University Education in the 21st Century
Robert Uzgalis
© Copyright 1996 Robert Uzgalis. All Rights
Reserved.
Years of university teaching has hardened my views about what makes students learn. Perhaps this is just a function of the growning rigidity of age and the closing of my mind. But this rigidity may also be a response to evolutionary changes to the tertiary educational system. Whatever the cause, the changes in education have irritated me deeply, making my views stronger and my voice more strident.
Part of what follows is moral in tone and attitude. Some find this offensive they think that morality belongs to the 19th century much less the 21st century. I have some sympathy with their view, but at the end of the day the hardening of my views and stridency of my voice come from a moral outrage at the large numbers of students who leave the university gaining little from the experience.
This failure to educate in turn comes directly from what I see as a passive attidude on the part of university staff. This can be encapsulated by a statement I have heard many times: I cover the essential material in class, if students don't bother to get it, what can I do? Every institution I have worked at or visited makes it unacceptable to fail large numbers of students, so the lecturer just passes some proportion of students through the system; the institution continually admits a greater number of students, classes get larger, and the quality of education continues to drop.
I spoke in the first paragraph of evolutionary changes in education and in the last paragraph of admitting more and more students, which is one of the symptoms of those changes. The changes are primarily driven by society wide calls for `more social responsibility' and `greater efficiency'. These in turn can be translated into a mandate to educate many ill-prepared students for less money. This is impossible if one keeps the quality of education constant; one can of course turn out more people with degrees.
Since the quality of a university degree is not easily measurable, demonstrating the degradation of the degree is difficult. This makes degrading it easy to do; that the bachelor's degree means less today than it did 10 years ago is undeniable. The effect of this degradation on society and political systems may be difficult to determine in the short term. However, in the long term the success of a democratic society depends on a reasoning, informed electorate. To appreciate my views of education and its current problems a classification of students by motivations and abilities is a good starting place.
First, good students, always learn something, you don't really need to teach them. They are a pleasure to talk to; they catch on quickly to ideas; and they usually have interesting responses (even if they are wrong). As a teacher one must stay ahead of them, push them into new territory, broaden them with new ideas, and give them new goals to enrich their educational experience.
These are the students that suffer when educational resources get allocated to a broader base. Instead of being pushed to assimilate more, they are left to dawdle, they will learn, of course, but certainly not as much. One would like to believe that these are the people that will probably go on to make contributions to the nation, to the culture, and to the progress of the species, so it seems unwise to place them at a disadvantage.
Second, the great middle class of students. Depending on ability and attitude they struggle through seldom knowing what is really going on in a class. They may eventually master some of the material by studying before the exam, but they absorb little material from lectures. They attend class for reasons related to convention, guilt, social needs, and to obtain clues as to what will be on the next exam. This class of students makes it through a class basically by memorizing facts and technical words.
The last group of students are the ones that find learning difficult, or those that for many diverse reasons can't bring themselves to care about the material at all. These students are almost always at the university for the stamp of approval or because they don't know what else to do. These students could probably be `saved' by extensive tutorial work and individual attention. But most universities will find that solution too expensive.
Concentrating on the mass of students (from all three classes of ability) the attitude of many, if not most, of these students is that they are not in university to learn anything, they come because they want a degree, a stamp on the forehead that says they are qualified. (Not qualified to do anything mind you, just the stamp that says they are a B.S. or B.A. graduate.)
Learning something is secondary to getting the degree; most feel that what they learn will be irrelevant to what they do later. I've had more than one student say that university is one big test, if can you get by it then you deserve the degree, otherwise you deserve to flunk.
Note that learning anything is not really a part of this test view of education; it is getting past the exam that is important. Behind this view is the attitude that you learn little of importance at university, certainly nothing that you should take away with you to use later in life.
I reject this attitude, I also acknowledge that much of what is taught in a computer studies curriculum (and much of the rest of the university) is irrelevant to anything that one might want to do later in life, except possibly teach in a university. This adds credence to the student's point of view. Certainly computer studies has not become a professional school where students learn to practice any discipline; it looks and feels much more like history or philosophy where deep thinking about fantasy worlds is the norm. The head of my department once commented that this move toward pure theory was the `maturing of computer science' and that it would surely make computer scientists more acceptable in the academic community.
By-in-large this group of students with bad attitudes can be taught to think and use their mind in reasonable ways. Which, I suppose, reveals in a nutshell what my assumption about the goal of a university education should be. However accomplishing this ambitious goal requires energy and effort to overcome student reluctance to do anything other than sleep and socialize. It also means preventing students from `borrowing' another student's work to satisfy course requirements. The student anything-to-get-by argument is insidious because it assumes anything is OK -- as long as you pass.
Current university education (everywhere in the world -- as far as I can tell) does nothing for the vast majority of students. They leave university physically older, more mature (perhaps), and by-in-large unaffected by the institution. Yet most of the energy and resources in university teaching go to servicing these weaker students.
The measure of an institution is not the good students it produces or the research quality of faculty that inhabit it. For in any institutions the best students, can be educated poorly, and they are still the best output of any institution. Good universities take in a higher proportion of good students; they probably educate them less and still produce high quality output. Average universities take in a good balance of students, and produce good students in proportion to their input. The real measure of an educational institution is the proportion of medium quality input students that rank in the top quality of the output. This is a measure that is never taken; it would prove too embarassing.
Sometime around the time of the Vietnam war or maybe a little earlier when Sputnik started the space race US universities began to be funded on the basis of the number of students that graduated (or some figure that was strongly correlated to this like average daily attendance). For the university this meant that the way to government money was to educate more people. Educating more people is difficult. One can maintain high standards if input standards are kept high. However keep high standards and letting in more people requires much work. Letting in more people and lowering standards is much easier; this just awards more degrees. It is much less difficult than educating the masses. Either way brings in more money; which solution most tertiary institutions have chosen is obvious.
As more and more employers insisted on a bachelor's degree, not just a high school diploma, university study became important for the student as well as the university. Thus the university makes money (both from the student and the state) by babysitting a student for some number of years, usually three or four. This extended childhood helps prevent overcrowing of the job market and thus reduces unemployment.
What should the mass of students be taking away from a tertiary institution (other than the degree). There are I suppose several answers to this question depending on the goal of the institution. But I would propose that competence in some non-trivial field of endeavor is a minimum requirement. The competence must be learned in university, not something brought in from secondary school, because the self-confidence of being able to learn a discipline essentially on one's own is the power that enables a student to tackle the rest of life with confidence.
Most faculty are not really competent in anything except their own academic discipline. The distance of academe from reality is just as broad today as it was in the middle ages. This presents a problem for those that want to learn something in a tertiary institution that will be applicable after a student leaves.
It is important that each student should feel in himself the moral fiber of self-earned success. The tertiary institution must take the responsibility of ensuring that graduates do their own work, and that by enforcing this each student will change internally so that the eventual degree will represent something significant to each student. By not letting people get the degree by cheating (by buying or borrowing) the message of one's self-importance and sticking by one's own beliefs is driven home. This is essential for the moral fiber of the nation and the species. This means that universites must fail or severely discipline those students that fall short of the mark. The message from the university to the student must be abrupt and clear. To succeed tertiary education must be viewed by everyone as a privilege not a right.
When one learns to be a mariner, you must learn to stand eight stories up on the swaying yardarm of a sailing ship without a safety strap and reel in a flapping sail with with the wind trying to push you to your death. You have to do this repeatedly until you gain enough confidence that you can forget about your own safety and just do the job required. The self-assurance and competence a student learns from this experience is not learned in secondary school but it is essential for leadership. This experience makes a dramatic change in the individual. Perhaps every university should own a tall ship for its students.
Competence is not demonstrated by sitting in a classroom listening, nor by successfully sitting an exam; it is demonstrated by doing significant creative intellectual work. Therefore tertiary teaching must move away from lecture toward projects involving student participation. Lecturing is never easy, but it is much easier than dealing with hoards of students individually.
Changing people is much harder than feeding them facts that they have to remember for a couple of months and then regurgitate on an exam. It involves forcing people to conquer their fears, this takes immense emotional energy and confidence on the part of the teacher. Perhaps this is stated to strongly but current tertiary education has strayed to far from these goals as well.
The value of truth is another goal for tertiary education. Truth is of course a difficult concept to define. Having students understand the relationship between a formal model and the real world is of vital importance. Students should learn how formal models can be used to reason about the world and the value of having the formal model match as closely as possible the actions of the real world. Where truth can be viewed as the matching of the world and model; a truth that can never be perfect but it can be approached practically.
The value of this kind of truth is that it teaches the dangers of self-delusion, where one picks bad assumptions and reasons about the real world using them. Laws, actions in business, and human relationships all can fail because this kind of truth is ignored. It is another moral lesson to be learned before embarking on the rest of life.
So the goal of tertiary education should be to show students how to find the ability to learn in themselves, give them the confidence to do it, and provide a basis and some experience reasoning about the world with models.
Computer studies is a non-trivial discipline that students can learn and feel success in their ability to control a computer. Computer studies in recent years has moved heavily away from the teaching about real computers to teaching about abstract computation. This is viewed as `cleaner', that is a more healthy environment in which to teach. This is usually an excuse for teachers who have grown up in a theoretical climate and can't make the machine do anything themselves, that is computer studies teachers tend to be incompetent in practical computing.
Thus often beginning courses have turned to object oriented programming, a programming system based on a mathematical abstractions of data. This concept works for toy programs but doesn't scale up very well and in practice it is order of magnitudes more difficult to program. So even though object oriented abstractions are difficult to implement properly they are taught because the principles are so nice ... never mind the difficulties when one tries to use the ideas in practice.
If the modern object oriented approach is not taken then often a purely formal approach is taken (e.g. logic-programming or some other abstract approach). What is forgotten in all this is that students have nothing to generalize from. Remember the top of the class can take anything you throw at them. That is the nature of the top of the class. The vast middle ground need something concrete they can understand and hang on to.
For students that will become computer technicians, programmers, and designers it is important that they understand the breadth of the machine down to the bits that make it work. I feel the best place to start them is with the basic binary computer. Let the beginning student understand how general computation takes place on real machines. This may need to be simplified for didactic reasons but at least give them a concrete view of machines. Then generalize the way of controlling the machine, build data structures, show how performance at this low level can be measured, and so on. Gradually build up showing the problems of a single linear addressing system and the difficulties it poses when one wants to talk about multiple things that can grow finitely, but arbitrarily. Look at various solutions. Maybe do all this basic work in assembler language to keep the machine in view.
Then in the next term generalize and abstract the way one expresses programs, introduce a high level language like C, Fortran, or Pascal. This should progress as the student learns to proficiently use each level of abstraction. Because of the build up of abstractions, false hopes or fantasies about what the computing machine can and can not do are not created. At the same time theory appropriate to the level of abstraction should be taught to give strong backing to reasoning about programs at that level of abstraction.
Because of society pressures, one must accept that a large mass of students will go to a tertiary institution. As far as I can see there are two approaches to educating this mass of students. I have mentioned one which is to babysit students for some years, making them pay money and listen to boring lectures in exchange for a degree, call this the lower standards approach.
So the lower standards solution is equivalent to continue as we are; that is ignore the needs of the vast middle ability class, except lower standards sufficiently so that most pass. With this approach they come and leave without much change in their abilities, knowledge, or self-confidence. Good students suffer with this approach because of the degradation of standards and the lack of personal contact to foster development.
One approach formalizes this education standard and provides courses and a degree toward which these middle ability students can migrate. In computer studies this is commonly called Information Systems, or some such name. Call this the IS solution.
Proponents of IS say that it is a reaction to a too theoretical computer science curriculum. But in reality it less academically challenging, and tends to be less demanding on the practical aspects (for example, few IS programs really require students to be able to program).
Most IS program teach generalities about computers and require taking some accounting and business courses. They never require these students to master anything technical. They will take little with them except a few new buzz words and a vague general notion about computers and business.
Many universities have taken some variation of this IS approach. Leaving unpopular technical computer studies in computer engineering and computer theory. Monash University in Melbourne, is an example of this approach. Among many others that try this populist approach is the University of London External Computer Science program which has taken the process a step further and is now selling this approach and calling it a BSc degree in Computer Science.
Students don't learn anything until they attempt to use material. No matter how you lecture them about what to do when they stand up on the yardarm of a ship it is not like being there and doing it. This is as true in history and English as it is in computer studies. Using this principle one can build a curriculum based on projects and expository material that motivates the projects. Thus, each student must complete all the projects to make it through his education. No grades for half-completed projects; no going on until the project is completed. Call this Active Education, or AE, to distinguish it from the passive sitting in class listening to lecture approach, or PE.
To make active education succeed the teacher must put energy and effort into making each average student do the projects which require him to learn. This means the student must not be allowed to `borrow' or `buy' solutions to the projects. There are at least two ways to accomplish this. First, direct observation and close personal contact in tutorials force a student to do work, but this tends to be so expensive that most universities reject it. However, with care and thought it can make it work.
Alternatively one can develop sufficient individual projects so that it is difficult for a student to find a solution to `borrow'. The trick to doing this is to find independent axes across the problem domain and build the each intersection as a separate problem. If one creates 5 × 3 × 2 alternatives, then there are 60 individual problems to assign. Even in a class of 120 this only leaves two student having the same assignment.
A third and much inferior approach is to try to catch borrowing by writing a program to check to see if two programs (or essays) are copies of one another. Then disciplinary action is taken against the students involved. This has the potential to punish a good student who is compassionate with another poorer student. It also encourages students to discover ways around the automatic checking and directs student energy toward the wrong goals, and teaching the wrong ethics.
Forcing students to do lots of homework and projects is not likely to prove popular with students and it will require determination on the part of the teacher. It may not make the teacher popular either, depending on the general situation at the university. But in terms of education, moving up the abstraction latter doing several projects at each level forcing the student to master that level, will work to make the mass of students assimilate and make the material a part of them.
The concept of student teacher evaluations is bogus. Students can not evaluate teachers, because they are not yet in a position to understand what they are to learn. Giving credence to student teacher evaluations only lowers the standard of teaching. Giving response forms to students so they can complain about teaching can give reasonable feedback to inexperienced teachers, things like one can't be heard in the back of the room or that the writing on transparencys can't be read. But experienced teachers handle these things quickly at the beginning of a class. Evaluation of teaching can only be done by peers, and a peer review system.
I hear some realistists sitting in the back row muttering among themselves that this is pure idealism... it will never work in practice. It won't work because if some department or even some university moves toward active education and begins to force students to learn then students will just go to another department or another university where life is easier. Yes, I suppose that's true, it is also the reason for grade inflation, and the root cause of evolutionary relaxing of requirements. Everyone is looking at everyone else out of the corner of their eye, so they don't end up out of step and reduce revenue.
Traditionally standards were enforced outside the university by accreditation. However the accreditation system has failed more and more over the last decade to prevent the slide in standards. In part this is because accreditation committees are appointed from the very institutions that are lowering standards -- the accreditation teams understand and maintain relative standards not absolute ones.
I believe that part of the solution is a dual stamp on each graduate. To get a bachelor's degree or it's equivalent, a student should have to pass the institution's requirements and also pass a state general competency exam. The state competency exam would not cover specific technical areas, rather it would cover general knowledge (historical, scientific, arts, and literature), the ability to communicate (read and write), and the ability to do some mathematics. There should be a required written essay on the exam which should show the ability to structure and organize concepts into a writing. There perhaps should also be a state advanced placement exam in each major subject area.
Institutions would then have to undertake to bring everyone they graduate up to a minimum standard of competency. The advanced placement exam would measure competency in particular subject areas. The results would be published, by school, of the abilities of graduates. This can be measured against the input distribution of students accepted by the institution, and perhaps what that original distribution looks like after each year of education. This would give prospective students an idea of how well an institution educates relative to other tertiary schools.
By adding this exam to the requirements for a bachelor's degree will stiffen the resolve of accreditation committee's and begin to rebuild confidence in the meaning to the bachelors qualification. However even within the existing framework a B.Tech degree could be set up which emphasises doing rather than listening and marks the holder of the degree as a doer rather than an ordinary graduate. It is then the student's choice which way to go and the employer's choice as to who to employ.
Evolutionary changes in education demand revolutionary changes in the way teaching is done. I have outlined some of the revolutionary ideas that I have been forced to come to grips with in dealing with the changes in tertiary education in the last decade. They are not the only solutions, but for educating the large masses of students now attending universities throughout the world they may be the only way to offer the individual growth that a university education should bring.
The cost of not making these revolutionary changes is to have a large portion of the electorate that can't reason, elected officials without moral substance, and the risk of a workforce that is mentally and morally weak. Democracy is based on an intelligent, reasoning electorate, this requires reasonable education; it is not something that is optional, for all-of-us it is necessary.
So in the end after a quarter of a century teaching in classrooms, I find I believe that, in general, a tertiary teacher should not lecture. University credits and degrees should not be based on the number of hours of lecture, but rather it should be based on the material that a student has been shown to master. I believe that the classroom is an inefficient and outmoded method of trying to communicate knowledge. Lecture is useful at times, but we need to move forward toward active education and create student involvement and activity combined with learning from supplementary materials like books and computer based reference material.