January 6, 2015, by Deepa Kumari Veerasingam
U21 ECR Workshop: The Future of International Higher Education [Part 2]
In commemoration of its 10th anniversary, the University of Nottingham China Campus hosted a Universitias 21 (U21) interdisciplinary workshop on the future of international higher education. The workshop was held on 1st November 2014 with over 60 people in attendance, including two of our PhD students who won the travel prize competition. The competition which was held in September 2014, asked early career academics and PhD students why they think they are the best fit for the travel prize and how their interest/research fit the U21 workshop.
Here is what one of the winners, Kevin Tan Chong Yew had to say about his experience from attending the U21 interdisciplinary workshop on the future of international higher education. Kevin is a first year PhD student from the School of Politics, History and International Relations.
Over 60 people, mostly from the Asia-Pacific and Australia/New Zealand regions, attended the workshop. Most of them were either early career researchers (ECRs) or PhD students.
The guest speakers were all from U21 partner institutions such as the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne in Australia, the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Following the welcome address by Prof Fintan Cullen from UNNC, Prof Yang Rui, an expert in international education from the University of Hong Kong, delivered his keynote speech.
According to him, East Asian universities should develop their own pedagogic and administrative models based on local cultural and intellectual resources rather than just copying the West.
Citing the late Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, he said: “The West is unique but not universal, universalism will result in imperialism… East Asian universities are modelled after the West have problems building their own identities as most theories come from the West.”
While some East Asian universities achieved successes in the hard sciences using the Western model, they could not match the West in term of the soft sciences, Prof Yang added.
“They must learn how to find a balance between Westernisation and the indigenisation of higher education,” he added.
This was followed by several presentations in sessions on virtual learning and education and the future of higher education. One of the speakers, Paula de Barba talked on the contemporary topic of massive open online courses (MOOCS).
She explained that many universities are investing in MOOCS to get learning analytics of their students. With these “big data”, universities could personalize their courses according to the students’ dispositions, skills and needs.
However, there were still challenges in making sense of these learning analytics because they could not provide reasons behind students’ performance in their courses. For example, the university would still need to find out why students drop out from their courses.
“Situational interest is important for students to do well. So what creates situational interest?” de Barba said.
In the afternoon, there were three breakout sessions on virtual learning and education, entrepreneurship and education, and equality of education, led respectively by Stephen Wee from NUS, Felix Arndt from UNNC and Edobor Michae Erhabor from the University of Queensland.
In one of the sessions attended by two of UNMC delegates, Wee said the challenge for virtual learning in his university is how to produce students with what is known as the “i-NUS qualities” – inquisitiveness, initiative, inner resilience, imagination, inclusiveness and integrity.
While online learning could measure students’ performance, it could not measure other intangible qualities that a university should inculcate among its students.
He reckoned that the learning outcomes could be affected by the learning design of the virtual platform. There, the question is how to design an online learning platform that meets both the interest in learning and performance?
During the discussions, the delegates raised many interesting issues including the intention for a university to introduce online learning platform for their students.
Among others, there were concerns that some universities would see this as a mean to maximise profit (increasing the number of students) or to cut cost (reducing the number of lecturers).
However, most delegates agree that there would be problems with such a profit-oriented model of education because an online platform would only be as good as the designer. As such, the role of the lecturer would still be indispensable under an online learning model.
On the whole, the workshop has been a fruitful event as it allowed various scholars from the U21 network to discuss issues and share ideas on how to improve the teaching and learning processes in their respective institutions.
Kevin [second row, third from the left]
We hope that this sharing from Kevin provides you with some useful and beneficial insights of the U21 interdisciplinary workshop on the future of international higher education.
Cheers!
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