Online education has been
shaping the way we educate ourselves. There is nothing new in this. Personally I
have already concluded six courses on Coursera and I am planning to participate
in courses provided by universities like Stanford, Princeton and Cornell. I
have no plans in conducting a local university online course in Finland.
In my local community
Finland, I have been talking and writting about the challenge and benefit of
online challenging universities to change for almost five years now. In my
opinion, it is the structures of the incumbent university system that is
preventing change.
Here are a few tests I
recommend you to conduct to assess the current state of art in online education
in Finland. In this way you will also be taking part in the revolution and in
building a new university system in Finland.
1 Search, register and pay
online for an online course
A modern university is online.
Go to your search engine. Type in what you would like to study. You should land
on e.g. a university web page or on the page of an online course provider, an
aggregator like Coursera or Eliademy (a global start-up in Finland). Click
the course you want, register and pay for it, if it has a price. You will gain
access to the course and everything including course access should follow
almost automatically.
To bench mark the current
state of affairs go to the home page of your local university and see if they
have an online offering on their front page. As a point of reference my
university does not have an online offering on its front page and this is despite
the fact that I have been talking about it for close to five years.
2. Test the digital
processing of course information
We all know that the
processes of firms are becoming digital. This also in many ways changes the way
companies work. New processes can be designed, which are far more efficient
compared to the old. This digital process re-engineering should also be taking
place at universities.
Courses accomplished in other
universities are often accepted as part of a new degree the student is
studying. As a test go to the university you are a student of and try and find
this process and register your prior courses electronically for acceptance as
part of your new degree.
My present benchmark is that
in my online course offering I am also indicating which e.g. online Coursera
courses I will accept as alternative ways of accomplishing the course. For the
occasional student who has been unable or late to attend the actual course I
have tailored alternative solutions. In practice the student suggests an
alternative and after consideration I perhaps accept it. The key point is that
after finishing the course, the student fills in the acceptance process
electronically and all I have to do is give my electronic acceptance (electronic
signature) and forward the accepted course to be registered as part of a
degree.
The current benchmark is that
many of these case have been handled in paper format and the process takes time
and the flow of the process can’t be monitored and does not get monitored. A
concern is also that no one has a view to the big picture. Could I e.g. with
the six courses I have accomplished on Coursera get 30% of a bachelor of
business administration degree in some Finnish university?
3 Asses the digital tools
When you have a carpenter
coming round to your house for a renovation job, I am sure you will do a quick
assesment of his potential skills by having a glimpse at his tool box. No tools
– no skill, a lot of brand new unused tools – no skill. The same thing you
should do to your university and its online course. Today’s tools are computer
programs. When you enroll into a course, be sure to check that you will be
using software to do the job. I do not mean Microsoft office tools, but things
like doing accounting with an accounting program etc.
The current bench mark is
that in my teaching, I am struggling with the tools issue. On the one hand
tools alone do not help and in many cases one needs live data (e.g. accounting
data or data of stocks in store) to play around with and that is not easy to
have access to. There is also a lot of free software out there, which luckily
helps.
Teaching business
administration has been one of the cheapest i.e. lowest cost degrees. A
university more or less gets the same amount of money from the government for
each degree independent of the subject. A business degree is profitable to the
university. From a perspective of strategy it is “the milking cow”. Ironically,
for this reason many universities want to have a business degree on their
course offering. This leads into a lock in situation in which universities are
unwilling to invest in software tools to teach. I have been voicing my concern
publically that our teaching is incompetent. It is sad to see that we are
potentially building an unskillful future generation.
You might have noticed that I
have talked nothing about what an online course is like. These tools are
developing at a fast pace and it is a topic for another post. Please also note
that I do not believe online will replace face to face. It is simply that
online and face to face teaching have to develop a mutually beneficial
relationship.
You will also notice that I
am addressing you the student. I am not addressing the industry. In fact we
proud ourselves in Finland that we have a strong collaboration between
universities and the industry. Unfortunately our economy is not doing well and
my concern is that our local industry will not help the universities out of
their present predicament. In fact history has shown that the
university-industry relationship in Finland has led into embeddedness and into
an inefficient interdependency. When Nokia was at the top of its game and
contributed to almost 4% of the gross national product of Finland, no
university was able to voice out a concern. Today most Finns would agree with
me that at the turn of the millennium our community was unable to challenge
Nokia in a constructive way. The universities were too much dependent on
industry opinion.
For this reason I look at you
the student to change our universities. You have the vote to cast. Walk out, do
not study in Finland, go to Coursera like I do, challenge us to change. On May
the third Suomen Ekonomit (Business alumni of Finland) released a proposal to build
a digital university of economics. This was a big step. The alumni are proposing change.
It is the students, the
alumni, which will disrupt the university education system in Finland. Go out
there and do it!
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