Higher Education Is Stuck in the Middle Ages -- Will Universities Adapt or Die Off in Our Digital World?

By Don Tapscott, Edge. Posted June 17, 2009.

The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

As someone who gives many lectures a year, I appreciate the irony of this view. But I understand that my lectures are not a good way of learning. They play a limited role of interesting an audience, changing their view or possibly motivating them to do something different. But I dare say that 90 percent of what I've said is lost.

True, this broadcast model is enhanced in some disciplines through essays, labs and even seminar discussions. And of course many professors are working hard to move beyond this model. However, it remains dominant overall.

Technology and the web provide an important element of a new model, but so far few have adopted it. If someone frozen 300 years ago miraculously came alive today and looked at the professions -- a physician in an operating theater, a pilot in a jumbo cockpit, a engineer designing an automobile in a CAD system -- they would surely marvel at how technologies had transformed the knowledge work. But if they walked into a university lecture hall, they would no doubt be comforted that some things have not changed.

The New Generation of Students

The broadcast model might have been perfectly adequate for the baby-boomers, who grew up in broadcast mode, watching 24 hours a week of television (not to mention being broadcast to as children by parents, as students by teachers, as citizens by politicians, and when then entered the workforce as employees by bosses). But young people who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet. In fact television viewing is dropping and TV has become nothing more than ambient media for youth -- akin to Muzak. Sitting mutely in front of a TV set -- or a professor -- doesn't appeal to or work for this generation. They learn differently best through non-sequential, interactive, asynchronous, multi-tasked and collaborative

Young Americans under 30 are the first to have grown up digital. Growing up at a time when cell phones, the Internet, texting and Facebook are as normal as the refrigerator. This interactive media immersion at a formative stage of life has affected their brain development and consequently the way they think and learn.

Some writers, of course, think that Google makes you stupid; it's so hard to concentrate and think deeply amid the overwhelming amounts of bits of information online, they contend. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, even calls them the "dumbest generation" in his recent book on the topic.

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They're used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What's more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

If universities want to adapt the teaching techniques to their current audience, they should, as I've been saying for years, make significant changes to the pedagogy. And the new model of learning is not only appropriate for youth -- but increasingly for all of us. In this generation's culture is the new culture of learning.

The professors who remain relevant will have to abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students -- shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one. Second, they should encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor's store of information. Third, they need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Finally, they need to tailor the style of education to their students' individual learning styles.

Because of technology this is now possible. But this is not fundamentally about technology per se. Rather it represents a change in the relationship between students and teachers in the learning process.

The Most Vulnerable Universities

The ability to engage young people at university obviously depends on the institution, and the individual professor. The great liberal arts colleges are doing a wonderful job of stimulating young minds because with big endowments and small class sizes students can have more of a customized collaborative experience. My son Alex graduated from Amherst College, a small undergraduate university with a student teacher ratio of 8-1. His teachers included a Pulitzer prize winner, Nobel Laureate and overall professors who live to work with students who enable them to learn.

But the same cannot be said of many of the big universities that regard their prime role to be a centre for research, with teaching as an inconvenient afterthought, and class sizes so large that they only want to "teach" is through lectures.

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Don Tapscott is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank in Genera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

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