[LINK] Lost professors: we won’t need academics in 60 years

[Tom Worthington]

On 27/04/12 11:09, David Boxall wrote:
> From
> <http://theconversation.edu.au/lost-professors-we-wont-need-academics-in-60-years-6293>
>>Chris Lloyd Professor of Business Statistics at University of
>> Melbourne
>
 > ... Academics create knowledge through largely unfunded research ...

Professor George Walker, has been discussing this in Canberra this week:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/04/building-university-research-capacity.html

 > ... generate curriculum; they deliver lectures; they accredit ...
This could be enhanced with a flexible version of the CECS Teaching 
Quality Program, followed two new 10 hour advanced flexible teaching 
modules. Staff would then progress through three stages of teaching: 
first as a tutor, then more intensive teaching and finally (for some) 
designing courses themselves.
Academics have been largely untrained in how to design and deliver
education. There are now teacher training programs in place at many
Australian universities and these will make a big difference to the
quality of education:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/07/postgraduate-certificates-in-tertiary.html

 > When I started lecturing in 1978, I would take one or two textbooks
 > and write out my own lecture notes. ...

Yes, there are many disciplines which started out in such an ad-hoc way.
But it is time we did things more professionally in tertiary education.

 > These days, I design new courses by trawling the web ...

It is one of the dirty little secrets of education that teachers use the
Wikipedia but then penalise their students for doing the same. In some 
courses I have got students to critique and edit a Wikipedia entries to 
give them an appreciation of its good and bad points:
http://tomw.net.au/moodle/mod/assignment/view.php?id=110

 > I deliver the course to the students in a big hall. ...

In 2008 I decided that lectures were not a good way to do education, so
stopped giving lectures:
http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/08/my-last-lecture.html

 > Surely, 60 years from now, the very best curriculum and audio visual
 > presentations will be collected, digitised and organised ...

Videos of lectures are not that much more useful than live lectures.
There are better ways to do education. Techniques for new teaching
styles are explained in tertiary teaching courses run by many
universities:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/08/tertiary-teaching-for-research-led.html

 > I am not sure that there is much interaction in most lectures anyway.
 > ...

"Lecture 2.0" is the general term for more interactive lecture
techniques (my "last lecture" gets a mention): 
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Lecture_2.0

 > Electronic interactions through small groups ...

Small groups work well, face-to-face, or online. But we can't handle an
increased volume of students this way, without improved tools and 
techniques. Routine tasks of helping students with academic writing, for 
example, can be automated with an artificial intelligence tutor.

 > Accreditation is another core function of universities which they
 > currently monopolise. ...

Professional bodies also run courses, certify professional training and
accredit university courses. I was commissioned in 2008 to write an
online ICT Sustainability course for the Australian Computer Society.
This is designed to meet a global skills standard and delivered as part
of a globally certified professional program, accredited through
national professional bodies. It was later adapted for use at
unviersity in Australia and North America:
http://www.tomw.net.au/ict_sustainability/

 > A degree is a quality guarantee ... I cannot see the private sector
 > usurping this role.

There is little distinction drawn between public andThis could be 
enhanced with a flexible version of the CECS Teaching Quality Program, 
followed two new 10 hour advanced flexible teaching modules. Staff would 
then progress through three stages of teaching: first as a tutor, then 
more intensive teaching and finally (for some) designing courses 
themselves. private sector
tertiary institutions when it comes to quality, they have to meet the
same standards.

The major issue is local versus global: if a student is studying
on-line, will their teaching be outsourced to a low cost country?

 > Many may argue that it is daft to predict what will happen in 60
 > years. ...

We do not have to wait 60 years: changes to education are happening now
and will become very apparent in the next five to ten years. Australia 
is well placed to benefit from this change, as for example, one of the 
leading Learning Management System products (Moodle) was developed here 
and there are many deep thinkers on how to do education better.

The current situation reminds me of the Internet in the mid 1990s, when
technology was available and worked. But most IT professionals were in a
state of denial, saying the Internet was just an academic experiment and
not suitable for serious use. Within a few years the Internet came to
dominate IT. The hard part was integrating the Internet way of working 
into traditional corporate culture: http://www.tomw.net.au/auugpa.htm

Some academics are now saying that the more systematic approaches to
education are threatening their academic freedom and that online
learning is untested. But I expect that within a few years these will 
become the normal and obvious ways to do university
education. Hopefully Australian universities will be part of that
change, or they will become just satellite campuses for overseas
institutions.

My suggestion to my colleagues on how to get to the new world of 
unviersity education is "Integrating Online Learning into Campus Life": 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/04/flexible-online-learning-for.html



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Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/