Innovating higher education-Meric Gertler , President, University of Toronto

A conversation with Meric Gertler, the President of University of Toronto, an expert on Urbanization. I have been talking to Meric on various issues over the last decade, this is one of the first interview that I am putting out on Linkedin. Broadly, we discussed : how is higher education changing and what should Universities or institution of learning do to prepare for this change, why the design of classroom and teaching needs to change. How has University of Toronto changed its approach to teaching, learning and skills.

In the last few years, I have realized that academic world is the slowest in reinventing itself. As a result several Indian Universities and many foreign universities are stuck in a world that has changed. Academics with their deep reservoir of accumulated knowledge are the slowest to change their framework of thinking. This affects not just their institutions but also several generation of students. I have been trying to bring out innovations by talking to leaders in the higher education world so that it inspires a change. This is one such conversation, I hope you enjoy it, share it and let me know your views.

Hi everybody this is Yatish Rajawat here and I am here with Meric Getler who is the President of the University of Toronto. Hi Meric.

Hi Yatish.

Welcome to this conversation. I’m going to ask you a few things as President of one of the larger or largest universities in the west. How do you see the three mega-trends shaping universities affecting higher education? The three trends are : one the ubiquitous availability of content and learning courses online, Second gap between skills and employability rising and third people are questioning the value of knowledge versus the value of skill. In a Google world- knowledge is ubiquitous and easily available while skills need to be learnt. An electrical engineering graduate does not have the skills to wire a house. How do you see these three trends shaping universities and higher education per-se?

Well these are great questions and they are questions that I think every day. Every educator today is preoccupied with them so let’s see where we can go with this.

 A lot has been said about how knowledge is becoming widely available so readily available it is already changing the way that education is taking place. And I think it is true, but maybe not quite in the way that most people imagine. If we were having this conversation two or three years ago we would be making predictions that online learning would replace all other forms of learning. And it is only a matter of time. Not if but when. 

Now that we have had a few years of experience with online learning with MOOCs ( Massive Open Online Courses). And similar kinds of experiences we’ve come to realize two things: First of all that MOOCs are great substitutes for traditional forms of learning in certain circumstances. But more often they are great compliments to more traditional forms of learning. So for example we have come to realize how we can integrate online learning tools into our traditional teaching and learning methods. So that we can make classroom time more valuable by making it more interactive, more focused on problem solving and small group learning experiences.

“ We have come to realize how we can integrate online learning tools into our traditional teaching and learning methods. So that we can make classroom time more valuable by making it more interactive, more focused on problem solving and small group learning experiences.”

 It means that interactivity and active learning is extremely important. So you use your own time as a student to perhaps consume the basic content of the course through online modules that you might view on your own time. But when you come to class –

Not in college/ university time, but in my own time I would be looking at it in the hostel or at home–

Yeah at home. Exactly. Some people like to work late at night. Some people like to work early in the morning. The idea is that you can customize your learning experience using these online tools in a way that work with your personal habits best. But then that face-to-face experience becomes more valuable –

The face to face experience becomes more valuable to do what exactly then?

 Working with your professor or your graduate teaching assistant on using the knowledge of the course to solve actual problems and to address actual problems and doing it either individually or even better doing it in teams. 

Two questions follow from that. Does that mean that the classroom is slowly steadily turning into a problem solving area ? Is teaching now more collaborative and team interactions, than in the past ?

True.

Therefore, the physical location of the classroom becomes increasingly important in terms of is it embedded in the problem or is it too far away from the problem?

Well it’s a great question and there are two ways of answering that; one is by looking at the actual physical structure of the classroom itself, because it actually –

The era of the sage-on-the-stage as it has been called is over. A model around which most traditional classrooms have been physically designed. And that is of course being supplemented with this more interactive form of learning. It has forced us to ask ourselves how do we redesign a classroom so that you can switch from one format to-- a small group learning format to-- a much more interactive learning format. We’ve just recently built a fantastic new classroom in our new Myhal Center for Engineering and Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UFT.

Meric :The era of the sage-on-the-stage as it has been called is over.

Tell me a bit more about the redesign of this classroom that has been done?

It in our new Myhal Center for Engineering and Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UFT. Next door to the administration building at UFT. Just finished a couple of months ago. It looks like a traditional auditorium that accommodates 500 people with a stage and the audience seated facing the stage. But It can be switched to small round tables in the auditorium as they are on tiered levels they can kind of serve as team based interactive problem solving mode.  It’s proven to be very successful. And people are coming from all over the world to look at this room. It’s also very nicely wired so that we can integrate the online material into the in-person teaching format seamlessly. So, that’s one of the method that teaching is evolving

Meric :It looks like a traditional auditorium that accommodates 500 people with a stage and the audience seated facing the stage. But It can be switched to small round tables in the auditorium as they are on tiered levels they can kind of serve as team based interactive problem solving mode.

Therefore, University of Toronto has fundamentally changed the design of a classroom? Or

Yeah, but the other thing that is changing where does learning occur? The advent of digital tools has helped us appreciate that learning needs to take place outside the classroom. Learning will work best when it is situated in a rich environment where there are real problems at hand, on your doorstop. Hence in an urban university like the University of Toronto which has got three campuses situated in the middle of the greater Toronto area. All of a sudden it’s realizing that it has these tremendous assets on its doorstep that is to say interesting problems of the city in neighborhoods all around us. We have this great opportunity for our students and faculty to engage in active learning by addressing real problems in real locations in real time right next door. But also globally as well. And this is where we leverage our global networks.

Meric :Learning will work best when it is situated in a rich environment where there are real problems at hand, on your doorstop….. We have this great opportunity for our students and faculty to engage in active learning by addressing real problems in real locations in real time right next door.

This is what we discussed almost a decade back in your office in Toronto when you talked about the Urbanization problem and the need for the university to tackle it ? How do you consciously open up academicians to explore the problems in their nearby vicinity, instead of esoteric stuff halfway across the world?

Exactly. So the good news is that digital tools have forced us to look anew at things we used to take for granted. Where we are actually is tremendously important and tremendously valuable in providing a richer learning experience for students and also richer research opportunities for our faculty. We are now recognizing these really interesting topics that they can tackle in their own research. 

Well I would say the academician needs to look at both the near and far problems its not either or. But the first part is really important and there great opportunities nearby that we are fostering greater awareness of –

Give me an example ?

 In Toronto, there is this very pressing need to expand the supply of affordable housing. To tackle this increasing affordability challenge. That a lot of people, not just the lower income class but even the middle- income families are facing. This is a problem that can be tackled by a professor of suburban planning and architecture who can approach this from a design perspective.

Or just as a Civil engineering problem?

Yes, civil engineering perspective. It’s a problem of economist and management faculty. 

Where do these facilities come do they come up where these families go to work to reduce the commute –

Exactly and then how you price these kinds of facilities.

It can also be seen as a social problem how do you create the community which is complete and integrated and crime free…

Exactly right. So not only are these interesting and important problems to solve, but here’s the other thing we’ve realized that if we can encourage more of our faculty and our students to work on these projects we do two things simultaneously; first, we make Toronto a more livable city. Second; we help ourselves as a university, because the more livable we make Toronto the easier it is to attract and retain talented faculty, staff and students. So it’s a case of enlightened self-interest. And you know I’ve talked about this a lot around the university and pointed out to people why this is very much in our own interest and people have really responded. Our faculty have jumped in and really –

Meric,“When our faculty and students work on these projects we do two things simultaneously; first, we make Toronto a more livable city. Second; we help ourselves as a university, because the more livable we can make Toronto the easier it is to attract and retain talented faculty, staff and students. It’s a case of enlightened self-interest.”

It does another important thing it makes your students employable within the city. Because if they are working with the municipality or if they are working with the city in affordable housing than the likelihood that they would be employed by them is higher because they have already worked on the real problem.

You are exactly right.

 I think the most crucial part is application.

So you have put your finger on another megatrend in education that is growing interest in experiential learning what is sometimes called work integrated learning which we know our students –

I call it applied learning.

Right. Our students want it, moreover employers want it. Employers are saying we would much rather hire somebody who has already got some experience than someone who has no experience. This is a trend that is taking hold in Canada and in many other countries.  Bringing it back to your first question, it’s another reason why where you do your learning really makes a great difference.

These kinds of experiential opportunities are a tremendous advantage for our students. 

 One of the problems that we discussed almost 10 years back was the problem of urbanization that India is facing. The scale and the scope of this problem is much larger than in Canada. In Canada if you say the degree is X, we are at 20X or 35X because the population itself is 35 times. You created this multidisciplinary school on Urbanization tell us more about it.

 Well we established The school of Cities we recognized that the biggest challenges facing cities today are complicated and they will require multidisciplinary teams to come together to generate viable solutions. If you look at transportation issues and congestion for example and the need to expand public transit as one of the responses to that. Once again you can approach it purely as an engineering problem.

 You can also say why transportation itself? Why mobility itself?

Precisely. You can think of it as a behavioral challenge, how should be the behavior of people who live in the city who have been used to driving their own car or their motorcycle or some other motorized vehicle forever. How do you convince them?

The identity of individuals is linked to their vehicles? Its representative of their self, their ego?

Quite so. Hence you have to understand it’s a social and a cultural phenomenon as well.  We appreciated that and we also looked at the environmental dimensions. What are the benefits of being able to shift more transportation activity from internal combustion based travel to other form that are more efficient. Recognizing that many urban problems are multidimensional in nature we thought it was right to create a new platform inside the university to foster this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration.

 We have lots of departments that you can think of as silos because they work in their own sphere. Their own discipline, on their own paradigms and they do great work. But it doesn’t enable them to work together in these interdisciplinary teams. So this new school of cities is designed to support that. We intentionally designed it as a big, open tent, where we invited faculty from all across the university to get involved. Then we did a little kind of inventory we realized that there are now over 400 faculty members at the University of Toronto who work on some aspect of cities. It could be in disciplines like urban planning or architecture urban designer or landscape architecture. It could be indirectly in geography, it could be in political science, the Open Government. It could be in economics, civil engineering, public health, environmental science. There was more than 400 such faculty members. The school has really focused applied research which is very problem or solution oriented.

Define this approach to research is it very different from what other Universities do?

Applied research. Because again a lot of the fundamental research is taking place in departments but a school like this I think ought to focus on problem solving. So it is very much kind of applied research. Secondly to think about new teaching programs that would be targeted not only to traditional full time students but also to people who are already working professionals, working in city government, working in the private sector on urban focus issues and helping them to upgrade their capabilities. And then third, a very strong mandate for outreach and engagement where we see this as a connection point between the university and the city around us where we can share our expertise with partners in the community, but also we can learn so much from them and you know become aware of interesting problems to solve, which actually give our students and our faculty really interesting things to work on. So that’s the idea behind the school. Now the global piece of it is really important. It’s a local play but there is also a global play that we recognized from the get-go. We could enrich our understanding of problems in Toronto by comparing our problems and our approaches to the problems and the approaches that we find in other great cities around the world. And Mumbai is such a great example. And India has many you know large dynamic cities that present very interesting problems to solve. We started the conversation with IIT Bombay five years ago, maybe six years ago. Where we said look you know you’ve got expertise in cities, we’ve got expertise in cities, both of us were interested in not only creating these platforms within each of our institutions for interdisciplinary collaboration but also for working collaboratively across the ocean. Partnering with one another. Joint research projects and joint teaching. So as we were forming the school of cities we were also developing our idea of partnering with institutions like IIT Bombay in India. Tata Trust got involved and stepped forward and agreed to support the creation of a new center in Mumbai which would be a kind of joint venture between Tata Trust and the University of Toronto, a kind of school of cities alliance they are referring to it as which will provide a focal point for activities in India. And a kind of a base for what we see as an emerging network of interactions between the University of Toronto and other institutions in India working in cities starting with IIT Bombay, but ultimately growing beyond that as well. 

Thank you very much for your time, Meric. I hope to continue this conversation with you in the coming years.

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