Connected University: Openness versus Monopoly
This is the second post in a series examining the impact of digital connectivity in universities. See here for the first post. Also cross posted from — and a Spanish version — here.
—Daniel Dominguez & Jose Francisco Alvarez
There are many challenges that digital connectivity set out to universities. In this article we highlight the evolution towards a strategy of institutional openness that allows to design learning spaces that connect both the interest of students and the stakeholders in the innovation and knowledge. Currently this institutional opening is confronted with traditional approaches that consider the university as the central physical reference of the production and dissemination of knowledge, innovation and even entrepreneurship. However, the path of openness is crucial if the Academy wants to cover some of the needs urgently demanded by their new audiences, whether students, business or civil society itself.
Nowadays practices and social processes that generate new knowledge based on innovation happen mostly in open spaces and connected via Internet. The web is the natural place of student to work. It is an open space that provides tools, content and learning resources without the limitations of the physical world. The articulation of the web with other non-formal settings results in enriched learning contexts that are capable of generating innovation, where people put in relation with the resources and services to implement new ideas. Unlike what happens in the classical model of instruction that prevails in universities, in those spaces knowledge it is not assumed but emerges from the social practices and are the communities that validate the new realizations (see, Schmidt, J.P; Geith, Ch.; Håklev, S. & Thierstein, J., Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 2009, vol. 10–5).
Of course informal learning practices are not new, nor unique to the digital intermediate spaces. The acquisition multiple types of skills has been customary in places like libraries, occupational centers or community centers; and more recently in MediaLabs, makers workshops or collaborative workspaces. The novelty is the ability to connect these practices using digital technologies, and the ability to monitor activities and use the data to accredit and certify the skills acquired directly, using procedures that are available to any interested agent. And to do that without having to resort to expert knowledge that was traditionally exclusive to the “official” agencies (see, Ito, M., Soep, E., Kliger-Vilenchik, N., Sheresthova, S., Gamber-Thomson, L., & Zimmerman, A., Learning Connected Civics: Narratives, Practices, and Infrastructures, Curriculum Inquiry, 2015, 45:1, 10–29).
The expansion of open learning practices — both in the online mode, as classroom — happens simultaneously to the progressive functional inadequacy of the degree and the master level, which establish the main educational portfolio of universities. There is a broad consensus among employers and students themselves about the lack of value that provides a degree when it comes to access to a job in the open economy in occupations that do not depend on regulatory frameworks. In some sectors such as computing the gap is so great that companies while resorting to any alternative remedy — hackathons coding events, apps contests, academies and online courses, nano-degrees, etc. — to select and train their employees in the skills they need, as these skills are far from which students can acquire in the technical colleges. The same is true when it comes to many other fields in the social sciences, humanities and university technical education, supposedly called to nurture skilled sectors of the digital economy professionals (see, Caribou Digital, Winners & Losers in the Global App Economy, Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom, Caribou Digital Publishing, 2016).
If we consider the proliferation of new digital spaces, it seems clear that the university needs to rethink its role as the central agent that provides training and certifies the skills acquired in the process of teaching and learning. It is increasingly necessary to open the bureaucracy through multiple channels that allow establish fluid connections with society. This is a change that requires action mainly on the institutional political & institutional design. What we have seen in recent times is that the university management has been guided by old models of industrial efficiency, in which the structure of the organization is a border with the outside. The border becomes funnel which requires a continuous flow of students, information, materials, products, services, etc. between the inside and outside. Then institutional management is to use the advantage for now gives its monopoly status, to control and regulate at least in part these flows. The funnel university has been primarily concerned with its internal organization, absorbing more and more resources to sustain the internal structures and trying to differentiate itself from other agents and spaces in the higher education field. This framework has been widely supported by a condition of exclusivity based on bureaucratic rules and procedures (see, Paul F. Campos, The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much, The New York Times, 4 April 2015).
The new open and interconnected context demands another institutional model. The funnel organization is designed to control, but new capabilities to openly access and apply knowledge in situations of real practice, have overwhelmed the vision of the Academy of monopolizing higher education. In these circumstances exclusivity based models tend to be relegated. They are only able to create silos that have a very limited impact on the social system that receives them.
Meanwhile, the interface organization is opposed to the industrial model and is particularly suited to situations based on openness. It is a scheme suitable for situations where the efficiency and controllability are required but are not a differential value. In the interface organization boundaries become blurred and the interaction space is its hallmark and its differential component. Accordingly the management of the organization would become a process of interface design, which relies on methodologies of service design, in communication protocols and in the provision of stable networks with stakeholders (see, Thomas W. Malone, Designing Organizational Interfaces, Proceedings of the CHI’85 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Francisco, CA, April 14–18, 1985).
There are at least three coordinates to consider at the organizational design based on the principles of openness & interfaces:
- Collaboration environments. The ability to establish open connections blurs the dimensions inside/outside of the organization. There is no clear limit about what stays in and what comes out. Under these conditions the elements that have a part in the action are shared and arranged so all participating agents can use them.
- Reticular & integrative structure. As already it said, so far universities have applied an in/out logic. They have encouraged the exclusion in the network of higher education agents: either by introducing regulatory changes in order to alter the protocols that facilitate collaboration between agents within the network; or through filtering processes based on meritocracy mechanisms that “de facto” excluded the other agents. In a contrary, promoting integration in a network requires searching for “connectors” capable of linking groups of nodes; and sharing the communication protocols with other network nodes. So a more favorable situation to the new social context would be to promote a center/periphery logic with the aim of promoting the integration of the network.
- Management of shared ownership. Open collaboration environments require participants to access the materials and products involved in the process of knowledge construction. Aspects such as licensing and restrictive management of intellectual property — when it comes to content — or patents closed — in the case of products — are shown as real barriers to innovation, and are opposed to the logic of the opening.
One possible application of open institutional models would be in instructional re-designing of grades and master’s degrees. Also the certification of skills according to open schemes. These are issues to be addressed in future posts.
