Education is unable to think out of the box. And the box for them is a campus. The reality is that you need to throw the box out.
Ai is not going to disrupt anything unless it fosters a new paradigm. Without changing the paradigm, changes are incremental, not exponential. So it wasn’t atm that killed bank branches. It was digital banking and the smartphone.
It is banks which hold the common man’s savings. Not fintech. And people don’t put FDs in apps. And that is the only thread that keeps banking alive. Unless scams kill that and parking of money moves elsewhere.
Education has similar challenges.
And similar dilemmas.
I was at an Indo UK event on quality assurance in Indian universities. There were really smart people. Articulating really well. They made some very good points. One professor from NIT Trichi spoke of outcomes and experiences. Outcome is expertise and employment. Experience is peer group, soft skills, hostel bonding etc. They were hoping the experience economy would keep paying their salaries and the gardener’s bill. An articulate Brit made some great points. He said that ratings and rankings had lost relevance. Each student has a different need and you can’t have one ranking for all. You need to help a student rank the options as per his need. A startup I met by Aman Singh called Gradright believes he can do it using ai. There was a serious discussion on ai saying that ai can impact both outcomes and experience. So ai can help teach better and even help find jobs (really !!!). And it can improve the experience by increasing free time greatly ( then why live on campus).
But this is not an elocution competition. And they missed the bigger picture completely.
The university as something that lives in a campus is dead as a concept. And describing education that happens in a predefined time slot – in a one curriculum, one speed, one format for all – is an obsolete concept.
Even the concept of building a university by department is obsolete. Life does not have problems called physics, chemistry, biology and maths. Nor do they come with names like electrical, mechanical and civil engineering. They come with names like hunger, healthspan, energy, movies, batteries, vaccines – none of these can be mapped 1:1 with university departments. So you need fluid boundaries which universities don’t have.
So the university as it exists has no future. And the employment they create – from gardener’s to professors – is no longer sustainable. Nor is the fees. As avenues to find a spouse or pass some time – there are better options – mostly online and smartphone accessed
So what are the features of this animal called a NextGen university.
No university.
Only research organisations.
The undergraduate factory business is dead. And we have to look at repurposing the real estate and creating alternate employment for the tens of thousands – with no research background or ability – masquerading as teachers.
