financial crisis
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Online pivot – the future
via GIPHY After having done past and present posts, the real surprise now is that I am doing one on the future of HE. As I pointed out in the last post, one of the real defining characteristics of the current situation is that no-one knows what will happen. So it would be foolish to have a stab at predicting the future, especially when some people are so good at being so spectacularly bad at it. According to Elon Musk human language will be obsolete in 5 years time, so I can’t compete with that level of stupid. The biggest impact on higher ed is likely to be financial. The…
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Working harder for less
I realise this blog has been a bit whingy of late. This is my last whingy post, after this, sunshine and unicorns, I promise. I was chatting with (okay, whinging to) a colleague the other day, bemoaning the fact that we all seem to be working much harder, for less impact in higher education. I now regularly work during evenings, weekends and holidays. I don’t recall doing that so often since the days when I was creating T171, our big elearning course, in 1999. Then I was doing that whole “get up at 3am to fix problems” thing, but it was a big deal, it led to the OU becoming…
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The duty of care
(don’t worry, the elbow patches won’t be retired anytime soon) Some of you may have seen a recent article about the drop in part-time student numbers and the OU. First of all, some perspective, it’s not quite the end of the OU as some have interpreted it – they anticipated a drop following the introduction of fees and planned for it. But the overall decline in part-time numbers has been bigger and longer than expected, so it is beginning to bite now. The OU will be okay as an institution, but it means there are people missing out on education who would really benefit from it, and that’s what makes…
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Pity the austerity natives
Mike Caulfield has a post on how automation of middle-class jobs, increases competition for poory paid job, which removes the incentive to innovate in technology for those jobs. It made me think how many postgrads going into an academic career now don't really expect it to be well paid, or secure. They approach higher education career with a very different mindset than I did. When I came into academia it was with the hope of getting the "cushiest job on the planet". Professors used to be part of the prosperous middle class, now they hover just above the precariat. This chimed with another thought I'd had which was that for my…
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How to dismantle a sector, stage 2.
So last week, London Met university had their licence to act as a sponsor for overseas students revoked, so it can't teach its existing 2,600 non-EU students, or get new ones. This is unprecedented, and as well as being obviously distressing for those students, will send a loud message around the world about the UK's openness to overseas students. I think there are three interpretations as to why it occurred: LMUea culpa – it's all LMU's fault, they've been playing fast and loose with the immigration system and have been caught out. I'm sure there will be evidence of wrongdoing, indeed I would suggest the Government has been waiting for…
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How to dismantle a sector
I'm not an overtly political animal, unlike many of my colleagues, so maybe this post is misguided or misinformed, but increasingly working in Higher Ed in the UK feels like working in a beleagured sector. Many people will feel like this in the current crisis, so higher ed is no different in that respect, but it now feels like it is not only suffering the same fate as all sectors, but is actually the victim of an ongoing campaign. I sit in many meetings with colleagues, in this university and across the sector, where we end up shaking our heads and laughing with a mixture of amazement and hysteria at…
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Random debt relief
I my last post I pointed to some research which suggested that random selection of a proportion (not all) of politicians led to greater efficiency, and that a similar model might be useful in the allocation of research funds. I'm not an economist, so I expect to be mocked for the next proposal, but here goes anyway. A similar approach might be a more effective means out of the financial crisis than straightforward austerity. This is based on two assumptions: Individual debt relief is more effective at generating growth than bank bailouts – the reasoning here is that banks don't actually distribute the money very far. Individuals will spend more…
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Ed tech & the new academic reality
In my last post I tried to set out some new(ish) realities for academics in the UK. In this post I want to think about what these might mean for educational technology. I am not going to discuss the broader implications for higher education and research as a whole, as there has been lots written about that. Again, I am going to attempt a neutral tone, my aim in this post is not to bemoan the state of affairs (I do that enough in other posts), but to think through what it means to operate in this context. So in terms of ed tech, here are some thoughts: Less time…
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The new academic context
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/nualabugeye/2636448990/> My starting point for this post is that the financial crisis and changes in funding are going to radically alter the higher education environment within the UK. In this post I want to set out the context within which academics will have to work from now on. There are two things to point out: the current climate may see these changes become a reality, but they are also the culmination of a number of trends that have been occurring over the past twenty years or so; I want to set out the new context in an objective manner, and to avoid ascribing value to these changes. This is the…
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Higher Ed – room for disruption?
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/annetta/1954945479/ by Annetta) (Another excerpt from my Digital Scholarship book): In other posts I have looked at some of the impacts new technology has had in other industries and what we might learn from this in higher ed. While the lessons these sectors offer are instructive, it also provides a basis for considering in what ways higher education differs, and thus may not be subject to the same influences. The major difference is that higher education is not purely a content industry. I argued in this talk that HE produces a considerable amount of content, which could be distributed and shared digitally, but its revenue is not predicated on selling this content, unlike music…
