Can we Save Higher Education?

I started as an IT employee many years ago. I learned the job of how to administer an IT network before there was even a degree for it in any college or university. Everyday was exciting back then. New things were learned, and databases of knowledge were kept.

I eventually turned that knowledge into an IT consulting company that my business partners and I ran for 17 years before selling it to a larger firm. My joy had switched from doing IT to teaching IT. I felt so lost those early years or learning IT, and I wanted to make sure the next generation had what they needed to succeed.

In 2012, there were so many students, there weren’t enough teachers to handle the crowds of IT learners. However, those crowds didn’t last. The recession that spurned the massive and rapid growth in colleges and universities around the US was replaced by a growing economy.

My colleagues didn’t think that was an issue as they had seen the rise and fall of US economies through many recessions over the decades. The next recession would come, and the growth would be back according to them. However, that’s not what happened. Couples stopped having children. At first, that wasn’t felt in our industry, but the fallout in the baby economy was immediately felt, and we were warned.

We’re now entering the college ages of what would have been another flock of students, and they simply don’t exist. Rules have been changed on international students as well, and they are also no longer coming to the US as they did over a decade ago.

What will become of Higher Ed?

We started the 20th century as training grounds for the industrial revolution, and that worked well for us for many decades. The early 2000’s saw disruption with the advent of online learning in the information age which was then magnified by the 2020 pandemic. I personally haven’t been back to the classroom since March of 2020 when the pandemic hit. I was sent home to teach on Zoom.

We moved from teaching applications on school and student owned computers to teaching in cloud managed labs hosted at Microsoft or Amazon AWS.

However, the students keep dwindling all the while we are updating our 100+ year old ways of teaching.

Staff positions are being terminated. Buildings are being closed. Century old universities are out of business. Whether you like it or not, this is just the beginning. We’re not going to see a growth of students like we have again in our lifetime. The people simply don’t exist.

To save our beloved institutions, we need to think even more in ways that will be uncomfortable at best and devastating to some at worst.?The devastation will likely come to those older and most learned professors who now teach a class of 5 or 10 students where they once taught 50 to 100. The cost will come down initially as incentives for students to come back. That means admins and other non-income producing staff will lose their positions. This has already begun in many institutions.

I now give you the answer, but you’re not going to be jumping for joy over it. You’ve been using it without even realizing it. The answer may be Artificial intelligence. It has come on strong and fast and is already disrupting the likes of Google and Microsoft. Google is afraid of it while Microsoft has announced investing in it to make it bigger and faster in response to our daily lives.

AI can now be available to students at all hours, and even on weekend and during holidays. When was the last time your professor emailed you on a Saturday when you had a question?

AI provides Realtime translation and natural language queries for all different subjects. In other words, everyone can use it without having to be a programmer.

I wondered how AI would change education, so I asked it. Here’s what it said:

“There are a few different ways that a chatbot can perform automated grading. One approach is to use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and interpret student responses. The chatbot can then compare the student's response to a set of pre-determined correct answers or a scoring rubric, and assign a grade accordingly. Another approach is to use machine learning (ML) models to analyze student responses and predict their grade. For example, a chatbot can use a supervised ML model that has been trained on a dataset of student responses and corresponding grades to predict the grade for new student responses.

Additionally, the chatbot can also perform automated grading of multiple-choice questions, true and false questions, fill in the blanks and short answers.”

It will not only replace many of our professors and ways of teaching, but it will also tell us how to do it. You can either let AI bury you, or you can use it as a tool to make innovations that will surpass all your hopes and dreams for our next smaller but mighty generation.

College courses aren't usually created by a single professor. They're created by a group which then sends it to a committee and after that is voted by other groups for approval. This usually take up to a year. We can now create those courses using AI much more quickly and nimbly with updates as needed before sending off for a vote. We won't even need to grade the papers and labs. AI can do that as well.

After teaching for many years, I started to create courses. I create courses for #Microsoft for LinkedIn Learning and #AscendEducation for colleges and universities. I try to incorporate the latest teaching styles that will be the best approach for our students in our new reality. I, for one, can't wait to see what AI will do for my classes with the proper oversight. I expect it to take us to places that only AI can define for us when we ask it nicely.

The answer is "Yes! We can save our higher education institutions." Just don't expect things to be business as usual. Our business will be amazing.

Steve Jobs said it best “Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.”

Robert McMillen