Physical or Digital Mobility in Higher Education: A False Dilemma
Cross posted from here (in Spanish). This is the third post in a series examining the impact of digital connectivity in universities. See here for previous posts.
—Daniel Dominguez & Jose Francisco Alvarez
It is commonplace to defend the mobility of students as a source of quality in higher education. Usually it is taken for granted that internationalization leads to an improvement of university activity. Assuming that principle today requires some preliminary analysis. As with many other issues it is appropriate to go deeper and analyze the nuances to achieve the most interesting opinions.
The tradition indicates that international mobility has been important since the origins of the university, either in the European Middle Ages or earlier. In that sense, it is worth recalling that “when the first European university was founded in Bologna in 1088, the Indian University of Nalanda had more than six hundred years providing higher education to thousands of students from Asian countries” (A. Sen, India: The Stormy Revival of an International University. The New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015).
Since then there have been changes in methodologies, curricular content and even the purposes of the university itself. There have also been many initiatives in favor of the mobility of students, mostly designed on the basis of the huge value of the physical exchange between institutions. Today we are undoubtedly in a phase of general acceptance of mobility by academic structures; with strong support from governments, businesses, citizens and students themselves.
The good reception of mobility makes important to assess their contribution to upgrade the quality of the system, especially since the socio-technical changes in the last half century — the digital era — are changing the conditions of such practices. It is essential to consider how the new digital capabilities, new opportunities for training and new social dynamics — which allow access to training and generate differentiated standards of science — have changed the physical conditions of production, transmission, distribution and preservation of knowledge.
If this is the scenario, and the data is overwhelming, physical limitation related with mobility today has to be thought otherwise. Nobody considers now, for example, that to hear a lecture from an expert, or a real wise, it is essential to attend and share the same space where conference is taught.
A first aspect to consider is that the internationalization has gone from being a complementary condition of university activity — which had more or less differentiated structures quite powerful — to become a transversal component to university policies. It is a global and obvious expansion in case of teachers and coordinated research projects: learning platforms with open and online courses and degrees nourish from initiatives of universities around the world; and with regard to research, it is difficult to find examples of projects mere local significance, and the usual teams are collaborations by consortia and supranational networks.
None of these new forms of international cooperation between institutions requires the physical presence of teachers or researchers in other workplaces. Joint work sessions consist in specific milestones that meet the mission of strengthening emotional or cultural ties between the teams. In any case, the field of research depends on the continuous stay in the territory of the researchers. Somehow the victory of internationalization is taking place at the expense of traditional mobility, leading to a structural change that still takes to be understood by many of our universities.
Something similar happens with the dedication of the students. Currently, anyone with Internet access can buy all kinds of knowledge, skills and abilities across multiple digital tools. Khan Academy is the reference point to work the core subjects to high school stage. Platforms like Coursera or EdX offer higher level courses in conjunction with universities and business schools worldwide. On the open web it is possible to access to manuals, scientific references or videos about any discipline, together with the data required for research; there are all kinds of documents, best practices and open protocols that allow the exchange of information between students, teachers, research groups and also with business and administration. If you look at teaching practices, while the model of the lectures is widely questioned as a teaching method and its alternatives as of inverted classes, peer-to-peer projects, personalized learning or project-based are not entirely dependent on physical contact.
The fact that mobility programs remain outside the reality is tantamount to letting outside academia the practices that are common in the daily lives of people interested in knowledge.
To help reduce this gap the new forms of international mobility should build on what is already everyday behavior of students and teachers. These new modalities could be formulated from the practical, social and from access to knowledge produced in digital spaces, trying to accommodate available procedures to student needs and objectives of each program.
Here is an example. The classic exchange programs to improve the training of students, often seek to complement a deficit in the curriculum of one university and others with higher quality in the target areas. Therefore, students move between institutions, assuming it is the physical headquarters of the university where to access the necessary resources to boost learning. This would be a case of mobility based on the logic of scarcity of resources, characteristic of the economies of the analog era.
However, any alternative of the traditional model of mobility seeking to have impact on digitalized society — where the logic of abundance is prevailing (M. Weller, A pedagogy of abundance. Spanish Journal of Pedagogy, 249, 2011) — should keep in mind that the physical movement is not the main option because it is not required anymore or even it is not the most desirable.
There is a set of academic situations where students mobility could not help to achieve the intended purposes of improvement. Rather, in most cases, stay abroad is an added and elitist difficulty due to language limitations, the cost of moving or the time needed to adapt to the local culture, which is contrary to the very idea of curricular use. Of course indirectly other results are obtained, not negligible with respect to vital formation. But it seems essential to note that today the most effective way to exchange knowledge — either in open spaces or the context of a shared study plan — is through digitally mediated practices, so it can be said that mobility programs not incorporating this dimension may be considered incomplete.
Another second group of mobility programs primarily seeks cultural exchange or the strength of regional identity. In the Spanish context the main examples of this type would be the Erasmus programs and the recent framework for Ibero-america Mobility Program. Cultural exchange is directly linked to relocation — to know the other must be present — , so this would be a kind of mobility justified in terms of the classic stays abroad. The way to enrich the student experience would go through improving the previous and posterior phases of mobility providing opportunities for exchange, either in digital campus or other parallel spaces.
It might be interesting to extend the scope of mobility, adding more social dynamics to open programs to a greater number of young and not only those who are enrolled in a university. The same Erasmus program has progressed in that sense. In the beginning, it was an initiative directly linked to college and now has expanded to other educational levels and the general citizenship, participating through volunteering, work placement or as partners that offer educational services related to the exchange.
This brief analysis of the types of mobility and their connection with the program goals and the new needs of students, shows the convenience of designing proposals taking into account the behavior of modern society.
The digitization of everyday practices can expand the capacity to act also in the field of knowledge production, acquisition and dissemination — activities that have historically been the heritage of the academy — . Models of digital mobility, access to open learning resources on the Web, propagation of spaces for high level educational content, and the routines of student socialization, mostly based on digital mediation, provide an opportunity for the university to fulfill its traditional mission in today’s connected society.
