If Gen-M are connecting and collaborating at a pace faster than baby-boomers, how are they doing it? Is it through new gadgets? Is it through their skills using these gadgets? Or anything else? Are they doing it right? Is anyone helping them to do it right? If not, has educational institutions got any role to play in it?
It is a combination of these and many more like that are the daunting questions to deliver education in the 21st century. How can a computer be used beyond the realms of its intended use for businesses and for personal and for entertainment to give totally a new meaning with the advent and the usage of collaborative software platforms?
Sharing is new way of life. Gone are the days when a select few would try to muscle things around with the knowledge they have. Knowledge has become universal. If so, the brick and mortar institutions are facing new challenges. They need to operate more as businesses than as institutions delivering education. How can they compete? How is this possible?
Peter Drucker said, in one of his many books that he wrote, he felt ashamed of coining the word ‘profit center’ for an organization when it should really be ‘cost center’ till such time it finds a customer to place an order for the goods produced. Hence, customers are real profit centers. He corrected himself – showing that learning never stops.
If customers are profit centers for businesses then students are the customers, and hence the profit centers for educational institutions. If what has been taught is differing from what needs to be learnt a gap usually forms. However, closer a gap, closer the chances that an institution will become a profit center. Otherwise, it will suffer the consequences of losing its most valuable customer – students.
By installing or depending on technology alone will not solve the problem, unless it addresses the underlying culture of the newer generation. For example, technology in every village in India may not help to lift the education literary if the culture of the village masses is to work in the farms. Technology is only a tool, but what should be noted is that the delivery of the education is of more significance than the tool used to delivering it.
Hence, the knowledge about COL is needed to deliver the education – using the tool that technology can provide for the 21st century. The educational institutions are best equipped in delivering the education as they have a process already in place to do it. However, the process must be revamped or tuned right for the 21st century. It is now possible to do with the help from COL.
Since the technology usage has become all-pervasive, it is now essential for us to use COL framework to use the technology to help Gen-M discover other quadrants to complete the learning. This journey must be built into the currently existing processes to tune them for the 21st century. Those educational institutions embarking on this journey will close the gap much faster – between what is being taught to what is being learnt. Hence those institutions will become closer to attracting more students to the learning process and hence flourish to become profitable and sustain the ever-changing world.
While organizations are beginning to learn from outside in, it is time for educational institutions to adopt the same technique to learn from outside in to revamp the processes. I am very much heartened to note that this process happening already at McHenry County College in McHenry, Illinois.
Just augmenting the brick and mortar institutions with more technology without the much-needed information literacy to go along with it will be synonymous to water down the drain. Information literacy can only come by going beyond the community that a school or a college or a district serve. While an institution needs to stay focused on delivering education, it should be prepared to change or adapt or transform itself to the changes happening outside.