When economists speak about education and human capital, they usually mean formal education. It is provided in schools and universities by formally qualified teachers. These are imparting knowledge that is laid down in curricula, and the result of the learning process is testified by certificates and diplomas conferred to those students who passed exams. Hence economists usually measure the availability of human capital in a society by the average number of years citizens attended schools and universities. Yet is formal education the only source of human sophistication and intellectuality?
Nowadays, it is widely accepted among educational scientists that there exist crucial skills which are either not at all or only insufficiently featured in formal education systems.
Presenting information in a clear and concise manner, for example, is a central skill that is taught at schools and universities only sporadically. In a two-year master’s program like ISET’s, there are only two obligatory presentations a student must give: a literature critique in the first year and the master’s thesis in the second year have to be presented in front of audiences. These presentations are graded but enter the overall diploma grade only marginally. Despite the little weight attached to this skill in most formal education programs, the ability to present information clearly and to the point has enormous significance in most intellectual jobs.
Argumentation and discussion skills provide another example. These skills are central for every job where decisions have to be made in teams, i.e. the majority of today’s qualified jobs. How somebody performs in discussions, how well somebody can make their points, how effectively somebody gets a message across – these skills can be of paramount importance for progressing in one’s career. (Most directly, this is relevant when one needs to convince a boss that a promotion or a pay rise is called for.) Nevertheless, discussion skills are typically underrepresented in the learning curricula of formal education institutions, and students all over the world (also at ISET) organize extracurricular debating clubs in order to compensate for this deficiency.
Like with presentation skills, the reason why argumentation is not comprehensively covered in formal curricula is arguably because they are difficult to grade. How creative and how resourceful somebody makes their points in a discussion will to some extent be a subjective judgment. With classical exam problems, testing for bare knowledge or demanding the student to make calculations, this problem does not exist.
THINGS ONE CANNOT LEARN AT SCHOOL
During this summer, a friend of one of the authors enthusiastically traveled to her village, Inchkhuri in the Martvili region, for actively spreading non-formal knowledge there. Her main goal was to “cultivate the community” of the village and foster creative and independent thinking of the villagers. To this end she arranged movie evenings that featured philosophical and intellectual films, and she invited her neighbors to coffee meetings for reading interesting media articles together. Both kinds of events were followed by discussions, encouraging everybody to freely express their opinions about the movies they watched or the articles they read. In these discussions, the villagers, old and young people alike, spoke about various topics, such as: principles of law, norms that are correct or incorrect, importance of education, family and social environment, and people who were a source of inspiration for them and their thinking. People in a rural region, perhaps somewhat undersupplied with intellectual inputs that stimulate their intellectual capacities, discussed fundamental philosophical issues and were inspired by questions from the social sciences, politics, and economics.
INFORMAL EDUCATION
Educational scientists distinguish non-formal education from informal education. While non-formal education comprises everything that is not covered by formal degrees, certificates, and diplomas, the concept of informal education refers to learning that happens unintentional and often subconscious. According to Tony Jeffs and Mark K. Smith: “Informal education is a spontaneous process of helping people to learn” (Informal Education: Conversation, Democracy and Learning, Educational Heretics Press, 2005).
Researchers argue about the role of informal education. According to some, informal learning is the most important form of education. Informal knowledge is accumulated anytime and anywhere, when talking with friends, colleagues, and parents, and when overcoming challenges and gaining experience in dealing with certain problems. Even though many do not realize it, we are all attending the “University of Life” each and every day.
Communication plays a central role in the theory of informal education. As Zeldin writes: “Conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world” (Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life, Harvill Press, 1999). For example, talking with colleagues about computers and how to solve problems associated with them may most effectively improve one’s computer skills, even though no certificate or diploma is awarded for these conversations, and one may not even have recognized that one has learned something important. Through conversation one does not only acquire pure knowledge, but one also learns to criticize ideas, to argue on different topics, and to agree with each other at some point. One gets exposed to other people’s viewpoints and shares one’s own ideas. According to the theory of informal education, conversation increases knowledge, deepens thinking, and can even change the fundamental convictions of people.
As informal and non-formal education may have such huge power and significance, educational institutions all over the world are engaging in experiments how to support the acquisition of such knowledge. The increased emphasis on communication skills, encompassing presenting and debating, is largely owed to this development. Without any doubt, also in the Georgian educational institutions a lot of things could be done in this respect.
Comments
In my view, the centuries old model of formal university education -- with classroom instruction as its centerpiece -- is simply defunct. Of courses, inertia will prevent the system from transforming itself very quickly, but a radical change is inevitable, also because it is in the interest of global market leaders and millions of students around the world. Online platforms branded by the likes of Harvard and MIT can allow for much more effective learning than the classical model of classroom instruction – you can learn wherever and whenever you find it convenient; you can stop and do some reading/practice exercises before you move to the next subject; very importantly, it only takes ONE – truly the best one – MIT/Harvard professor to teach the whole world. Of course, it is important for the students to interact with and learn from their peers, but this can also be achieved in innovative and more efficient and effective ways. Finally, the problem of examinations and certification can also be resolved via new technology and/or international proctoring agencies).
In the meantime, many students would benefit far more from attending the University of Life - taking jobs and learning professional skills by doing.
In online education, in particular in the MOOCs with thousands of students, there is essentially no interaction possible between the teacher and the students. Taking a MOOC is like reading a book: the information solely goes from the teacher to the students, not vice versa.
In the past, I was quite afraid that the job of a university lecturer would become obsolete, but since I realized that learning gets more effective through information flows in both directions, I am not so concerned anymore. I do not see how MOOCs can make up for a classroom discussion. This is, by the way, a good reason to make our classes more discursive, because here we have a competitive advantage to MOOCs.
I agree with Florian Biermann. MOOCs leaves no space for only “bad lecturers.” In “bad lecturers” I mean those who enters in the class and for them it does not matter whether they stand and read the lecture in front of an audience or just in front of a mirror. Also, sometimes lecturers try to attract students on lecture by not giving materials after class, or by giving grades to attendance (there are different ways of doing that. For instance, to hold quizzes without knowing the exact day of quiz). These lecturers are just cheating on students when they make themselves useful artificially. Technology will make them useless for sure. “Good lecturer” according to my definition builds the lecture on the questions and answers from the audience. Existing technologies (currently known for me) cannot substitute this.
I think we are debating apples and oranges. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) as such are a nice complement to other methods of instruction, but they cannot substitute for the traditional brick and mortar university. The cannot do it for two reasons:
First, they do not perform the "certification" function which is an essential feature of formal education. University diplomas were invented as a means of signaling quality and filtering job applicants. For some occupations, such as medicine, accounting and law, additional filtering is provided by national guilds, but for most professions, there is no substitute for diplomas.
Second, they do not provide for teacher-student and student-student interactions (thus failing to take advantage of peer effects in education).
What I had in mind is something like the program currently being piloted by Georgia Technical U in the US, one of the global leaders in engineering education. According to its self-description "The instruction will be via Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC), which will be open to anyone at no charge, but will also be available as for-credit courses leading to an Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS). The total cost of instruction fees and tuition for those taking the M.S. route is expected to be less than US$7,000." (as opposed to $60,000 for the on-campus program). For more see, e.g. http://www.gizmag.com/georgia-tech--graduate-computer-science-degree-mooc/28763/
What Georgia Tech is trying to do is combine MOOC with exams (to perform the certification function), real time interaction and additional guidance for the students. For this reason, at least initially, the number of students will be limited to several hundreds.
Now, this limited interaction is of course a nice addition to the standard MOOC. However, as perceived, it will not be able to achieve significant peer effects and teacher-student interaction. One idea Georgia Tech may want to experiment with in the future is to recruit CLUSTERS of off-site students in large metropolitan areas (in and outside the US) that would allow for local face-to-face interactions between fellow students from the same city/region and among them and junior instructors (perhaps themselves senior students) who would perform the role of tutors. I can imagine seminars and discussions groups being organized that way in Beijing and Shanghai, Moscow and St. Petersburg, New Delhi and Bangalor, Cairo, Tehran and Tel Aviv.
This will certainly make Georgia Tech Master of Science a bit more expensive to deliver. However, the extra cost might be more than compensated for through the larger scale of operation and quality of the learning environment.
Come on, we are in the 3rd millennium!
All of the courses at coursera.org come with final exams and preliminary quizzes. These tests have always the multiple choice format, an important weakness compared to traditional instruction. Coursera experiments with peer-reviewed grading (e.g. other students grade your exam) -- Tanja took such a course and had to grade other students' exams, but to my mind this system does not work well. For some courses and for a fee, Coursera offers a certificate upon successful pass of the final exam.
To say it again, the crucial point that cannot be provided online is interaction. What systems like Coursera or edX.org have come up with so far for stimulating interaction are discussion forums. Yet to my mind, a discussion forum does not even come close to an interactive lesson in the classroom. Also the attempts to connect students with one another through discussion forums falls short of learning groups you can have at real universities.
In that sense I agree with you Eric. To extent what Florian already mentioned, MOOCs are like books, but I would say "improved books," because all the textbooks are encyclopedia-type and frequently it becomes difficult for a student to identify what is really important in it. I think verbal communication is much more productive for expressing ideas and that's where 21st century technologies really help the education system to be more effective.
I think education system really needs a major reform. We are using the system which was developed quite a time ago and it doesn't provide all the skills needed these days. As the demand for skills changed in the world so should change the education system too.
I find this article very interesting and related to this post. It's about a different teaching method, which helps better reveal the skills of pupil and is more efficient:
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/