Higher Education at the Inflection Point

NOTE:  This version does not include illustrations and diagrams.

GREETINGS!

I was struck by this cartoon which I saw during a recent trip to Bangkok:

Well, thank goodness our education system, for all its weaknesses, is not that lousy - even given the high ratings of our President. But as the designated national university, UP has certain obligations. President Emil Q. Javier, during his term as 17^th President of the University of the Philippines, repeatedly said that our University cannot be the only tall and stately tree among stunted ones. It is our obligation to help uplift higher education in this country. This lecture, I hope, will raise some questions that will be in aid of charting the course of higher education in our country.

When I was preparing this lecture and thinking of a title, I was debating between "The Universities of the Future" or "The Future of Universities" There is an assumption implied in those titles – that universities have a future. Do they?

Gerhard Casper, the President of Stanford University, wonders if the university will survive in this environment of information and communication technologies and asks whether we will have a "world without universities." In fact, Peter Drucker, renowned futurologist has sounded the death knell and said that "30 years from now big university campuses will be relics." (Peters, 1999)

Perhaps we should not be too worried about Drucker’s prophecy. Thirty years ago he also predicted that "while ‘information evolution’ will have its most dramatic input on education, teaching and learning may not use computers at all or may use them only marginally" (Drucker, 1969). Well, he was wrong. He could be wrong again.

Nonetheless there are strong indications that universities are at a crisis point or at what Andy Grove, President and CEO of Intel, calls inflection point (Grove, 19996).

President Javier has always said we must be fluent in three languages – English, Filipino and Mathematics. This means that inflection point, a mathematical term, should be part of our vocabulary. An inflection point is where the second derivative of a curve changes sign. It is where the rate of change of the slope of a curve changes sign. It is a point where a curve changes its curvature, going from convex to concave, or vice versa as shown in Fig. 1 (Grove, 1996).

Figure 1. Inflection Curve (Grove, 1996)

Saying that universities are at an inflection point is a positive view. As Andy Grove (1996) puts it, "An inflection point occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new, allowing business to ascend to new heights." The title of my lecture therefore implies that higher education are at the brink of soaring to new heights.

But Grove (1996) is quick to point out that inflection points are critical points because "if you don’t navigate your way through an inflection point, you go through a peak and after the peak the business declines." Instead of the crisis point being an inflection point, it becomes a maximum in the curve and everything is down from there.

Still quoting from Grove (1996), "The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up and listen." It is a time for institutions to arouse themselves from complacency, from their nest of laurels.

Last year I gave a talk on the challenges facing education. These challenges can give rise to an inflection point but I would like to use the analyses adopted by Grove from Michael Porter’s competitive strategy analysis. This analysis outlines six forces that determine the well being of a business (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Six Forces Diagram (Grove,1996)

Let’s redefine these forces and make them specific to higher education and therefore make the following replacements (Fig. 3):

• Existing competitors to other colleges and universities (in the Philippines)
• Customers to students
• Suppliers to faculty, suppliers of expertise
• Potential competitors to colleges and universities outside the Philippines and nontraditional providers of education
• Complementors are other businesses from whom customers buy complementary products. In education this could as traditional as book publishers to as nontraditional as Internet service providers (ISPs).
• The sixth force is the possibility that higher education can be done in a different way.

Figure 3. Six Forces Diagram Applied to Higher Education

I will use the six-forces model of Grove (1996) to analyze the situation of universities so allow me to further discuss the model while injecting some analogies from physics since we are talking about forces.

The competitive well being of an enterprise depends upon the interplay of the six forces. A small change in any one of the six forces may be balanced by adjusting one or more of the other forces. But if the change is too large, what Grove (1996) calls a 10x change, then the institution, if it were a ship at sea, would be experiencing a tsunami. How the captain and the crew respond is very critical. The ship will either get to port battered and largely disabled or get to port all the more strengthened by the experience. With a 10x force or forces an institution goes through an inflection point.

Are there 10x forces impinging on universities today? Where are they coming from?

I suppose we can easily dismiss as less than 10x the changes coming from other colleges and universities. They are busy with their own crisis points. The same can probably be said about our faculty members and staff. But having said that, I would be quick to add that we should not be complacent about these forces because the changes may occur slowly, build up to 10x and surprise us if we fail to make regular checks on them.

Prof. Richard Tedlow of the Harvard Business School, in his analysis of business failures reached the conclusion that businesses close shop either because they leave their customers or because their customers leave them (Grove, 1996). I might add that if we also consider potential customers then business is bad if these customers take a look at our display window but pass us up.

Customers of university education are changing in several aspects. Those entering the university as freshmen grew up in a media-rich environment. This is true even in rural areas in the Philippines since the reach of commercial broadcast stations have vastly improved and in addition, cable connections are widely available. Many of the young are also familiar with computers and all the media made available by computers such as the CD-ROM and the Internet.

Students are changing not only in what they are but also in what they need to be based on the demand of today’s and the future workplace. The Conference Board of Canada has put out a list of critical skills needed by the workforce (Bates, 1997):

• Good communication skills (reading/writing/speaking/listening)

Some add that these skills should be in more than one language.

• Ability to learn independently

This is also called lifelong learning skills.

• Social skills: ethics; positive attitude and responsibility
• Teamwork

With the complexity of world concerns, it is necessary for individuals with different expertise to work together. Thus the importance of group management and participation skills.

• Ability to adjust to changing circumstances
• Thinking skills: problem solving; critical/logical/numerical
• Knowledge navigation: where to get/how to process information

While these skills were listed for a workforce in a developed country, the global context of economies makes these skills worldwide in applicability.

The fast pace of technology changes requires upgrading, retooling and retraining of the workforce. Through their own initiative or through the instigation of their employers, workers are looking for more education and training. In the Philippines, postbaccalaureate education is required for advancement in rank especially those in the government.

The requirements of these older-in-years customers of education are quite different from those of the youngsters the universities have traditionally served. Most of them would have their own families – spouse and children - and may not want to be apart from them while studying. They may be very focused in their educational goals thus wanting small and short learning episodes on very specific topics.

More potential customers not only due to population increase but also due to the increase in balik-students from those already working. Different skills and interests that they bring in but also different educational goals. Put together these could constitute a 10x change among the consumers of education.

Complementors are establishments whose products one depends on (Grove, 1996). The complementor of universities, which I wish to discuss, may not be considered as such by many universities at the present time. But they are important for universities like the UP Open University and I submit that they will be strong complementors of all universities in the very near future. These are the businesses engaged in telecommunication. Like many technology-based industries, these businesses have not only improved their product; they have also brought down the cost of their products.

The power of telecommunications in education arises from its effect on the other forces especially on the students, on the way universities conduct their business and in bringing about new competitors. One reason for this power is essentially because developments in the telecommunications industry has brought about the "death of distance".

Universities may not be able to depend any longer on their own catchment areas. New communication technologies give power of choice to students. As Kershaw and Safford (1998) put it graphically, "Students are no longer supplicants at the door of the local institutions. As footloose consumers of educational services, they can take their businesses elsewhere if they are not satisfied with the local organization’s offering."

By the same token neither would educational institutions be restricted to serving students in their traditional catchment areas. The technology that liberates the consumers also unbinds the service providers.

A liberating force. Definitely 10x

Developments in technology bring about new competition. As I mentioned earlier changes in the complementors of the education industry bring about changes in the power, vigor and competence of potential competitors. These competitors of traditional universities go by various names: open universities, distance education institutions, and the new label for hi-tech open universities, virtual universities. In a recent Commonwealth of Learning study, a virtual education institution as one "which is involved as a direct provider of learning opportunities to students and is using information and communication technologies to deliver its programmes and courses and provide tuition support" (Farrell, 1999).

Virtual education is now being offered not only by those engaged in open and distance learning either on a single mode or dual mode basis but also by traditional institutions that have never been involved in distance education (like the University of Maryland, University of British Columbia). Some of these traditional universities straying into the virtual path are being helped along by business enterprises in the telecommunication industry. These enterprises, of course, are helping make greater use for their products. Good business sense. I have been hearing, for example, of a partnership being forged between Ateneo de Manila University and PLDT. This may be the same as the partnership agreement between UBC and BCTel to provide improved connectivity for the university and to develop joint educational initiatives that would benefit both partners.

Still another source of virtual education, very nontraditional as an educational institution, are large corporations who have developed training programs for their own employees, the so-called corporate universities. We call them nontraditional but they have been around for some time, numbering 200 in the 1970’s, doubling in number in the 1980’s and in 1997 the count was about 1600. Nearly 40% of the Fortune 500 firms have reorganized their lowly training departments into more centralized, proactive and strategic corporate universities. Some examples are Motorola, Sears, Walt Disney, and Cisco.

One might say that these do not constitute a threat to universities but we may be misreading their impact since with these in-house "universities", these enterprises will not need to send their workers to conventional universities anymore. Not only that, being business minded, these corporations, having already invested in developing training materials, are looking at recouping their expenses if not earning from their investment by offering the same training to outsiders, for a fee, of course.

Definitely a 10x force, wouldn’t you say?

Navigating through an inflection point in order to soar to new heights is not like having a ship surviving a tempest of 10x winds. It is not a simple matter of just balancing the forces to keep the ship afloat. A better analogy for traversing an inflection would be that of a vehicle moving from deceleration to acceleration. Before the inflection point, the forces are causing business to slow down; after the inflection point the forces are mustered to make business pick-up and boom.

Universities need strong forces, which will not just counteract the 10x forces from new competitors, the customers and complementors. Perhaps a better strategy is to turn around these forces and use them for acceleration rather than deceleration.

And there is yet one force in the six forces diagram: the force constituted by the possibility that what one's business can be done in a different way. Andy Grove (1996) admits that he has found this factor to be the "most deadly of all." This is the force created by superstores in the retail industry, which are doing in the small shops. But I submit that this force is deadly if your competitor wields it against you but you can take hold of this force, build it up and make it work for you.

It was good to have looked at those forces coming from the universities’ customers, complementors and competitors. It is good to imagine their power and get paranoid. For as Andy Grove (1996) said in his book title, "Only the paranoid survive." Let it be a healthy paranoia that should obsess us to think of ways to turn around the forces from new competitors, the customers and the complementors and use them for acceleration rather than deceleration and to think of possibilities that higher education can be done in a different way.

I am sure you have often heard proclamations about technology revolutionizing education. Revolutionizing in what way? Revolution can mean a winding or turning to return to the same point or it can mean a drastic change in a condition or method or idea. Technology can do both for education.

Technology returns educators to the same point if we use it merely to automate education under the replicant paradigm of education (Privateer, 1999). We must be wary of modernization schemes, which simply call for putting a web-linked computer in every classroom. Simply putting our lecture notes on the web does not constitute a new way of doing things. I once witnessed a class brought to another university using sophisticated satellite transmission. It was old pedagogy delivered with new technology since it was a simple lecture without any attempt at harnessing the capability of the technology for multi-point interactivity. This is not what we mean by harnessing technology to truly revolutionize education for significant and meaningful change.

Technology in education must be tasked to do more than simply transfer and access information. It can be used, for example:

• To organize discussion groups not only for teaching content but also for training on organizational skills.

With this goes the challenge of organizing a group of individuals who are physically apart and getting the discussion over cyberspace.

• To arrange for expert consultation.

• To remove from the students the tedium of memorizing facts and instead allow the students to cultivate higher cognitive skills.

• To set up a knowledge laboratory where students can test and apply acquired knowledge in simulated applications.

An example of this is a course on Fine and Performing Arts offered by the Simon Fraser University. One of the objectives of the course is to explore the possibilities of the computer as a medium for artistic expression through human body representation and to explore alternative approaches to choreography. One student created this dance segment using the software Lifeforms. (SHOW SEGMENT; PAUSE) He described his experience in this creation as follows: "When... I attempt to "control" what my dancer whom I've named Dan, is doing, he takes off in ways utterly unanticipated by me - his supposed master puppeteer. It is as if he is playing mischievous little tricks of his own. This makes me have to either join the game, or get angry and frustrated. So, I join, I play, I let Dan do his thing also. It isn't so far off the actual choreography experience, where all that pre-rehearsal prep changes when you're there in the studio with your dancers, who have their own bodies, ideas, understandings, inputs, strengths and weaknesses..."

• And in the process of doing the above, train students in the use of the technology.

For technology to become a positive 10x force in education it must be used in more ways than moving information or even knowledge from one point to another. It must be used for creating knowledge and training students to create knowledge in the current global context.

Customers clamor cannot be ignored by any business – even universities. The increase in number of potential students will strain the physical and human resources of a traditional classroom based university. In addition, the adult learners require greater flexibility in their place and time of study. Open and distance learning systems can address these needs.

But flexibility may also be needed in curriculum design. Most curricula in colleges and universities in the Philippines are highly prescriptive with fixed set of courses chunked uniformly at three units. A more flexible curricular model would be more fitting for lifelong learners, perhaps a curricular model that can respond to just-in-time, on-demand learning needs. Universities may need to start thinking of curricular offerings consisting of smaller fragments which students can put together depending on their interests, preferences and requirements.

New teaching models may also have to be instituted. Tony Bates (1997a), Director, Distance Education and Technology, University of British Columbia suggests several, one of which is resource-based tutoring. The model would suit students who already have a good foundation but interested in getting accreditation for advanced level of study in a very specific area of study. The learner would be put in touch with an expert who serves as guide to sources of information and pre-prepared learning materials. The tutor-expert helps the student navigate learning resources, puts the student in contact with other experts, and sets and assesses learning tasks such as a project work.

More customers and better customer satisfaction ia another positive 10x force.

If you can’t beat them, join them! Turn your enemies into strategic partners.

Different types of strategic alliances are emerging among universities and between universities and the private sector. Some universities form consortia or networks to offer cooperative and complementary programs. Examples are the Western Governors University involving 14 states in western US, and the California Virtual University. There are also associations involving intermediaries or brokers that serve as links to participating institutions. There’s the American Distance Education Consortium owned and operated by 55 universities, which embody the land-grant mission in the US. The National Technological University coordinates engineering departments of 35 universities in the US and grants diplomas.

Another type of alliance is that which the Empire State College of the State University of New York has formed with labor groups such as the United Steelworkers of America to allow members to takes courses leading to bachelor’s degrees while also crediting prior learning gained through military educational training, professional licenses and certificate and some courses offered through businesses, labor groups and professional associations.

The alliances I have mentioned provide education and training using leading-edge telecommunications technologies such as interactive video conferencing and the Web. The virtual educations they offer are for the privileged who have access to technology.

When we discussed the six forces acting on the university we quickly dismissed the faculty and staff saying we do not expect a 10xforce from their sector. But any effort of a university to do things differently especially in instruction requires a major contribution from them. We need faculty and staff effort to help us through the inflection point.

We need faculty to be interested in developing innovative curricula and in designing the learning experiences we earlier mentioned. We cannot leave such matters to chance - that there would be some faculty members who just happen to love such work and are willing to learn on their own with no thought of reward, or who have time to do the work besides doing research which, in the present academic environments, bring greater rewards. The reward system in universities would have to change to recognize the development of innovative teaching practices as much as research.

In addition to the pull of incentives we need to give faculty members the push of appropriate training. If they are to use technology effectively in teaching they need to first understand the learning process and the kind of teaching that aids learning, then understand why it is important to use technology and finally understand the different roles that technology can play in teaching. This grounding in theory is needed as much as the practice in the use of the technology. Otherwise we will see what we saw in the use of even just the overhead projector, the projection of unprocessed lecture notes this time into cyberspace.

In his book, Grove (1996) described how the computer industry was transformed as a result of 10X forces such as the introduction of microprocessors and personal computers. Prior to the strategic inflection point, the computer industry was vertically aligned. This means that an old computer company would have its own semiconductor chips, build its own computer around these chips, develop its own operating system, develop its own application software – then the whole package was sold by the company’s own sales people (Fig. 4). Propriety was the by word of the old computer industry (Grove,1996).

Figure 4. The Old Vertical Computer Industry (Grove, 1996)

The entry of microprocessors as the basic building block of computers and the low cost of manufacturing PCs caused a realignment of the industry from a vertical model to a horizontal model where no one company had its own vertical stack. A consumer now can pick a chip of its choice, buy a computer, branded or not, choose an operating system, install the applications desired and take everything home. The cost of doing this is less than ten times the cost of buying a working computer before the realignment (Grove, 1996).

Figure 5. The New Horizontal Computer Industry (Grove, 1996)

As this transformation took place, some companies like IBM who clung to the vertical orientation experienced difficult times, but Compaq which entered the picture sometime during the transformation and guessed correctly the shape of things to come, became the fastest Fortune 500 company to reach $1 billion in revenue (Grove, 1996).

I would like to suggest that universities might be making a similar transformation from vertical alignment to horizontal alignment.

Is the education industry moving in this direction? There are signs of what has been referred to as the unbundling of university functions: registration and record-keeping, teaching, provision of student services, and assessment and award granting. One sign is the emergence of enterprises or institutions separately performing these functions. The vertical and horizontal models of higher education are illustrated in Figures 6 and 7.

Figure 6. The Vertical Higher Education Industry

Figure 7. The Horizontal Higher Education Industry

If indeed the education industry is undergoing structural changes from the vertical to the horizontal industry model then I would like to quote from Grove (1996) again who stressed one important lesson that hits right here (In the heart): "when a strategic inflection point sweeps through the industry, the more successful a participant was in the old industry structure, the more threatened it is by change and the more reluctant it is to adapt it." Bato-bato sa langit?

You may be wondering why I used a business model in my analysis of the present state of universities. I chanced on Grove’s book while writing this paper and found many interesting parallelisms in the description of a business enterprise with a university. It is a view that must be shared by many people, industry executives and university leaders alike, because in April of this year 43 companies launched the so-called World Education Market touted to be "all about the international business of education" which is estimated to reach $90 billion in 2002.

I also believe that understanding the business of education will help us prevent the commercialization of education in the negative sense of making it profit oriented but instead help along the commercialization of education in the positive sense of making it a viable enterprise that can support and sustain the scholarship of discovery, research and application in the present milieu of changing student demands, global competitiveness as well as cooperation, and ubiquity of information and communication technologies which have sounded the death of distance.

The purpose of my talk has really been to heighten our (we in the academe) paranoia and perhaps jolt us from any complacency in our present attitude about our university. It is easy for a university like UP to become complacent because we take in such intelligent students who will most likely learn whatever we do and who will then go on to succeed in their careers. We will then claim them as our alumni and declare that we made all the difference.

I submit that if we are complacent, we do not do justice to the intelligence coupled with enthusiasm that our students bring with them when they enter our university. I like the analogy of the inflection point because I like the climb to greatness if we manage to get past the inflection point. We can't just coast along. We would be doing our students terrible injustice if we take them for that kind of ride. They deserve better. Our country deserves better.

The turn of the millenium is at hand. The frenzy is very palpable and not just because of the Y2K bug. It’s the zeroes in the New Year as Rex in the cartoon says. (PAUSE) But it is more than the zeroes because there truly are powerful forces like the ball of fire the other dinosaur in the cartoon is getting agitated about. The dinosaurs did not survive. Lets take those zeroes in the year 2000 serve as markers of the order of magnitude of the forces bearing down on our university enterprise. Then we might get paranoid enough to survive - to manage inflection points and soar to greater heights.

What other strategic initiatives can universities undertake?

I wish to introduce the idea put forward by the Otto Peters of a mixed mode university. Peters identifies three basic forms of academic learning:

• Guided self-study and self-study which embodies the principles of lifelong learning and involves any of the following.
• working independently through self learning packages in various media
• reading recommended literature
• participating in student initiated dialogue with other students or with tutors
• participation in organized tutorials or self help groups or
• seminars solving training and examination problems

• studying in a digital learning environment

• using computer networks to access information sources
• participation in online discussion groups
• Studying at virtual universities.

• Taking part in teaching events at traditional universities

• through advisory talks with professor
• discussion in colloquia, seminars

Peters refer to a mixed mode university as one, which allows students to put together their personal set of learning experiences allowing for deficiencies of one form to be compensated by the strengths of other forms. In this system, students are given greater autonomy and self-determination.

Perhaps it is also time to rethink of what should constitute a baccalaureate degree.

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