Ten years to the future? Chris Yapp

Chris Yapp, Head of Public Sector Innovation at Microsoft asserted that we had not seen 10 years worth of change in higher education in the past 10 years. He supported this assertion by making a virtue of the fact that he had not updated some of his slides in 10 years. Even, in his conclusion, he cited this as "evidence". There may be evidence behind his arguments, but an argument itself is not evidence even if repeated for 10 years.

Chris did make some good points. There are useful parallels to be drawn between the healthcare discourse and the education discourse. There is a parallel between the medical model of healthcare and the instructivist model of education. There is a parallel between learner centricism and patient-centred professionalism. Evidence-based practice is valued - and ignored - equally in both healthcare and education. However his central assertions do not hold up. More importantly, Chris's argument that universities have to behave more like commercial organisations cannot be refuted often enough: certainly no less often than it it is repeated. Chris asserts that higher education practices are stuck ten years behind the time; that this is to a great extent the responsibility of the entrenched, archaic attitudes of teaching professionals; and that higher education must adopt the "nimble" model of corporate mass customisation facilitated by new technologies. There is an overt "or-else" aspect to this argument. The university, as passive object of agentive forces beyond it, has to wake up and smell the coffee or be rendered irrelevant by the inevitable end of history.

No change in 10 years? Like all these arguments, it depends on what you look at. Are we the dinosaurs in chinos and neckties of Microsoft's current advertising campaign? The world in which I work has changed dramatically in ten years. Sure, bureaucratic procedures lag behind innovation (but, corporate governance is hardly cutting edge either). However, students at my university enroll online, pay online and modify their programme online. The only queues in Fresher's week day one are for the SU card to get into the bar. When students sleep - or more often these days work (and how different is that!) - through their lectures they can pick up the reading lists, assignments, notes and discussions in the supported VLE - and also in a myriad of grey areas freely used by innovative staff: wikis, blogs and other social software spaces. They text questions - on and off topic - to their friends in lectures; 10 years ago students didn't have phones. They went to the payphone to ring a hall of residence to get someone to put a note under a door or in a pigeon hole. Ten years ago paper was yesterday's technology. Now, Powerpoint is yesterday's technology. Courses are developed collaboratively, facilitated by appropriate technology: sometimes Word documents on a shared drive; increasingly using content management systems. Yes my university is a laggard in some forms of collaborative provision. We could do better with Foundation Degrees and local access programmes, but have been working with global partnerships for years. Yes, the early high modern plant is aging, access is not as ubiquitous as at some other universities but almost every student, whether in or out of halls of residence has their own computer and broadband access wherever they live. We are not as good as some at addressing our own pockets of deprivation but, for the few that don't, there are cheap rental and purchase schemes, 15 computer suites are open 24/7.We use voice and video over IP to monitor trainee teachers on placement. Not all change is for the better. I have to filter a hundred spam e-mails a day. The myriad of discussion forums and maillists - each one promising a genuine community of practice - have become a cacaphonic babble but I can, if I choose, mine these for key words and only have to pay attention to those that pop into my "smart" inbox. Where is this ten years of change that we have not had?

So, say we have not changed. Is it the fault of the entrenched attitudes and institutions of the academic profession? For every teacher I can cite, who is worried about putting his materials on line because, " then they will not come to my lectures...", I can cite two more (women) who are offering learners fully flexible programmes with multiple pathways towards the achievement of smart course objectives. I can show you databases of exemplary innovative online teaching practice in an institution that embraces blended learning. Across the sector initiatives stimulated by the JISC and BECTA such as the RDN, CETIS, BUFVC, Jorum, TeacherNet, the eScience Centres - and not to mention skunk-work Jabber Servers - code sharing repositories, and collaborations between the leading libraries and Google have all been stimulated by innovative, creative, progressive academic staff, exemplified by the audience and the projects on display at the Lifelong Learning for All Conference. Things are not all rosy in the British academic garden, but with the Dutch, the Americans, the Scandinavians, the South Africans and Brazilians we have some of the most innovative academics in the world providing services that are the envy of many. Characteristic of Britain, perhaps, not to capitalise on innovation, but in visualisation and simulation innovation (by which I mean the global games and animation industry), who leads? Who are these entrenched traditionalists? Are they not worth 3.3% per year? But, that is another debate.

As to the third part of Chris's argument, that universities have to become more like corporations, I can point to retrogressive practices in industry as much as I can point to creativity. Is it a good idea that we should become the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers of the education world? Be more like industry, says Chris, or get eaten by industry. Which industry should we be like? Enron? Not all corporations are buccaneers but there are plenty of examples of conditions in the so-called free-trade zones of developing countries that should be brought to an end forthwith not emulated. As for Chris, we might well ask the physician to heal himself, to attend to the plank in his eye before removing the splinter from mine. If all I have to look forward to by working smarter is working harder so that I don't get swallowed, where is the win-win in that?

Chris appears to promote the values enshrined in the Global Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which demands access to the institutions of the public sector for private sector entities. Education is a field on which the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation is being fought. Will some of the most innovative, creative, progressive minds in British Academia, who have led a revolution in learning over the past ten years queue passively to buy a ten year old argument because an acceptable face of corporatism tells us that it is our fault that we aren't all employed on short term contracts in a corporate university? I am sorry, I don't buy it.

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