Monthly Archives: October 2012

Don’t be fooled: Top US Schools are Within Reach for International Students

This is an op-ed I published today in the Straits Times.  It was motivated by a story that has gotten a lot of press around the world.  A wealthy Hong Kong couple were allegedly defrauded of more than $2 million by a college consultant promising that he could obtain admission to Harvard for their children if he made large donations to the university on their behalf.

Top universities in the US are trying to internationalize their student bodies but of course, not by selling spots to wealthy individuals. It is important for exceptionally talented students from modest and middle-class backgrounds who would consider studying at some of the best schools in the US to know that the system is not stacked against them. But is equally important for prospective students to do their homework to find the institution that is the best fit with their interests and talents.

From the Straits Times, October 19, 2012

When will Asia join the MOOC party?

The hottest concept in higher education right now is MOOCs, or Massive Online Open Courses. This has been a while in the making. MIT’s decision a decade ago to create OpenCourseWare that put much of its course material online was a startling move but one that ultimately changed the way people learn in important ways.   It paved the way for Stanford’s recent experiment with putting some of its courses online in their entirety for free (though not for Stanford credit), which drew hundreds of thousands of students worldwide, showing that the technology to deliver courses to mass audiences had finally come of age.

In a remarkably short period of time, this had led to the creation of several initiatives and consortia by some of the world’s leading universities and faculty members: Coursera is a company founded by Stanford faculty members and has signed up several dozen top universities across the globe to offer online classes, Ed-X is a joint venture between Harvard and MIT that has recently brought Berkeley and Texas on board, and Udacity, a for-profit spinoff of Stanford that focuses on computer science and engineering courses that are project-based.

What is also noteworthy is that at a time when many commentators are advancing a rise of the East, decline of the West narrative when it comes to higher education, the MOOC phenomena is, at least in terms of producers, almost entirely a phenomenon of elite North American institutions.  If you look at the list of Ed-X and Coursera’s partners you find that three quarters of the US universities in the Times Higher Education top 20 global rankings are already participating in one of these ventures, as are Canada’s two highest-ranked universities, UT and UBC. In contrast, none of the top 5 European universities has a MOOC tie-up.

So where is Asia in all this? For the moment, world-class institutions like University of Tokyo, National University of Singapore, University of Hong Kong, Peking University or Pohang University are conspicuously absent.  The one exception is HKUST, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and this is perhaps not a surprise. Its charismatic President, Tony Chan, who formerly taught at UCLA and Yale and was a director at NSF, calls HKUST the most American institution in Hong Kong.

Will leading Asian universities, or those in the rest of the world for that matter, embrace the concept? For now, there are some impediments. For some countries, language is a barrier to putting their offerings online. No matter how good their courses,  English is still the lingua franca of the elite world for online learning. Still, given the almost insatiable demand for higher education in Asia, Coursera’s co-founder has expressed the hope that HKUST will bring some of its courses on line in Chinese.

More serious though may be barriers stemming from university financing and culture. In this new educational gold rush, schools are making huge bets on an uncertain return.  Ed-X is reportedly a partnership with a $60 million investment; Coursera’s US partners are predominantly private institutions with large endowments while the public partners are mainly the flagship schools of the top state systems and have a median endowment of over $2 billion. Even without large endowments, there is no question that many Asian countries are willing to spend vast sums investing in their education systems.

But are they willing to invest for such an uncertain return? There is still no real business model, after all . It is hard to imagine many university presidents in the region who would have the boldness or sense of job security of the University of Pennsylvania’s President, Amy Gutmann, who said that the cost of bringing her institution’s courses online with Corsera amounted to “a rounding error” in her budget and was unconcerned about whether the initiative made money.

This is not the first time that US institutions have placed big bets on online education. Fathom and AllLearn were early forays by Ivy League institutions as the 21st Century turned that were spectacular failures.  These early pioneers lost boatloads of money on those ventures.  And while there are good reasons to think this time may be different (though how many times have we heard that phrase from everything from housing bubbles to tech stocks), the willingness of these same institutions to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and try again speaks to a certain form of American entrepreneurship that is often lacking in the rest of the world. That is the ability to fail and not be crushed by it. It may be that the rest of the world will take a wait and see approach and only if the business model is successful and clear will they jump in.

There is another reason the MOOCs might continue to be a primarily US or American-style phenomenon for some time, though, and that has to do with academic culture.  The idea of free and open access in terms of putting one’s intellectual property into the public domain is a relatively new development in the US and certainly not the norm everywhere. In many countries, something as simple as a request to see a syllabus is treated like asking for access to state secrets.  MOOCs also deal with the crush of students by relying on peer-to-peer interactions and a generally highly interactive style.  Such a teaching and learning style is still not widely practiced. Phil Altbach, the Director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education, has noted one of China’s biggest obstacles to university reform and improvement:  “the old tradition of rote learning and uncritical adherence to established texts, reinforced for millennia by the Confucian examination system, [which] is … detrimental to independent problem-solving and the new knowledge economy.” In such a system, the kinds of courses that fit well with the philosophy and structure of the MOOCs are unlikely to flourish. Alex Katsomitros points out that Coursera offerings that are highly interactive have failed to gain traction in Korea where students are not yet comfortable with that learning style.

So, from both a supply and demand side, MOOCs may lag for the time being in Asia.  Given the potential size of the market for higher education in the region, however, it is worth figuring out the best ways of breaking down some of the barriers to their adoption.

Academic entrepreneurship: West meets East

photo by Lucien Teo

Last night I attended a reception at the beautiful residence of the German Ambassador to Singapore to mark the ties between Germany and Singapore in the life sciences. It gave the recent THE world rankings of universities some real world context, in the sense of showing the rise of Asia in some of the new growth sectors and the link to higher education.  One of the speakers was Dr. Andreas Schmidt, the CEO of Ayoxxa, a biotech firm based in Cologne and Singapore that just raised a round of investments to develop and bring to market its chip-based protein analysis technology.  That technology was developed by Dieter Trau, a German bioengineering professor at the National University of Singapore. NUS, which didn’t break the top 50 best schools for the life sciences as recently as two years ago, is now ranked 33rd in the world.

Other speakers talked about ‘Singapore as the new US’ and ‘the East as the new West’, highlighting, if in a slightly hyperbolic way, the ease of doing business in Asia and the growing talent pool in the region. Singapore and Germany were touted as bridges on their respective continents, given their central location, and thus natural partners to bring these two zones together. 

Is there a new era dawning where Asia represents a new frontier for European entrepreneurship? It’s hard to say.  The Economist’s recent coverage of the difficulty of starting businesses in Europe laments the continent’s lack of entrepreneurs, thus migration elsewhere where the conditions are better makes sense, though Berlin, London and Stockholm are seen as hubs of innovation.  Asian investment in creating leading universities is also an important factor: young scientists are being attracted because the quality of the labs surpasses what they are offered in Europe and North America.

On the other hand, start-ups need capital and there is still a tendency for capital to invest locally. The global slowdown isn’t helping matters with financing being tighter and in the case of Singapore, there is some grumbling that money that could be going in to investing in innovations is instead being plowed into an overheated property market where returns have been high with relatively little perceived risk. Still, as Asia continues its ascent to become a knowledge based economic center and source of innovation, it is good to see European entrepreneurs present.