Chapter 2

The Changing Environment of Higher Education

Olga Kovbasyuk and Glyn Rimmington

Operating within the system and being the haves obscure the nature of a societal system. Haves gain the most benefits from stability that is perpetuated by their higher education system. Viewed from the perspective of have-nots, it is a system of subjugation. Public higher education (PHE), formerly a place of critical thought, has become an instrument of subjugation in the modern age. PHE has become focused on preparation of a compliant group of have-nots. However, new tools have enabled the have-nots to thwart this effort. Social networking and collaborative software tools provide alternatives to the traditional PHE system. While we cannot predict the exact form of future higher education, it will most likely feature collaborative, experiential, global learning for the development of educators and be somewhat independent of the familiar PHE system.

Traditional Education as Oppression

Educators as authority figures have a significant effect on learners’ beliefs, values, and assumptions. According to general systems theory,¹ intergenerational propagation of beliefs, values, and assumptions constitutes a negative feedback loop that maintains the stability of a system. In the language of critical social theory, the education system preserves the existing grand narrative,² the prevailing power difference or cultural hegemony³ between educators and professors—high power—and students—low power. Those within such a system have neither another frame of reference nor the vocabulary to articulate views contrary to the prevailing discourse.⁴ Paulo Freire⁵ identifies this type of education as a system of oppression. Furthermore, Gaile Cannella⁶ draws attention to the oppressive nature of scientific or modernistic discourse of education in the previous two centuries. In this discourse, the learner needs direction by the older, more experienced teacher. The learner is taught, tested, examined, and categorized. The learner in effect often has no voice and is a subject of the educator or professor’s scientific, modernist narrative. All forms of discourse are hazardous, but none is as hazardous as when it is no longer questioned.⁷ Freire states that “our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system.”⁸ This is the banking model of education,⁹ which entails depositing knowledge into the minds of students. It is at odds with the notion of individuality, identity, and education of the whole person.

Evolution of the Education Ecosystem

The 20th century saw the advent of high-speed, global communication networks. For a while, these amplified the banking model of education in its broadest sense. The individual was bombarded with the grand narrative of an increasingly concentrated control of broadcast media. This perpetuated the banking model throughout lifelong learning, which has led to subjugation of the general population. The result has been mindless, debt-crippling consumerism in some countries and perpetuation of dictatorships with power beyond all comprehension in others. For a while, the Internet was being modeled on traditional electronic media, such as radio and television, until a new generation of Internet-based tools emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. These tools have made revolution possible in education and in broader contexts.

The educational ecosystem of the next generation learner is less constrained by geographic proximity than in the past. The continual evolution and emergence of global communication technologies in the late 20th century provides both opportunities and challenges for education. Specifically, the first decade of the 21st century has seen the emergence of revolutionary social networking sites (SNSs; e.g., Facebook or LinkedIn). These sites can potentially break down both informational and pedagogical oppression by providing dynamism and shared ownership of information, where once there was fixity and control by the webmaster or educator. SNSs allow users to post personal or work information in a profile along with photos, videos, and documents. Different types of communication are available, including blogs, forums, notes, messaging, and chat. Web-based learning management systems (LMS) have evolved to become like SNSs or have been displaced by them. SNSs are a type of cloud computing, in which information is shared on large servers. SNSs are ideal for collaborative learning.

Subordination of affective learning by the scientific and modernist discourse of education and the power relationship between teachers and learners¹⁰ has been an obstacle to educating the whole person.¹¹ Gordon Wells and Guy Claxton¹² draw on Vygotsky’s¹³ Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and in their consideration of future learning make the point that societies and members form and represent each other. “Cultures play a large role in shaping the development of individual minds; and individuals’ thoughts and deeds serve to maintain or to alter the cultural milieu.”¹⁴ CHAT is concerned with developing “the whole person—body, mind and spirit.”¹⁵ “A true and complex understanding of another’s thought becomes possible only when we discover its real, affective-volitional basis.”¹⁶ Declining public support for higher education and greater emphasis on efficiency has moved the focus of education further away from the whole person.

While the current economic downturn and previous downturns have been cited as the primary cause for reduced government appropriations to public universities, these mask the longer-term trend of declining public support for education as reflected in policies developed by elected representatives. Allocations to higher education by federal, state, and local legislatures mirror the choice of voters in a democracy. Globally, funding for public higher education remained flat in 17 democratic countries for the 22 years from 1972 to 1993.¹⁷ Politicians espouse the importance of education, but perpetual funding cutbacks indicate otherwise. In the United States, net tuition revenue per full-time equivalent student enrolled (FTE) rose by over 380% in the 15-year period between 1983 and 2008,¹⁸ while appropriations per FTE rose less than 10% in the same period. In other words, for 15 years as legislatures have allocated less money to higher education and the costs of operating higher education have risen, the difference has been made up by charging increased tuition to the individual learner.

Decline in funding for public universities is a matter of the public perception of return on investment. It is often seen as a private good with little public or social value. This notion has gone unquestioned. Evaluation of public university education has focused on student performance measures, rather than social returns on investment. Simplistic analyses of personal income by public university graduates¹⁹ indicate a private benefit. More sophisticated, longitudinal economic analyses²⁰ for 1970, 1980, and 1990 U.S. census data showed that for every 1% increase in the proportion of university-educated people in a city, the result would be a 0.6–1.2 increase in average earnings, above and beyond the private return to higher education. In other words, when effects of other factors are removed, the presence of higher educated individuals is shown to have a significant social return on investment. For example, since the 1970s one of the authors (Olga Kovbasyuk) publicly funded higher education institutions in a central Siberian city that has had a disproportionately positive effect on the average earnings of subsequent generations from a small Far East Russian city via the establishment of a private foreign language school during the 1990s. The authors, along with Swedish, U.S., Japanese, and Indian colleagues, have enriched learning for students in each country with the aid of videoconferencing technologies. Global society benefits from such learning activities.

Learning Generation Gap

For the purposes of drawing a picture of future learning, it useful to consider the gap in beliefs, attitudes, and values with regard to learning between learner generations of the 20th and 21st centuries. Traditionally, education has been a vertical process with teacher authority figures who prescriptively presented what is to be learned in a linear sequence and then tested on an individual basis with standardized assessments.²¹ Modern, 21st century learning, in contrast, tends to follow a more organic, nonlinear, nonprescriptive set of paths and constructs knowledge collaboratively. Traditional, 20th century educators view such a process as chaotic and not testable. This ignores the plethora of assessment methods for evaluating team performance and individual performance within teams. The reaction of some traditional teachers and administrators has been to ban tools that enable collaborative learning and to label the overall process as cheating. This is despite advantages of collaborative and socially networked learning. There is a conflict of interest between the traditional 20th century educators and their use of copyright-protected textbooks rather than open sources. The pace of change in the 21st century demands a lifelong approach to education rather than diplomas and fixed-length formal teaching. Finally, the 21st century learner has grown up playing computer games with massively multiplayer role-play simulations, which are dismissed as a distraction by the traditional 20th century educator. This type of Internet-worked learning can move the focus of education from being vocational or professional toward development of the whole person. Some Internet comments on global learning include: “I valued the opportunity to ask a real Japanese person about life in Japan,” “Some of my ideas about life in Russia were totally wrong,” and “This videoconference gave me a different point of view about India and its high technology.”²²

Future Educational Systems

The education system up to the end of the 20th century can be viewed as a tool of the dominant class to assure the status quo.²³ Some external environmental factors that are driving change in the education ecosystem include new technologies, questions regarding the value of public higher education, and rapid change. Emerging technological tools (e.g., SNSs) enable collaborative learning and access to multiple sources of information. At the same time, support for public education as we know it has been in decline and its performance has been in question. However, the questions being asked about the value of public education and how to assess it have not been well formulated. Overly simplistic analyses can be misleading and undervalue the societal benefits of education,²⁴ especially education of the whole person. The voices of skeptics and defensive educators are often the loudest, but perhaps we should be listening to the next generation of learners. Given this combination of changing environment and the nature of modern learners, what will future educations look like?

Teaching in the traditional 20th century education system has been oriented toward stability of knowledge, whereas in the turbulent life of the 21st century, knowledge is a moving target. Teaching tends to proceed from foundational knowledge in a linear sequence of lessons that build on previous lessons.

In contrast, 21st century life calls for learning that is more organic and that evolves along with the flux of life.²⁵ The banking model of education is one in which the dominant culture determines the educational environment, which then reproduces the culture; however, when the learner is freed from the shackles of oppressive pedagogy, culture can coevolve with the changing environment.

The ancient Chinese proverb—Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime—assumes an unending supply of fish, which can all be caught using the same method. However, the pace of change in the 21st century is such that innovations, such as videoconferencing on our smart phones or GPS in a wristwatch, which were regarded as science fiction just a decade ago, are now taken for granted by the next generation. Modern learners can view and critically appraise multiple sources of information and derive their own interpretations rather than simply accepting information from a single source. Modern learning is less likely to be a solitary activity. Rather, with collaborative tools, learners can easily discuss conflicting or inconsistent information and a group can determine the most reliable or accurate interpretation. Blogs and other Internet-based videoconferences, many-to-many, social discussions, or learning collectives can facilitate this process. Teaming and distributed learning via communication technology serves as an illustration of future educational learning.

Teaming and Distributed Learning: Case from Russia, the United States, and Sweden

Throughout the past three years, a group of educators (Dr. Alyssa O’Brien, Stanford University, United States, Docent Anders Eriksson, Örebro University, Sweden, and Dr. Olga Kovbasyuk, Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law, Russia) has been attempting to answer a critical educational need: the development and implementation of a curriculum designed to foster “intercultural competences,”²⁶ or the increasingly important skill of approaching others with consideration for and sensitivity toward diverse cultural contexts. The need of such a curriculum emerged from a very practical goal: how to best prepare global graduates for the 21st century.

To make possible cross-cultural connections, in the course of Intercultural Communication, a curriculum focused on innovative use of collaborative digital technologies was developed with colleagues from Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law (KSAEL), Stanford University, and Örebro University. Through pedagogical activities implemented via videoconferencing, professors challenged students to explore multiple perspectives of leadership and educational environments that embody cultural values, such as explicitness vs. implicitness, direct communication vs. indirect communication, formality vs. informality, and so on. The ultimate goal in designing a global learning curriculum and concrete pedagogical activities for facilitating greater cultural sensitivity and rhetorical understanding in students through cross-cultural interactions was to make possible greater political understanding, ethical awareness, and intercultural competences in order to bring about improved relations for emerging global graduates.

Throughout these three years, over 20 videoconferences with Stanford, Örebro, and KSAEL were held on a diverse range of topics, ranging from environmental issues to leadership, from debunking cultural stereotypes to sharing local cultural habits and traditions. For example, the latest thematic connection between Khabarovsk State Academy and Stanford University was held in May 2011 on presidential leadership in the United States and Russia, such as social media and oratory skills (as practiced by Obama and Medvedev, respectively) and international relations (interrelation expressed by Obama and Medvedev). Russian and American students collaborated via social media for two months to prepare and present joint research on these topics. By placing students into three teams that remained constant for all the connections, professors facilitated developing relationships and focused on project-based learning and coreflection.

Blogging involved asking students to form international writing pairs, to pick a topic of interest for sharing and reflection, and then to collaboratively compose a blog post about that cultural artifact. In such a way, students from Örebro, Sweden, and Khabarovsk, Russia, collaborated on cultural assumptions of traditions and habits in their cultures. In addition, they conducted a dynamic exchange of ideas on the collaborative project blog on the topic of management style in Sweden and Russia. Students posted and received feedback from each other, and they made joint presentations on IKEA and its crisis in Russia. The Cross-Cultural Rhetoric blog²⁷ served as a collaborative writing space for virtual discussions, which were impossible by videoconferences due to time zone restrictions. Yet the blog enabled cross-cultural connections that made possible new understandings of specific knowledge, open-mindedness, and both cognitive and affective sensitivity toward others.

The outcomes produced by the qualitative study of the videoconferencing and blogging as new learning modalities have been very encouraging. The attitudes generated in the participating student body by the novel learning and teaching environment and teacher and student roles (teachers as motivators, advisers, helpers, facilitators, resources, participators, collaborators; students as autonomous, independent learners and creators involved in decision-making process) have been extremely positive and, in general, increasingly so as the years of collaborating have consolidated the experience. The holistic learning and teaching to which this new model has led thus seems to be generating high student satisfaction, something that accords with Lidya Kulikova’s²⁸ findings on the importance of dialogue and interactional exchanges. These results are particularly heartening when considering exit letters from participating students taken from the sample of qualitative data, which demonstrate the way in which this new curriculum made possible student competences in communication, or a move from awareness to understanding. The findings can be illustrated by the following:

The major outcome is hardly assessable in a traditional way as “it is pervasive and makes a difference in a personality.”²⁹ According to A. Nagata, “It involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters our way of being in the world.”³⁰ And finally, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer uses the term mindfulness to describe “the continuous creation of implicit self-awareness of more than one perspective in life.”³¹