On ‘The Edgeless University’

The Edgeless University – Demos

Available for download: via Demos Publications

This is an interesting paper which identifies a range of significant technological challenges for higher education. It is suggested that universities are on the brink of an electronic revolution like the music industry in 1999 but struggling to make sense of the opportunities or understand the strategic options:

The next stage of technological investment must be more strategic. The sector currently lacks a coherent narrative of how institutions will look in the future and the role of technology in the transition to a wider learning and research culture.

A reasonable enough proposition although this in the context of welcoming the far-sighted establishment of JANET seems a little bit harsh – it is difficult to get much more strategic than setting up a successful shared sector wide network like this.

Many of the specific points made in the report are quite pertinent (if not entirely novel):

- openness in terms of publication of research and free access to IP remains a difficult agenda;

- the importance of recognising the value of teaching in the context of potentially distorting RAE/REF demands is a challenge;

- high quality e-learning, discrete or blended, is about much more than just providing new tools – it requires huge investment and support;

- the value of face-to-face learning and teaching should not be discounted.

Fairly straightforward agenda there then.

However, some of the ideas in here are just plain wrong. In particular the idea that there is a deficit of flexible study pathways for credit-based learning and that somehow it is the role of government to take a specific policy lead in this area:

Government policy must help higher education institutions develop new ways of offering education seekers affiliation and accreditation. This might include shorter pick-and-mix courses and new forms of assessment.

Then there is the particularly misguided idea of seeking to reconcile “informal learning” with the formal system of higher education:

Informal learning is growing in popularity and significance, and attracting the attention of politicians, but there are problems in reconciling informal learning with formal frameworks, and managing the relationship between institutions of higher education and the kinds of learning that happen outside them. We have yet to find a model for collating learning from many different sources. Funding and the structure of learning in formal higher education tend to militate against this.

There is a good reason for this – if “informal learning” can be recognised then there are actually costs in doing so and, in order to have currency, it has to be within an educational framework of some kind. More often than not though, such learning will be just “informal” – it is difficult to argue that mainstream HE provision should be skewed to cope with such marginal activity. Indeed, there remains significant adult and continuing education provision parts of which are structured for this purpose.

The overall conclusion though is pretty difficult to argue with:

In building the e-infrastructure for higher education we should not just build around the needs of institutions as they exist already. To pursue the possibilities of the ‘Edgeless University’, technology will have to be taken more seriously as a strategic asset. Technology is a driver for change. But we should harness it as a solution, a tool, for the way we want universities to support learning and research in the future.

So, the future is ‘edgeless’ it seems.

“Top employers cut graduate jobs”

According to BBC Education, at least

But the survey quoted here reports a reduction in the number of vacancies compared to 2008 and a reduction against target:

There is further evidence of a tough graduate jobs market with a survey showing vacancies down 13.5% on 2008.
Research among the top 100 employers identified by graduates shows that the only area with significant growth was the armed forces – up 11%. As numbers of jobs have shrunk, firms have been getting more applicants for each – a third more than last year. High Fliers Research, which carried out the survey, said employers had cut recruitment targets by 28%. Employers have recruited 14,370 graduates to join their payrolls – against an original target of 19,951. Last year, there were 16,614 graduates recruited.

Yes, it is the most challenging time to be a graduate in the jobs market at the moment and it is going to be really tough for a lot of this year’s cohort, leaving university in the middle of the worst recession for generations. You have to feel a huge amount of sympathy. But the government is, to its credit, trying to mitigate some of the effects, at least in the short run, through internship opportunities etc.

However, if the general media reporting on this issue were to be believed, you would think that there were no graduate jobs available at all anywhere in the country. This simply is not the case, although the position is undoubtedly worse than in previous years, and the way this issue is reported doesn’t help.

The Guardian carries a similar report.

Report claims rankings can have positive effects

It seems that global rankings might not be entirely terrible

The Chronicle carries an item on a report suggesting, somewhat surprisingly, that there are some benefits arising from league tables.

The report, “Impact of College Rankings on Institutional Decision Making: Four Country Case Studies,” comments that more than 40 countries have rankings systems, which it describes as “entrenched.”

The report, which is based on interviews with people at more than 20 higher-education institutions in the four countries, seeks to determine what role rankings play on their campuses and to suggest lessons for American institutions. While criticizing the impact of rankings in ways that will be familiar to American readers — skewing priorities, warping hiring decisions, hurting disadvantaged students, and so forth — the interview subjects say that rankings can have positive effects.

Among them are better decision making based on data, better teaching and learning, prompt recognition and easy copying of model programs, and increased collaboration, not just competition, among peer institutions.

However, all require decisive action by institutions – steps which they should be undertaking in any case – and it is far from clear that these positives outweigh the many negatives.

An alternative global ranking of universities?

European project launched to develop a new international league table

Global Higher Ed has a report on the decision by the European Commission to award a million euro tender to develop and test a global ranking of universities to a consortium of institutions:

The successful bid – the CHERPA network (or the Consortium for Higher Education and Research Performance Assessment), is charged with developing a ranking system to overcome what is regarded by the European Commission as the limitations of the Shanghai Jiao Tong and the QS-Times Higher Education schemes. The final product is to be launched in 2011.

CHERPA is comprised of a consortium of leading institutions in the field within Europe; all have been developing and offering rather different approaches to ranking over the past few years.

But will it fly as an alternative?

IREG, the International Observatory on Rankings, reports the details:

The European ranking system will be independent, “robust” and measure higher education’s core functions of research, teaching and outreach, says the tender’s terms of reference. It will cover all types of higher education institutions in and outside Europe – particularly in North America, Asia and Australia – and will enable comparisons and benchmarking of similar institutions at the institutional and field levels.

The basic approach underlying the project is to compare only institutions which are similar and comparable in terms of their missions and structures. Therefore the project is closely linked to the idea of a European classification (“mapping”) of higher education institutions developed by CHEPS. The feasibility study will include focused rankings on particular aspects of higher education at the institutional level (e.g., internationalization and regional engagement) on the one hand, and two field-based rankings for business and engineering programmes on the other hand.

The project will help institutions better position themselves and improve their development strategies, quality and performance. It will enable stakeholders, especially students, to make informed choices between institutions and programmes – which existing rankings do not do because they focus only on research and entire institutions.

The field-based rankings will each focus on a particular type of institution and will develop and test a set of indicators appropriate to these institutions. The rankings will be multi-dimensional and will – like the CHE ranking – use a grouping approach rather than simplistic league tables. In contrast to existing global rankings, the design will compare not only the research performance of institutions but will include teaching & learning as well as other aspects of university performance.

Will be interesting to see the outputs of this work but it will be a huge challenge for the new model to become a credible alternative to SJTU and THE world rankings.

How many Honorary Degrees?

An honourable business for the President and the frog?

There has been a bit of controversy recently about Barack Obama receiving an Honorary Degree from Notre Dame University and not receiving one from Arizona State.

It’s not entirely clear how many Honorary Degrees the President does have but it certainly isn’t as many as Theodore Hesburgh, formerly President of Notre Dame. He has 150.

According to the Chronicle, Hesburgh is not the only one to achieve such a collection:

His closest competitor for the title of King of Honorary Doctorates is an actual king: Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand. In 1997, the king claimed to have 136 honorary degrees, surpassing Father Hesburgh’s total at the time. For his part, Father Hesburgh isn’t particularly impressed with the king. “His degrees are from high schools and dinky little places in Thailand,” says the Roman Catholic priest. He adds, “Thailand is a land of fantasy.” The king of Thailand is, in his own way, a man of genuine accomplishment. He is, after all, the world’s longest-reigning monarch. But sometimes honorary degrees are bestowed upon people whose accomplishments are slightly less stellar. Mike Tyson, Kermit the Frog, and Bruce Willis have all been given honorary degrees. Mike Tyson was a great boxer, Kermit is a hero to millions of kids, and Bruce Willis has been in some action movies — but they’re not exactly Father Hesburgh.

Previously noted here the Italian stance on Honorary Degrees. Perhaps there should be a worldwide cap on numbers or a constraint on awarding Honorary Degrees to muppets? Or better still, just don’t award them at all like LSE, MIT, Cornell and Stanford?

Getting Freshers to read, discuss and engage

THE reports on a really rather creative initiative at St Andrews

Every new student enrolling at the University of St Andrews this autumn will be sent a novel during the summer and will be encouraged to discuss it with other freshers when they arrive on campus in September. The university is distributing Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a Man Booker-shortlisted work, to all 1,500 new undergraduates in an initiative to give students a common discussion topic and to focus their energies on broad intellectual debate rather than narrow academic study.

This is a terrific idea. Helps with student induction and orientation in halls and ensures that the residential experience has a learning dimension too. Wish we’d thought of it

The Times: 2010 University League Table

Latest UK university league table has been published by The Times (last year’s ranking in brackets):

1 Oxford (1)
2 Cambridge (2)
3 Imperial College (3)
4 St Andrews (5)
5 University College London (7)
6 Warwick (6)
7 London School of Economics (4)
8 Durham (8)
9 Exeter (13)
10 Bristol (10)
11 York (9)
12 King’s College London (11)
13 Bath (15)
14 Edinburgh (18)
15 Leicester (14)
15 Southampton (16=)
17 Loughborough (12)
18 Sheffield (22)
19 Glasgow (20=)
20 Nottingham (16=)

Not a huge amount of movement since 2009 with the Top 20 largely unchanged although the press release draws attention to some modest changes:

The biggest climbers at the top of the table include Liverpool (up from 34 to 28), Leeds (from 31 to 27), Sheffield (from 22 to 18), Edinburgh (from 18 to 14) and Exeter (from 13 to nine). Lower down the tables, big climbers include Cumbria (from 99 to 83), Hertfordshire (from 79 to 66), York St John (from 91 to 80) and De Montfort (from 77 to 67), Bedfordshire (from 89 to 71), Lincoln (from 103 to 86) and UWIC Cardiff (from 85 to 76)

The strict demarcation line between pre- and post-92 institutions seems to remain as strong as ever though with no newer universities making it into the top 50. A very different picture to the recent Guardian table.

Research universities should consider merging

Research universities should “consider merging”

According to a report of a speech by Nigel Thrift, vice-chancellor of Warwick:

The top 30 could merge, either with each other or with big American universities, and contemplate bringing in more private providers or collaborate together more formally. Foreign merger or takeover might solve chronic university underfunding, he said, and produce “interesting scientific synergies” if UK and US universities joined.

Although it looks a bit bald here there are, I think, some interesting thoughts underlying this about the way in which universities can collaborate successfully for mutual benefit. Although this is not just about mergers, the idea that currently highly successful institutions would merge for longer term sustainability (rather than as a result of some form of crisis) is a novel one.

Additionally:

The alternative could be the slow decline of institutions unable to produce enough research papers, clusters of top academics or scientific facilities to keep up with the world leaders. He also raised the possibility of private ownership of a few, which would increase diversity and relieve stretched higher education funding. Universities already face squeezed public and private funding and caps on student numbers because of the recession and Thrift argued that international competition would “intensify markedly” for the estimated 150 million students worldwide in 2010. Research-intensive institutions would be hit most severely by increased competition from other countries as they recovered from the recession, he said.

So, the situation is grim and this is one way out. But will Russell and 94 Group universities see things this way?

Impact of the Budget on higher education

Savings needed? No need to think about it, just cut the administration.

John Denham has written to HEFCE on the impact of the Budget.

This is a significant letter from the Secretary of State but it doesn’t quite say what the Guardian is reporting. The paper’s headline states: “Universities told to cut admin costs, not teaching or research”. This isn’t precisely the message but the sentiments are there:

Ministers have calmed fears that universities will be asked to axe thousands of academic jobs and make savings on teaching and research.
Letters from the universities secretary, John Denham, to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) confirm that savings should be made in administration costs, rather than the core university business of teaching and research.

“I am confident that we can find efficiency savings whilst protecting the quality of teaching and research,” he wrote.

Savings should come from programmes that “do not directly contribute to the frontline delivery of teaching and research”, he added.

The important point here is that, having determined that universities have to make significant savings it really isn’t the job of the Secretary of State to tell institutions how to prioritise their spending. Of course institutions will not seek to undermine quality of teaching and research. But the idea that there is this huge unnecessary raft of administration from which savings can easily be made, that this will have no effect on quality and also that that somehow administrators are dispensable is simplistic and thoroughly misguided.

So, universities will find their own ways to make the savings required and will, it is to be hoped, aim to do so in a measured and sensible way. But this kind of advice is not hugely helpful.

New Guardian 2010 UK University League Table

New Guardian 2010 UK University League Table

The Guardian’s latest table is now available and the top 30 overall rankings are:

1    (1)    Oxford
2    (2)    Cambridge
3    (5)    St Andrews
4    (4)    Warwick
5    (3)    London School of Economics
6    (7)    UCL
7    (9)    Edinburgh
8    (6)    Imperial College
9    (13)    Bath
10    (10)    Loughborough
11    (11)    York
12    (8)    SOAS
13    (14)    Exeter
14    (16)    Durham
15    (14)    Leicester
16    (12)    Lancaster
17    (20)    Glasgow
18    (33)    Sussex
19    (18)    Aston
19    (17)    Dundee
21    (26)    City
22    (52)    Heriot-Watt
22    (25)    Southampton
24    (30)    Birmingham
24    (21)    King’s College London
26    (19)    Nottingham
27    (22)    Surrey
28    (27)    Leeds
29    (31)    Bristol
30    (36)    Sheffield

Some slightly surprising results here perhaps – especially in the teens and 20s. Important to remember though that the Guardian does not use RAE results in its tables at all, preferring to focus on teaching related indicators.

What is not shown here is the highest placed post-92 university – Bournemouth makes it to 32nd place in this table. Remarkable.