Beyond the customer/member divide?
It has been interesting to read the articles by David Donald and Stephen Hill (attached to earlier posts on this blog). Both are trying to get at what kinds of concepts and language can help us better visualise the services a university or a college offers. For David and Jane Donald (as in the original e-Revolution book chapter by John Powell) that is centrally about the students who, progress when
“they join a college and graduate, by degrees, to the status of full members of a university community. The way we label them is non-trivial. It shapes our expectations of them and their expectations of themselves, each other and us. It confirms status and shapes identity.”
For Stephen Hill, the issue of customer, member, learner stretches wider - to all the different engagements with stakeholders, businesses and communities. Again, he is interested in developing new terminology, which can enable us to get a better grasp on this increasing complexity. Both of these contributions reminded me of the - very current - communities of practice literature. Although there are some problems with (and many critiques of) this material, Lave and Wenger capture something of the dynamic kind of model we urgently need. So I have written my last article on this, entitled Beyond the MLE? Visualising the shifting boundaries of education, business and communities.
Who are our customers? Where are our learners?
The underlying questions of the e-Revolution book don’t go away - in fact, the importance of re-thinking the shape of post-compulsory education holistically is becoming ever more important in relation both to the extending range and type of stakeholder involvement and with the changing nature of new technologies.
Recently had an interesting phone call with Stephen Hill (Professor of Lifelong Learning and Dean of Teaching and Learning Innovation, University of Gloucestershire) - I was telling him of a specific example where neither the university systems nor the culture could cope with the idea of bringing learners from the workplace together with full-time MA students to study, within a single module. The business of integration of different procedures for costing, registration, accreditation and assessment across a short course and a post-graduate degree seemed insurmountable - even though bringing these groups together from their various perspectives was central to the proposed educational programme.
Talking to Stephen, it become clear that we really do need some new terminology and models for articulating customer relationships which , as he says “encompass the fundamental question of what it is that contemporary universities are about.” Terms like engagement and knowledge transfer/exchange suggest a different understanding to either the assumed older business and academic oppositions or the glib belief that education is only for employability.
In his article entitled Post-disciplinary, post-compulsory education? Stephen explores the complexities that arise from engagement between and across education, business and the community in what he calls “an increasingly post-disciplinary educational landscape” and suggests some questions raised for both our institutional models and for the language we use.
Technology, stakeholder relationships and institutional well-being
As I have mentioned below, since the book was written, post-compulsory education has been increasingly concerned with business and community engagement, another shifting boundary in relationships between institutions and the wider world.
Here, Simon Whittemore of JISC summarizes the key issues for HE and FE managers in his article Know your processes; know your markets; How to avoid building bridges on quicksand. JISC’s Business and Community Engagement (BCE) programme aims to help in the areas of knowledge exchange, employer engagement, public engagement and lifelong learning. What can new technologies offer to enhance these changing interfaces between universities and their many stakeholders? How can post-compulsory education find ways of being more responsive and adaptable? How does this affect the defining and managing of customer relationships (CRM) or learning process lifecycles? How can universities and colleges be more flexible to different contexts, whilst maintaining data control and security? These issues are vital, for as Simon writes:
“Many institutions are in effect vast, diverse and prestigious membership bodies so the question is: who are the members and where do the boundaries lie? Staff, and students are clearly members, but these words now encompass business practitioners who are visiting lecturers, entrepreneurs seeking to develop ideas, remote students who are primarily virtually full-time mothers, managers of businesses etc., and alumni who are, for example, primarily members of established professions. How can the institution serve all these divergent constituencies and yet maintain control and quality?
Only by establishing how engagement with these many and various parties actually takes place across the institution, its subject disciplines and functions, can an institution be in a position to manage and derive coherent benefit from these interactions. In many institutions that engagement is relatively ad hoc and so there are many duplicated and contradictory efforts and contacts. The accuracy and availability of the information associated with these interactions is vital to institutional well-being – its life-blood, one could say.”
Read the book!
Just a reminder that The e-Revolution and Post-Compulsory Education: Using e-business models to deliver quality education can be downloaded for free from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/erevolutionbook
Where does learning happen?
The Communities of Practice work challenges some assumptions, not only about what learning is, but also where it should take place. One of the most interesting things about working on the e-Revolution book was that we were mostly - in very different ways - trying to get to grips with how new technologies were affecting, or had the potential to enhance, relationships, roles and responsibilities across and beyond the educational institution.This meant challenging conventional notions which saw the university of college as the ‘natural’ site of learning; assumed it to be self-contained and separate from ‘outside’ organisations, whether community or business; insisted on a clear and simple division between academic life (good) and the business world (bad); and believed the tutor/student dyad to be fixed and obvious where any suggested change was perceived as a threat.
So we looked at the best e-business practices, not in order to copy or model ourselves on, but to learn lessons about what kinds of service 21st century universities and colleges want to offer, and how this might be achieved. Since we wrote the book, the boundaries between employability, business, learning, research and community engagement have both gone on being politically fraught (see previous post Education under a business umbrella) and are increasingly being addressed by HE and FE in the UK in a variety of creative ways. What we didn’t realise is how central business and community engagement would become (it is hardly mentioned in the book), and how much our communities of practice are also being asked - particularly in research terms -to look outward, to knowledge transfer and exchange, and to showing evidence of making an impact on the wider world. Surely this is a good thing, to be developed not avoided?
And it offers a future where not only students learn both at and beyond the university; but that those outside of it, such as local or business people are also learning.
Education as a community of practice?
Just been re-visiting some of the Communities of Practice literature, which is having something of an impact on ideas about teaching and learning in post-compulsory education. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991 ), and then Wenger (1998) suggest that ‘formal’ learning, isolated within the institution, separates knowledge from the whole set of processes in which it is normally embedded. Instead they analyse work-based activities (as in an apprenticeship) and argue that this way of learning is not - as it is often portrayed -merely a simple process of acquiring specifics through observation and imitation, to be set against, and inferior to formal instructional learning as verbal abstraction and reflection.
Rather it offers a form of learning through doing which is not just observing a task, but participating at the edges of a whole process – both absorbing and being absorbed by – the culture of practice. In this process understanding and practice are developed through simultaneous interaction. Thus learning becomes visualised as more like a journey through time, moving from the ‘legitimate periphery’ of a subject community to becoming a full ‘member’ of it.
This reminded me of the debate we had both within and outside the confines of the e-revolution book; how should students be ‘conceptualised’? Are they consumers, customers, clients, members or what? At the JISC conference earlier in the year I met David Donald from Glasgow Caledonian, who argued persuasively that students should be thought of as members of the academic community. He writes here in an article entitled Language Matters that:
“….even in a ‘commercialist’ ‘economistic’ narrative the notion of ‘customer’ is unfortunate. From this perspective are the students we graduate consumers, producers or products? If education is investment then students are a ‘producer good’. The customer (businesses and other organisations) has to be the final evaluator of the nature and quality of the goods. They are the demand side. The university or college is the supply side. It has to assure quality and ensure the relevance of the product for the market. The customer does not pay the producer directly — but immediate ‘employability’ is the goal. Relevant content and specific and general skills are the desirable characteristics.
The relationships we seek to induce are longer term and more profound than is captured by the notion of customer. Students are not passive recipients of services but co-creators in an active learning environment. The university is the learning environment and students (in a community with others) are constituent members of the institution.”
Education under a business umbrella?
So, HE and FE now find themselves part of the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. In a recent article in the Guardian, Peter Mandelson reassured us that whilst the needs of business and those of higher and further education are not the same, ” they can and do touch each other in important ways. At the end of the day, they are two parts of a single picture of a Britain that has knowledge, confidence and character to prosper in a changing world” (16 June 2009, p.4).
Whilst the e-revolution book made it clear we weren’t trying to turn post-compulsory education into a business, these kinds of central goverment moves make it even more urgent to both find ways to show what education offers that is different from business production/consumption processes; and to understand enough about the best business practices (and we have seen to many of the worst recently) to re-structure universities and colleges into a better shape for dealing with the contemporary world.
Developing a philosophy
Julian Beckton agrees (see previous but one post) that HE doesn’t seem to have the time or energy to explore the implications of technology. But he also says “I’m not really surprised, because I also think that the issue of ‘how knowledge and information are best created, managed and shared’ is a really difficult philosophical problem”.
I agree with that completely. But, for Julian this can only begin to be solved through finding out what different disciplines need; for me, it is about finding ways to open up more precisely what the key philosophical issues and implications are for higher and further education of new technologies, and disseminating these as widely as possible, so that we can have an explicit, open, creative and realistic debate.
Understanding clouds
One of the key shifts in new technologies that education needs to explore, is the shift towards what is called ‘cloud computing’. If you want to know more, read John Powell’ summary Cloud computing - what is it and what does it mean for education? This is the increasing potential for institutions to subscribe to applications and other services available ‘out there’ when and if they need it, rather than have capital tied up (and depreciating) in ICT hardware and software. But as John says, this also means looking at the implications for the IT environment, the education market and in student and staff behaviour. As he goes on: “There are practical considerations to address – for instance, how to ensure necessary institutional information is stored in perpetuity and is auditable in the cloud – and philosophical – such as the nature of scholarship in the digital realm. (…) institutions must recognise that the changes in IT provision the cloud implies will inevitably affect all, although the timescale over which this takes place will vary.
Similarly, in his very interesting talk to the last JISC conference, Rashik Parmar, IBM’s chief technology officer for north east Europe, argued that the shared infrastructure we’ve had in the past is now moving to a higher level and expanding to include such things as information services. For him, the challenge is to remove the many and varied barriers to increased collaboration.
Struggling to ‘get’ the implications of technological change
Everyone knows, of course, that technological change is happening very fast and that selecting and using a particular technology is not just neutral solution to a perceived problem. But when it comes to making strategic decisions at an institutional level, post-compulsory education still struggles with thinking through the implications for all their existing processes. Too often, choices end up being made on technical and financial grounds alone. One of JISC’s roles is to support senior managers in understanding and then creatively and effectively responding to these contemporary challenges.
But, for me, the biggest problem is that higher education in the UK - on the whole - seems to have neither the time nor the energy to explore the implications of ICT at the most basic level. By this, I mean in terms of how educational services are provided; how student and other stakeholder experiences are enhanced; how knowledge and information are best created, managed and shared; how organisational roles and relationships should change (both within the institution and between institutions, businesses and communities); and what activities should happen where and at what scale. This is about educational vision, not about technologies (although it demands an understanding of both the potential and the difficulties offered by ICT).
Re-designing education?
To read more from Daxa Patel, one of the main institators at JISC of the e-revolution book, and now an independent learning consultant, about the book and what has changed since it was written, click here.
The changing shape of knowledge?
One of the things Daxa and I talked about a lot was how new technologies are challenging our assumptions about the role of the post-compulsory educational institution. Universities in particular used to be the assumed centre of knowledge creation and exchange. But, now with so many sources of information (which seems to easily mixed up with knowledge) the FE and HE sector has to be much clearer about what it has to offer, distinctive from either ‘training’ courses or social networking. I saw an advertisement recently - I think for the University of Westminster - that explicitly ’sold’ itself as a place where learning was a deep rather than a surface issue, but also satisfying precisely for that reason. Rather than just jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, and trying to make learning more like social networking, maybe we need to show what it is that education offers that is both different and better.
Where is the vision?
Was talking to one of the instigators of the original JISC-funded book project, Daxa Patel recently (who is now an independent consultant), and we got onto the issue of how innovative and effective change can happen in HE and FE. The tendency in the sector is still to use ICT as an operational enabler to support core activities, rather than “as an agent for strategic or transformational change”. This has led to much better integration of systems, but not to holistic process-oriented rather than function/project oriented approaches.
Meanwhile, in the world outside, with everything from Web 2.0 to cloud computing to the ipod apps store and micro-payments, it is not only that boundaries are shifting, but that many organisations are responding creatively, innovatively and effectively in this new environment. Is post-compulsory education so hand-tied and risk-averse that it cannot act with the same vigour?
Coming from outside the box
In the attached article Coming from outside the box Les Watson looks at how Web 2.0 applications are shifting the boundaries away from older conceptions of VLEs.
Shifting the boundaries
I am coming to realise more and more that, whilst the e-revolution book was ahead of its time by arguing for a more holistic approach beyond not just the VLE but also the MLE, it failed to judge just how dramatically new technologies are shifting boundaries within institutions, across them and between the post-compulsory education section, business and the community.
I can think of at least three reasons. First, with new technologies the boundary between ‘educational technologies’ and ‘commercial/community technologies is blurring beyond all recognition - and universities and colleges have not yet begun to catch up, as students use the application which suits them from wherever they can find it.
Second new technologies offer new ways to do things which do not require ‘bounded’ organisations; access and security can be dynamic and real time - adjusted to circumstances rather than location. The form and scale at which things most appropriately happen has to be re-thought.
Finally, organisations are engaging in all sorts of different partnerships and new ways of providing services; thinking new ways of linking education, business and community engagement.
This fluidity offers great opportunities to universities and colleges; but also involves taking risks, changing cultures, developing more flexible systems, and - perhaps most importantly - rigorously and creatively analysing how post-complusory education can best place itself within these shifting boundaries.
What are the key issues?
Discussing what needed updating and developing from the e-Revolution and Post-Compulsory Education book with contributors and with others at the JISC conference, a key theme came through again and again: just how quickly boundaries in post-compulsory education are shifting in ‘what’ happens ‘where’ in terms of technology (and therefore, also in terms of ‘customer’ experience and roles/relationships – ‘who’ does what, where and when). This was also a central point of the book, which used the best of e-business practices to look beyond institutions as bounded, compartmentalised and inflexible entities. It was interested in how universities and colleges might holistically re-think their boundaries and relationships - with students, academics, student support and administrative staff, suppliers and other external stakeholders. It aimed to explore the capabilities of new technologies and networks in enabling and supporting change.
What became clear from these discussions is how contemporary shifts in ICT are challenging traditional boundaries whether institutions want it or not. Look at how quickly non-educational technologies like Facebook and Twitter are impacting on student’s lives. And it feels like universities and colleges are scrabbling to ‘catch up’ with these technologies and to try and work out how they ‘fit’ into an educational setting.
The problem of scale
One of the speakers at the JISC pre-conference - Lorcan Demsey of OCLC - gave a very interesting presentation, suggesting that a key impact of new technologies has been to shift the ’scale’ at which activities most effectively take place. He looked particularly at libraries and proposed that with the impact of Google and Amazon we need to look much more carefully at what can be best provided at the institutional level. He called this a multiscaler approach and concluded with 3 questions;
Rescaling the uniform? - where to locate routine, common activities so as to prevent duplication and repetition across institutions
Developing the unique? What is special and can add value to educational activities within the context of a particular university of college?
Distinctive scope of the institutional? What is particular to what institutions offer, in which they should specialise?
This is a similar argument to the one Will Buller of CISCO made in the book; organisations can only be flexible, responsive and light on their feet if they concentrate on what they are good at….
Invitation to get involved…
We are also inviting people to participate in the ongoing debate through two seminar events:
Thursay 23rd April 2009, 11.00 – 4.00 JISC office, Brettenham House, London
Thursday 30th April 2009, 11.00 – 4.00 Lord Todd Conference room, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
If you would like to attend, please contact j.o.s.boys@brighton.ac.uk. Places are limited to 20 per event.
Continuing the debate..
At the JISC Annual conference in Edinburgh, where many issues being raised overlap with, and inform, questions asked by the contributors:
• How are emerging technologies affecting the ‘shape’ of organisations?
• How can we develop common systems for the seamless integration of data essential for organisational connectivity and responsiveness?
• New technologies put the customer at the centre. How should this affect how we engage with students and other participants in post-compulsory educational provision?
• How should institutions respond to increasing commercialization and globalization of post-compulsory education?
• What are the changing patterns of institutional relationships with service providers, business partners and wider communities; and how can ICT better support these kinds of collaborations?
We hope to continue these debates, linking into other JISC work, and other concerns of the academic community.
Consumers, members or what?
One of the difficult tasks of the book was to articulate how students are conceptualised in relation to the e-business models being explored. We didn’t feel that students were simply ‘consumers’, but neither are they passive ‘users´of education. They participate in a long-term process as a constituency, not just an audience. What is really valued is the attention, interaction, opportunities to discover new insights and to make new connections between ideas. This is certainly not a consumer-supplier relationship, although there are clearly connections with the way that many e-businesses - one only has to think of Amazon - are also adapting notions of the consumer to include active engagement and peer group collaboration.
In the book, John Powell explored education as an ‘experience-good’ whilst Les Watson supported the notion of envisoning students as ‘members’. This latter idea obviously links to Wenger’s Communities of Practice work. But I still feel that we did not adequately capture either how to conceptualise students, or how to articulate the similarities/differences between education and the kinds of services that the best e-businesses offer. So much here still remains open to debate.