Repositioning Higher Education in Africa: Building Reputation Gaps in African Universities By Dr. Valentine Obi

 

The theme of today is Repositioning Higher Education in Africa: Building Reputation Gaps in African Universities. In my discussion this morning, I will also be talking about the changing role of higher education in this age of disruption, with a particular focus on the way, computation, data and innovation are underpinning these changes.

 

To begin, I think we all recognise, we're in the midst of a global transformation that's catalysed by rapid acceleration of digital technologies including unprecedented access to computation and data. The scale, scope and pace of these advances are truly unprecedented in human history.

 

To put this in perspective, if you look at the scale of these advances, we're not only dealing with a singular technology but rather a set of interrelated technological breakthroughs with a wide range of applications from health to finance, transportation to energy, manufacturing and far beyond. This pace of innovation has been unprecedented and it requires new strategies for partnership, not only within a campus community but also across to government as well as industry partners.

 

Let's consider for a moment, just what we have seen in the last 10 years and what it portends for Higher Education as a whole.

For example, the world build houses and it takes weeks and months, though in Canaanland, it is different, we grow houses. But imagine a day we can print houses, just like you print your letters, thesis documents, etc,  at one tenth of the cost of building a house today and within 24 hours.

 

Imagine a day, if I said to you, that by integrating biomedical, clinical and scientific data, we can predict the onset of diseases, identify unwanted drug interactions, automate and personalize diagnosis and therapy.

 

Imagine a day, that by using autonomous technologies, we can have our cars drive safely and securely without the danger or at least mitigating the danger of traffic accidents caused by human error.

 

And finally, imagine a day, that by integrating emerging technologies such as AI, AI enabled learning techniques and inverted or flipped classrooms, we can achieve personalised outcome based education for each student.

 

Flipped classroom is a “pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter”

 

Now, all of this, applications, and advances I talked about, they're not science fiction. In fact, some people in this audience can attest that, every one of these scenarios are possible. At least, to some extent, we can do most

of this today. And that's been as a result of advances that we've seen in science and technology, over the last couple of decades. Today, in some cases computational technologies are out performing even the most experienced human beings.

 

FACTS 1 (Show 3D Printed Houses)

3D House Printing

House building, generally speaking, has changed little since humans began stacking blocks to make shelters. Most homes today still require teams of workers to add layers of blocks or other building materials on top of each other manually. This method heavily relies on individual skills, produces large amounts of waste and noise, takes time and yields low productivity.

The 3D printing approach however, promises to build houses faster, cheaper, and more accurately with fewer people. With benefits like these, it’s no wonder that 3D printing construction is gaining momentum. In China, for example, they already 3D printed a complete 6-storey apartment building (show the buildings).

To put things in perspective, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, once declared that by 2030, a quarter of all the buildings in Dubai would be 3D printed.

All major shoe companies have started 3D printing of their shoes. It is believed that, by the end of this year, new smartphones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect

shoe at home. Airplane spare parts are already 3D printed in remote airports.

 

The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from $18,000 to $400 within 10 years. In the same time, it has become 100 times faster. It is forecasted that by 2027, 10% of everything that's being produced will be 3D printed.

 

FACTS 2

(Show the Tricorder devices).

Health: The Tricorder Xprize is done. The $10 million competition, is aimed at incentivizing companies that will develop a sci-fi medical device (called the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and you breath into it. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. Each device must be able to diagnose 15 different medical conditions and monitor vital signs for 72 hours.  It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medicine, nearly for free.

 

The Tricorder device is available today. It will accurately diagnose 13 health conditions or diseases and capture five real-time health vital signs, independent of a health care worker or facility, and in a way that provides a compelling consumer experience.

 

FACTS 3

(Show Autonomous cars)

Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self driving cars appeared for the public. It is projected that in the next couple of years, the whole car industry will be disrupted. It simply means, you don't want to own a car anymore. You will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and can be productive while driving. Car parking spaces can then be transformed into parks or something better. Our kids may never get a driver's licence and may never want to own a car.

 

Data available states that, 1,2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. That is one accident every 100,000km, with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save at the least a million lives each year

 

Most car companies might become bankrupt. Traditional car companies try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. The fact is that the big car companies are completely terrified of companies like Tesla. Just this year Tesla, became the most valuable company in the world, making Elon Musk, the founder, the richest man on earth.

 

(Show Apple car and Tim Cook).

(Show Tesla car and Elon Musk).

 Insurance companies will have massive problems, because without accidents, the insurance will become 100x cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.

 

Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in more beautiful and safe neighborhood.

 

I can go on and on but we don’t have the time, but that is where this planet is headed.

 

Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution!

 

Welcome to the Exponential Age!

 

So, how does it affect higher education. And that’s the problematic thing for me, that most of our universities are remarkably complacent and unaware of the looming threat over their fiefdoms. Why? Waiting in the wings, are a number of really well funded high tech companies looking at you, the Universities, sitting on a $4.6 trillion global education market. Now tell me, if that isn't a target worth disrupting. Education is no longer just for your citizens, it is now a global franchise. The pandemic at least showed us that. People were able to study from unimaginable distances.

 

The first big disruption in higher education, started in 2011, with the announcement of a MOOC, a massive open online courses, that was taught at Stanford University, 120,000 students worldwide took it.

But, it was not successful, someone might say,  because only 2% completed it. But wait a minute, it was an eye opener and the world became fully aware of the different way to educate their teaming population. Let’s for  a minute, step back. CU receives over 10000 applications every year but we can only take about 1500. What happens to the rest the 8,500 potential higher education ready students? Next year, more thousands are added to this waiting list and on and on it goes. Who is going to educate them?

 

So, Coursera, edX, Udacity, has all started to develop courses, using new methods of data gathering, so every single learner that they have, is generating big data.

 

All of those big data are informing much more accurate algorithms. And those algorithms are outputting online classes, which are adjustable, reliable, individualised, personalised; able to move with the needs of the student, able to set the bar just high enough that it's a challenge, and not crushing.  Frankly, they're able to turn education into all the best things about games.

 

How do we get student addicted to learning? The only way to do that, is to  make It fun, engaging and challenging. Just like their games that they spent hours on.

 

Can we come up with an incentive like that for regular classes? I'm not sure.

 But, here’s the truth. The university is facing a world in which the Internet has all knowledge available for free. Any student can go anywhere to find any information. Truth, is that Universities are not anymore in the business of providing information. Universities are supposed to be in the business of telling people, how to interpret information and working with them to understand their world. And yet, these new courses, which are powered by really excellent machine learning, are doing precisely that.

 

I'm not in anyway, trying to depress you, quite the contrary. Technological innovations have always disrupted the status quo and they are here to stay. But, there's still greater pressure today on higher education, as the engine of progress for any country. Therefore, we need to be smarter and strategic in the way we deliver education in the 21^st century. But you know and you are aware, that advances in computing and communication technologies, have had and will continue to have a profound impact on society. It will impact and affect almost every occupation. So, we must live ready, Re-learn a couple of things, if we have to, to be part of the new chapter.

 

Rethinking change in structure and pedagogy, that is, the principles and methods of instruction in our Universities, are inevitable. If we step back further, to the beginning of university education.

 

The first university, the university Bologna was started by Christian monks in 1088. It was really just a gathering of people who showed up from all over, because, there were a lot of people who wanted to learn something. And alot of people who wanted to teach something. So, it was called a “community of teachers and scholars”.

 

But, it started as a collection of students, referring to themselves as universitas,  because they came from all different nations. And it was a collective bargaining society, which allowed them to hire instructors to teach exactly what they wanted to learn during exactly the time period they wanted to learn it. They had very strict and high standards about faculty, for example, if you couldn't fill an auditorium you clearly were terrible and you were fired. If everybody slept through your lecture then you were fired. And if you didn't know your material, you guessed it, you were fired.

 

So it was a pretty rough time for academics and yet it was an incredible time for learners. This was a university without diplomas. This was a university without a curriculum, students designed it themselves. The classes, however, are pretty much the way university classes are now. Which is also a puzzle; why are we still teaching the way they did a millennium ago?

 

So,fundamentally, we haven't changed the way we teach, since that time.

 

One question, that has been coming up for a while, is would Universities last forever?

 

The Unfolding Era

Let me read an excerpts that came out in the news on Google Education and it goes: 

Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree. Google's new certificate program takes only six months to complete, and will be a fraction of the cost of college.

 

Google made this announcement that could change the future of work and higher education: These courses, which the company is calling Google Career Certificates, teach foundational skills that can help job-seekers immediately find employment. However, instead of taking years to finish like a traditional university degree, these courses are designed to be completed in about six months.

 

Kent Walker senior vice president of global affairs at Google said, "In our own hiring, we will now treat these new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles.

 

The six-month course is estimated to cost just under $300--less than many university students spend on textbooks in one semester alone. Additionally, Google said it would fund 100,000 needs-based scholarships in support of the new programs.

 

The three new programs Google is offering, together with the median annual wage for each position (as quoted by Google), are:

·         Project manager         ($93,000)

·         Data analyst                ($66,000)

·         UX designer                 ($75,000)

Google claims the programs "equip participants with the essential skills they need to get a job," with "no degree or prior experience required to take the courses." Each course is designed and taught by Google employees who are working in the respective fields.

 

With all these in our horizon, I think, lots of our universities, are going to have to scale back, retrench, not try to do everything, focus on the very things that they do best, and not try to cover all topics. But I think also, that the universities are going to have to figure out how to change or they may lose relevance in this new ecosystem. Our Universities should become global universities,  providing courses, just in time for lifelong learners, on schedules, that lifelong learners can handle. Some of them may be in person, and a lot of them may be at a distance.

 

I would say also, that, there's huge hope in this as well, especially for those who get it right. Statistics shows that, in the next three years 3.3 billion people globally are going to become part of the global middle class, with very little money, but hungry for education. By 2030, that's going to be 4.8 billion people. Universities can serve millions, but a global university can serve the billions who want to go forward and educate themselves. Our Universities can latch on, on this and get ready to serve the billions. It is possible and CU can champion this, for obvious reason. I think the Board should give the CU management the task to train minimum 3 million people within the next 5 years. That’s an estimated revenue of at least N300 billion for the University.

THE CU MANDATE

The CU mandate, number one, basically summarizes all I have been talking about this past couple of minutes. God is in the future and the future is in Him. So, let’s try to unwrap Mandate No One briefly as I close.

 

1.      Raise a new generation of leaders through a qualitative and life applicable training system that focuses on value and skill development.

 

New Generation of leaders:

Leaders that think differently, solution based leaders, thinking outside the box leaders. Leaders that believe that there is better and optimal way to do what is being done today to get better results. Leaders that are not afraid to explore, innovate and create. These leaders are not satisfied with the status quo.

 

Life Applicable training system: Not the traditional but life applicable training, such that people can apply on their day to day life. Life applicable training system, that makes the graduate hit the workforce running. Businesses are tired of retraining, supposedly trained graduates. They are educated alright, but not fit for purpose.

 

This is truly no fault of the students or lecturers but simply the system. The system that was designed centuries ago. It is long broken and no longer fit for purpose.

So, the students are being educated alright, but they cannot apply most of the things they learn in the work environment.

 

The Chancellor, once said, where is the best place to train a motor mechanic? In the engineering department or in a proper motor mechanic workshop? As a student at Harvard Business School, one thing that is always prevalent in our courses, are visits to companies and organizations, that we are discussing about in the class, in order to have first hand information with some of the main actors in the discussion. Another feature, is the invitation of experts in the field of study to take some parts of the course with our lecturer.

 

Business owners, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders are sometimes invited on campus to teach or share experiences with the students. Some example of these, are businesses that failed, re-engineered, got back and became profitable again. Invitation to speak, can also go to business leaders, whose businesses failed but they are willing to share their experiences. The idea is to learn from the mistakes of others, so you don’t make the same.

 

Focus on value: Truly, how can you teach management and business courses, when you haven’t run any business at all, whether successfully or unsuccessfully.

 

This is why, I believe, that we should encourage symbiotic relationships between universities and the business world. Relationships that will help the universities understand their challenges, research on it and develop solutions for them with the students. This will lead to the production of graduates that are value adding. The University must be able to say that, these graduates will deliver to businesses in this sector, this kind of value, because, we have researched on their common challenges and we have prepared our students to solve them.

 

Remember that these students are just going to spend just 4 years in the University and then about 50 years in the workplace. Doesn’t it make sense to focus more on what will make that 50 years adventure more exciting and fulfilling?

 

Shouldn’t Our curriculum consist of  topics like:

 

·         How do we solve world hunger?

·         How do we cure cancer?

·         How do we cure sickle cell?

·         How can we build cheaper houses?

·         How do we educate 1m students this year? Etc.

 

Focus on Skills development

Theres is nothing you are going to teach a student today, that he or she cannot find on the internet. One of the main criticisms of higher education through the years has been that universities don't properly equip students with the real-world skills they need in the workplace. Although traditional degrees are still deemed necessary in fields like law or medicine, more and more employers have signaled that they no longer view them as a must-have--Apple, IBM, and Google, just to name a few.

 

We therefore need to seriously rethink what is taught in school entirely and perhaps teach less content, opening more time and opportunities for skills development.

 

With all that I have said in this discussion, if we can apply The CU Mandate One across board in detail, we are on our way to repositioning our universities and closing the  gaps that exist,

 

So, the future is here.  All the educational components and all the technological components are in place, it's just for us to run with it.

 

Habakkuk 2:2

And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.

 

Thank you very much.