the heck well the gonna charge no cellphones good question and because we have we just this is second nature for us this is a solar panel maybe you've seen this you could find the sun online and in about an hour and a half that'll George that
cell phone good luck so then everyday people or want to follow a course they can charge a cellphone that that set up was about fifty to fifty dollars but the primary thing I will leave you with is this this is a photograph and it's really a pretty touching thing and that is this was a show on sixty minutes the future of money some of you may
have seen it and this is a very poor part of Kenya and these are two children of a of a family in Kenya and %HESITATION he used to have to let the kids study by kerosene lamp and because they've kinda created this big point project in Kenya where in program money into your cell phone this is dad has a cellphone and now instead of using the
kerosene lamp for education he's able to put money into a solar panel and now his children were able to study at night you see that light that's there well that's powered probably by a nickel or so for an hour so instead of studying by kerosene lamp third of people to study now use electricity so my hope for all of this in the most positive sense is
that all these changes are going to take place that will be significant and powerful will permit us to help children adults around the world to get the kind of education that we've gotten their children gotten that our grandchildren going to get nor to make their lives better their family lives better as well as a community thank you very much
