The Future of Higher Education | Kevin Manning | TEDxBaltimore

I've been in higher education for about 50 years almost 50 years and last one of our students how old he thought I was and he said eighty years old and I thought wow I wonder how many 80 year olds or running universities I don't think there are many I'm going to tell you two stories I probably shouldn't be telling you this but I have an interesting beginning in education I'm from New York and when I was in kindergarten we were playing musical chairs and the teacher said to us whoever finishes and his succeeded blast would win the game so at one point in musical chairs I got to a seat with this other student and I knocked them off the chair figuring you know I'd kind of win that way so the teacher wouldn't let me play anymore when I got home I told my mom about it and the next day I'm sure they don't have these anymore a truant officer came to the door and I was hiding under the kitchen table and she said oh no he's not going to come back to school anymore so I didn't go to kindergarten which probably explains a lot of my behavior and then in first grade we had moved and we in first grade I decided with a friend of mine Jerry bread that I was going to play hooky the first day of school pretty amazing it's even amazing for me when I think back on it and I got a toothache about in the afternoon and about 2:30 I decided to go back and of course as soon as I got back to the house my mom knew that I didn't go to school and so she was pretty upset about that so the local kids were going to get a little ride in kind of a wagon or something and she wouldn't let me do that so that's kind of my beginning my whole beginning in education but when I was in st. Louis I had this transformational experience in college and I decided at that point that that was really an important thing for me and I decided to commit myself to higher education and that's how why I'm here today so this is a cellphone and this is the future classroom of higher education this cell phone I'm going to explain what I mean by that I didn't realize when until I did the research for this project that there are seven billion people in the world roughly and there are seven billion cell phones it's only taken us 20 years to bring these cellphones together now a lot of this that we're talking about today has to do with developing countries because of course everything that we need in higher education is here in our country but the fact of the matter is that a very small percentage of the population of the world is educated even in the United States they're only about 25% of the population maybe a little bit more who have a four-year or more degree so there's a lot of work to do and there are a lot of people to educate Clayton Christensen who was a professor of Business at at Harvard talks about the fact that disruptive innovation is a key to how organizations change and if you look at the steel industry or the newspaper industry you'll know about that and he wrote a book a couple of years ago called the innovative University where he says that the internet will be the disrupter for higher education now if you think about this every industry has usually two problems it's got a problem of a resource releasing resources in their organization and then and then a scaling problem so in the auto industry it's it was speed that was a resource problem and the scaling problem was the the way they manufactured the cars in higher education it's the faculty member in the classroom that's the resource problem and the scale is the Internet that's how we get this all this education to a lot of people so what I'm going to talk about today is I'm going to talk about three aspects of higher ed I'm going to begin by talking about Harvard 1636 and then I want to talk about where we were after World War two and this won't be as painful as it sounds and then I'm going to talk about where we are presently and then what what might happen in the future so Harvard 1636 Harvard was founded and I don't know if you realize this or not but the original university was really kind of fashioned after a reality of the agrarian culture so young men mostly ministers would be dropped off there was no transportation at Harvard and in in September at the end of the growing season then they would usually stay there for the 16 weeks because how could they get back and forth would take four or five hours or three or four days so they would stay and study there and then they would be dropped off after the holidays and come back in May because they had to go back to the farm again but a lot of us think that that the way higher ed is structured the United States has something to do with some kind of scientific reality about education but the fact of the matter is it really does it has to do with practical realities and that's how Harvard was kind of formulated and I think it's an important thing to keep in mind because as I get farther down this it will sound like I'm really talking about heresy but there is really no real basis for what we've done except tradition and then the traditions have become regulations and the regulations have become the way we operate in higher education the second phase of what happened in higher ed believe it or not and think about Harvard we're still operating the same way worldwide it's still faculty members who are doing the research and doing the study lecturing in a classroom etc and a lot of what we do is lecture method you know 70% probably what we do is lecture method the second big change though in terms of trying to switch things around came after World War two at World War two really the only change that took place where we had the commuter University the cars were available then people moved from the city to rural areas they were able to get to a university but it wasn't really a very dynamic change I'm sure you would admit because the fact of the matter is the only thing that we did was the student was now able to get closer to Harvard by car and as a consequence they could study in a way that they couldn't study before because even in the 18th century in Cambridge and in Boston across the country there was no train transportation so you had to get there in another way the other thing that happened to her after World War Two was we did have the we did have the correspondence schools came about you probably know the University of Maryland was offering correspondence programs to the veterans and then the Open University in England which is also kind of a distance-learning University began to offer courses in England so that's the second phase and then the third and final phase where we are right now is the internet phase the internet university now the Internet has not been really it has not been taken up in a very significant way although it's expanding but it's a very very important development it's a real paradigm shifter in higher education the reason it is is it's asynchronous in that you don't have to have a faculty member in the classroom to be offering the course it also disaggregates the curriculum it takes all the courses apart you know at the present time in general if you're going to take a program you have to go for the whole 16 weeks usually unless you're in a part-time program but now with distance learning you can actually take a Shakespeare course or you could really take one act of a Shakespeare of course if you wanted to the problem with the online learning and the distance education right now is it's slightly better than a lecture method in that in that you can repeat the lecture but it's pretty much it's a very linear type of experience it really doesn't bring all the full body technology that's available for us today and that brings us to the present time in terms of the cell phone so just consider for a minute we've got 7 million billion people in the world we I don't think I mentioned before but there are only 1 billion cars in the world and only 1 billion TV sets compared to the 7 billion cell phones though think so think about that so a lot of what's happened in the past is the universities would design programs for desktop consumption and of course our students for example at Stephenson are not even using the desktops anymore probably by a ratio of 20 to 1 they're using the cell phones cell phones are cheaper they're easier to you know I have what mine in my pocket they're easier to deal with so I'm going to kind of describe three different types of developments that might take place over the next 25 years the one is a simple one where you just get three universities together let's say we get Penn State Maryland and Iowa together and they're going to offer a state of the art agriculture program and that state of the art agriculture program is going to be offered now in a different way you know most of us will develop a program on our own campuses at a very low cost but this is going to be a little bit of a better program they're going to collaborate on this it's going to make it a better a grigory program everything from a one-hour lecture to a PhD and then they're going to offer that to a variety of organizations including schools so kind of like Microsoft developing software they might offer they might license it to a variety of schools now there are in the world there are about 570 million farms believe it or not so agriculture is one of our largest industries it's not by dollar volume but it's a very significant industry so there's an opportunity there to do something really really important another kind of idea that could come about is the notion of where an organization would develop kind of like an NBC like a television channel and it might be not-for-profit or it might be a for-profit organization where they would bring together and again this was not possible to do before in any significant way but bring together say all of the world's mathematicians to one single location that those mathematicians would work with 250 video type people they would develop again degrees in mathematics from a one-hour lecture to a PhD they would develop the programs they would license them to organizations to governments to colleges to universities so in our case we have a mathematics degree but we don't have a an agriculture degree so it would be much easier for us to kind of have confidence in this agriculture degree that might be offered by these professors than to try to develop it ourselves because of their expertise the same thing would be true for mathematics so what's really going to happen the point that I'm making in this whole thing is what's really going to happen in the world over the next 25 years is the structure of higher education like the newspaper industry like the retail industry is going to change dramatically and I think for the better it doesn't mean you know there are always these concerns about what about engagement well engagements not going to go away actually engagement is not really a big part of traditional higher ed today anyway because the fact of the matter is most of what we do are lectures this was I think the challenge in the news pay for industry for example when you think about the fact that 70% of newspaper is information 30% is commentary so it wasn't 100% commentary and the same is true for higher ed so I think there are many benefits and many outstanding things that can happen and a lot of this is going to happen because of this cell cell phone penetration it wouldn't be a would be able to do this in any other way China for example has leapt over all the technology and they're putting Wi-Fi everywhere in the country the only thing that people are using primarily are things like the cell phone so I want to wrap up and conclude by showing you two final slides and one is a slide that is answering a basic question whoops basic question that you may have especially in developing countries is how the heck are they going to charge those cell phones good question and of course we have we just this is second nature for us this is a solar panel maybe you've seen this you could find this on online and in about an hour and a half that'll charge that cell phone good huh so then every day people are want to follow a course they can charge their cell phone that that setup cost about fifty to fifty dollars but the primary thing I want to leave you with is this this is a photograph and it's really a pretty touching thing and that is this was a show on 60 minutes the future of money some of you may have seen it and this is a very poor part of Kenya and these are two children of a family in Kenya and he used to have to let the kids study by kerosene lamp and because they've kind of created this Bitcoin project in Kenya where you can program money into your cell phone this dad has a cell phone and now instead of using the kerosene lamp for education he's able to put money into a solar panel and now his children are able to study at night you see that light that's there well that's powered probably by a nickel or so for an hour so instead of studying by kerosene lamp they're able to study now using electricity so my hope for all of this in the most positive sense is all of these changes that are going to take place that will be significant and powerful will permit us to help children adults around the world to get the kind of education that we've gotten there our children have gotten and that our grandchildren are going to get in order to make their lives better their family lives better as well as the community thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 75,245

Rating: 4.7375178 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Education reform, Higher education, Internet

Id: XfRoM21qHtE

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2016