Advancements in Technology and the Impact on Higher Education

Advancements in Technology and the Impact on Higher Education

This is an essay on changes in higher education. I tend to read a lot of non-fiction futurist literature and discuss trends with my friends. Originally posted to FoRK. Thanks to Janie Wilkins for inspiring me to write this down. Material added and reformatted for posting here.

Access to information through advanced technology

How is the ever-increasing access to information going to change education? Increased use of calculators and access to information has affected design of exams. "Open-book" exams seem to be more frequent. My friends in grad school are doing take-home exams. These must be written differently than ordinary exams, because students have the aid of textbooks and computers. I think this reflects a realization in academia that information is useless by itself and no engineer becomes successful merely by memorizing all the physics equations they might need. No engineer ever needs to dredge equations or even techniques up from memory; engineers now need to know where to find information and how to apply it. So the exams should start to test understanding more than memorization, which is understandably much more difficult and many professors are loth to do the work required to set exams up that way.

Assignments and projects (which measure achievement, rather than knowledge) seem to matter much more than in the past. Some courses at UWaterloo were entirely project-based, and some spanned more than one semester. Students were required to work in groups, because a successful engineer needs to be able to find information, apply it, and communicate it to co-workers. We also got a surprising amount of marks from presentations, which led some of my classmates to design glitzy multimedia presentations that I have not seen equalled since I left school. All of this seems to be a big change from the past, and this trend could well continue.

Caveat: I don't know if there is really an increasing number of open-book and take-home exams, and a greater number of marks assigned to projects and presentations. Some of this is speculation, based on personal experience and common assumptions shared by my classmates.

Access to last year's information

Some courses are now run on the web, with student assignements or journals or essays posted to the web. This allows students to build on each others' understanding of the topic. It also forces the professor to be constantly innovating. Professors used to get away with recycling old exams: now at UWaterloo they can't, because student organizations keep copies of old exams to use when studying for exams. In the future, professors won't even be able to get away with recycling old assignments, because students will have access to the experience of past years' students.

Smart professors will take advantage of this by designing courses that build up year by year (each class building on the accomplishments of the last class), or take on new challenges year after year. I've seen this in the UWaterloo project courses already.

Wearable computing

Access to information could increase even more if wearable computing takes off. There's a grad student (at MIT?) who came to UWashington recently & gave a presentation to some friends of mine, which they in turn reported to me. This grad student is doing his thesis in wearable computing, and walks around all the time with a projector & special glasses which can show a screen in front of the "real world". This is connected to a computer which he wears in a pouch, I think. The input device can be held in one hand and does chording. With cellular modem technology, he can connect to the internet at any time, and does. In the presentation, he had two screens showing to the audience: one with slides, and one hooked up to his computer which showed his notes and how he was going through them and even adding to them during the presentation, so that the audience could see how this wearable computer was helping him at that moment. He recently obtained permission to do his PhD examinations with the computer! He can look up papers & his own notes during the oral. Will wearable computing take off? And, if wearable computing really does take off, will wearable computers be just as accepted in exam situations as calculators are today? I think the answer to both is probably yes. After all, today's programmable calculators can already store plenty of equations and even notes, and these calculators were allowed in most of the exams I took.

High-Tech firms and higher education

This section is more about high-tech firms affecting education than advanced technology, but I think it's an important factor.

Applicability of education to advanced technology fields

UWaterloo (my school) was a pioneer in the area of cooperative education. I spent 8 terms at school doing courses, but I also spent 6 terms in jobs in industry (a term is 4 months). This meant a total of 5 years non-stop to get my degree, but it was worth it: there was a positive feedback loop between learning stuff, applying it, and going back to learn new stuff. I graduated with two full years work experience. Students' work experiences also fed back into courses: students were not afraid of telling professors "This is stupid. Nobody uses Pascal in the real world. Teach first year students how to use C++, right away." What this showed me is that high-tech companies which are the biggest employeers of coop students are affecting education by sending back students with real experience to draw on when choosing courses and evaluating courses. This affect could tend to make much of higher-education more practical, less theoretic (not necessarily a good thing).

Economics of education -- supply & demand of employees in high-tech fields

How is the low supply of high-tech workers affecting education? It is getting harder and harder to find good people to employ. American politicians talk of restricting the number of work visas granted in technical areas so that Americans must be employed, while computer businesses are aghast at this idea. As a Canadian with a TN visa, I can vouch: I am no cheaper than an American employee, in fact I cause my employer to take on additional expense to go through the visa & green card processes. The reason why I am employed in the US, therefore, is not because I am cheaper than an American employee, but because there aren't enough qualified Americans.

Meanwhile, in Canada politicians are deploring the other side of the coin: the "brain drain" which sucks educated Canadians into the US means that there are even fewer qualified Canadian employees. I suspect this is made up for in part by a more open immigration system. Regardless, there is a clear trend: not enough qualified candidates for any position in the computer industry. My fiance cites a study that says that the number of enrollments in CS in '96 in the US was 50% of the number of enrollments in CS in '86. Not only is the supply of CS grads not meeting the demand, the supply is less and less close to meeting the demand, and the supply is even decreasing in real terms.

(As an aside: the decrease in # of CS grads is happening at the same time as increased private funding of CS departments. Are they related? Correlated? Why are CS grad #'s declining anyway?)

What is going to happen as a result of this? Are more employees going to come from foreign countries? Less? What are high-tech firms doing, and going to do, to encourage more CS grads?

How high-tech industries help out

High-tech firms can provide funding, directly and indirectly, for education. In Canada, the government has reduced funding for schools bit by bit, so that over the 5 years I was in university, tuition doubled, and has grown more since. Also gov't slashed the amount of money going into scholarships, and has more recently slashed its own contribution to student loans. Gov't has been asking banks to step in and fill the void of student loans, but banks are understandably averse and this has not been working well. Grad studies are suffering as well. I was among the top students in my class, but could not get gov't funding for my grad studies.

To some extent, private enterprise is stepping in to fill the void. I was able to support myself during university because of the coop program and my internships at BNR and Microsoft. All CS, math & eng'g students at UWaterloo were in the same program, and companies are happy to hire interns when they can't find enough qualified grads. Arts & science also participate in coop, but find it harder to find jobs and make less money. Many of the jobs they do find are in high-tech (e.g. an English student writing software handbooks). High-tech industry indirectly pays the tuition of many students. Also, some scholarships are from high-tech industry.

More private enterprise in schools: My dad, who is a professor and dep't head of geological eng'g at UWaterloo, relies entirely on industry to fund his research group, pay salaries of his research assistants, fund grad student salaries. His group is much more focussed than most on the problems that industry needs to solve. It seems that a lot more areas could get more industry funding and may have to if the gov't trends in Canada continue. Again, most of this funding is from high-tech industries who realize they need even more tech in order to compete.

High-tech companies are doing education directly: at MS we rely on university to teach students theoretical concepts such as recursion and finding the order of an algorithm, but we have to teach new hires all sorts of specific technology. There are all sorts of programs for getting a master's degree in business funded by your employer while you continue work.

How will this trend continue? I can certainly envision private enterprise taking an even greater role in education, expanding partnerships with schools. Will private enterprise go so far as to run schools and offer diplomas? Will companies ever sponsor students in the same way the military does -- paying for a student's education entirely in return for 5 years employment? Will coop programs expand into many more schools?

Why the privatization of schools might not happen

I don't believe that private enterprise will take over all of higher education. What interest does private enterprise have in giving philosophy courses, or pure math? Yet there are still students who will pay to take those courses. And, as long as pure math departments are run by ordinary universities, then it makes sense to also have applied math, and probably also engineering and CS run by the same ordinary universities. Also, a company can't "own" a student just by giving them an education (like the US military does) -- a student can go work anywhere when they graduate.

So I don't see the trend (of higher education being more tied to private industry) continuing unchecked; rather I think there will come some balance point, or possibly some backlash if people realize that the privatization is not solving all the problems of higher education.

Continuing contributions of high-tech industry

What I do see is that high-tech industry will continue to feed into higher education in these ways: Some verification of the trends I've claimed needs to be done.

Impact of feasible distance learning

The advanced technology which will be used to make distance learning feasible has many far-reaching impacts which haven't entirely been thought out, as far as I've seen. Change will come gradually and will be resisted by many in academia. Rough outline of the impacts before I delve into detail:

Greater Choice

Students will have vastly greater choice to take the courses which interest them. Courses like Conflict Analysis , which I took in my last year, sometimes get cancelled if only a half-dozen students sign up. When students from many universities can get together "virtually" to take a course, it gives students much more choice.

It seems that this might result in increasing specialization of students -- students can take a dozen courses which explore one small area ever deeper, instead of being forced through restrictions on availability to take 2 courses in that small area, and choose other areas for the other ten courses.

Scheduling will change. If a student is taking 5 courses from 3 different institutions, 2 of them virtually and 3 of them live, how can these institutions ever avoid conflicts? Instead, students will interact more asynchronously with professors and other students. Set hours for courses will decline.

This trend combines with the trend for students in high-tech fields to go out and find summer jobs or intern jobs, because it gives students more power. What will students do with this power and choice? Some of them will certainly take a highly targetted set of courses meant to garner them the highest possible wage, focusing on buzzword technologies and making choices like "C++" rather than Lisp or ML. The question is will it work? Will high-tech firms employ buzzword-graduates or well-rounded graduates? If high-tech firms employ buzzword-graduates, then universities will increasingly become places of training for work, rather than higher-learning. That would be a disappointment. However, the evidence I've seen suggests this will not entirely be the case: I prefer to hire CS grads rather than community-college "computer systems" or "computer programming" grads. That probably means there is a balance between specific skills (how to write a program in C++) and abstract understanding (what is the nature of a programming language) which makes up a good employable candidate.

What is the meaning of a degree? If I take 1/3 of my courses live at Waterloo, 1/3 virtually at some other university, 1/3 at yet another, which university gives me a degree? How do schools vouch for each others' courses? How do you stop a student from getting 2 credits for 2 courses which are basically the same? I'd suggest looking into how schools do independent studies programs (such as the one at Waterloo ) to see how schools currently deal with this. I would guess that students would still enroll in one school and get a degree from that school. In the process of getting the degree, students will take courses offered by other schools which are approved by the school they're enrolled in.

Are students going to be able to deal with choice? About its independent studies program, Waterloo says "this program works best for self-motivated students with an idea of what they'd like to pursure intellectually. This very open structure can be daunting to those who are not used to it. " I think in general universities are going to become more and more like that. Students who can't make those decisions on their own will take a recommended "menu" of courses much like many degrees today.

Will there be a backlash to this trend of increased choice for students, due to some students not being able to handle it? Probably not. By university age, students are expected to be able to run their own lives. Students will tend to select universities that offer choice. When I hire students, I look for an advanced degree not to see if they are likely to know information necessary for their job (they won't) but whether they are capable of the learning, discipline, organization, stability, determination and other skills necessary to get an advanced degree.

Greater impact from great people

Another result of feasible distance learning is that when somebody famous like Douglas Hofstadter (okay, relatively famous) gives a course, there will be thousands of applications. How will this be dealt with?

What won't change in higher education

For a long time, we will still continue to: Many more of these things will be online, but that won't change their fundamental nature for a long time.

Related trends in education

We'll see more and more education in pseudoscience.

Chiropractic colleges and universities which teach acupuncture, homeopathy and naturopathy (like local Bastyr university) are gaining credibility. I see no end to that, because many stressed out and sick people seem to need human touch and faith to heal themselves from psychosomatic diseases, stress-related illnesses, and even illnesses aggravated by stress/unhappiness. Since mainstream medicine doesn't offer therapy, touch or faith, alternative medicine will continue to gain ground.

The increased availability of distance learning will help alternative medicine schools by giving those schools increased profits and a wider base of potential students (except chiropracty which probably needs to be taught in person, but I'm not sure :). It is precisely the alternative, pseudoscience schools which will likely take advantage of new technology first, because they are less bound by tradition, less protective of a traditional "quality" in-classroom education, have less traditional funding (alumni donations) and also seem to have a more business/competitive approach to schooling.

More and more older people will be getting degrees.

I'd love to get an MBA, but can't right now because I couldn't handle being away from work to take courses, and I couldn't handle having my evenings or weekends constantly eaten up by regularly scheduled courses. However, I and many others will be able to take courses using their computers, at home, with flexible hours. We can see the professors lecture at our leisure, email questions on the material, and take exams on dates which we schedule. This ties in with people realizing that lifelong learning is necessary, for many reasons, foremost the lack of life-long careers. Also "old people" are acting younger and younger. This will increase the number of active students and provide greater revenue to educational institutions.

Distance education will be used by masses of hobbyists.

I'm a quilter. Thousands and thousands of quilters tune in weekly for saturday morning quilting TV shows. They buy the tapes of the shows, at $19.95 for two half-hour episodes. They travel to far places at great expense to take quilting classes from the famous quilters (well, famous to us) they most admire. How is distance education going to change this? Hobbyists are going to be quite willing to pay a medium fee (I'm guessing on the order of $300) to take a virtual class in their hobby from a well-known practitioner.

Quilters, and many other obsessed hobbyists, are also rather well-connected. They use the internet to join hobby-topic mailing lists, gather in chat rooms, put up pictures of their works on their web sites, run online contests, put up instructions and patterns, sell material & patterns. They love being well-connected, because many of them don't know any local hobbyists with the same obsession: it's much easier to find a community online than in real-life if you're doing something "odd" like quilting. Many of them probably already have computers capable of being clients for distance education.

I'm looking forward to hearing if others can verify or debunk some assumptions or guesses I made, such as the guess that open-book and take-home exams are on the rise.
Lisa Lippert (to home page)