21st Century University: A Knowledge Server

More than ever, the overall wealth of nations relies on their wealth in educated people and on their capacity to create and innovate. The golden age of knowledge has started in the 20th century and this trend is confirmed and highly emphasized in the down of this third millennium. The university has never been as important and the volume of education never that high. The university offers educational opportunities, creates knowledge and provides services. The university has a significant impact on almost every aspect of contemporary society from personal prosperity and well-being to economic competiveness to national security, to protecting the environment and enriching  the culture. There is a consensus on the fact that no other public investments have higher economic pay off than those made in higher education.

While the primary missions of the university is referred to in terms of teaching, research, and service. These missions can also be regarded as the twentieth century credos of creation, preservation, integration, transmission, and application of knowledge. If we refer to the computer language of networks, the university can be considered as a “knowledge server,” providing the services of knowledge (i.e., creating, preserving, transmitting, or applying knowledge) in whatever form needed by contemporary society.

From this prospect, it is clear that while the fundamental knowledge server roles of the university do not change over time, the expressions of these roles do change and change quite significantly.

The fundamental roles of the university consisting in knowledge creation, preservation, integration, transmission, and application shall be preserved. However the particular realization of these basic roles will continue to change in significantly profound ways, as they have so often in the past.  From this prospect the challenge of change and transformation, is simply to sustain the traditional roles the university has always been playing in society.

The 21st century University will not settle on merely transmitting along the best of past   knowledge but will actively integrate the modern concept of the importance of creating new knowledge.  The 21st century university model will most probably be an IT-driven model.

Teaching

• Higher Student demographic

Until a few decades ago, university education was deemed necessary and useful for only a selected few. Now most occupations in the modern economy and labor market require a university degree. Studies based on foresight analysis have shown that more that 70% of the jobs to be offered by 2020 will require a university degree. This will translate into a larger demand for post-secondary education than in previous times. This increased demand will come from a more diverse segment of the population and will force system to deliver a high quality education to that large and diverse population.

Until recently the university developed on the basis of the apprenticeship model of an expert working closely with an apprentice. The expert assigns tasks, provides supervision and training to carry out those tasks, and offers continuous feedback on the work. This basic model, or its modern day developments of "the expert individual tutor," has proven to be the most effective demonstrated way to education.

Would these approaches of the past be adequate to fulfill the current society’s educational needs? Those needs consist on effectively teaching complex technical knowledge and skills to the bulk of the total population. The answer is probably NO as this is an unprecedented educational challenge.

• The Impact of IT

The developments of information technology (IT) over the past few decades offer obvious opportunities for changing the way university teaching is carried out to make higher education f more effective and more efficient. Surprisingly, this immense potential remain largely untapped., Generally the educational IT currently available is quite limited in both quantity and quality regardless of some spectacular examples. As a consequence of that, faculty members of the 21st century university  will likely have to trade their roles as teachers against those of designers of new learning experiences, and creators of innovative educational processes, and environments.

It is likely that in the 21st century university, faculty will drop the current teaching style.  The  actual solitary learning process where students basically  learn on their own through reading, writing, and solving problems will evolve and develop into collective learning experiences in which students work together and learn together.  In such educational landscape the faculty member becomes more of a consultant or a coach than a teacher. Faculty members will no longer be focused on gathering and then transmitting conventional knowledge but rather more concerned   by inspiring, motivating, and managing a dynamic learning process by students. However, the issue here is that today’s faculty members did not go through the adequate training and do not have the skills needed to engage in such educational experience. The university will have to undergo profound changes that would affect  its deepest   roots  if the process of creating new knowledge is to evolve from the solitary scholar to teams of scholars, often spread over a number of disciplines. On other words high education objectives would be achieved through the process of generating knowledge by performing research. The concept of learning by doing will be emphasized and would probably need to be revisited and institutionalized.

• Research & Development

In the 21st century university, basic and applied researches will be probably merged under the label of Research& Development. In addition to the adoption of the concept of learning by doing, this will emphasize the major new role the faculty will play in knowledge acquisition and application especially in science and engineering. Running a research program is becoming a mandatory part of nearly every science and engineering faculty member's activities, and it is often the most well recognized and rewarded part. The typical job description of the university staff will definitely include the carrying out of defined research programs. This main activity will requires the preparation of research proposals and the competition for research funds. In addition the scope of work will  include the following classical task: i)Management of graduate students and staff, ii) writing of scholarly articles, iii) Contribution to  related professional societies, iiii) Attending  conferences and lectures. Therefore the job of university staff will be more or less similar to the task of running a business.

Through its own research and development programs and also as recipient of industrial R&D support, the 21st century university will significantly contribute to the nation industrial innovation and in building knowledge based economy [KBE]. Contributions of research and development  partnerships between industry and universities on the level of technological innovation will lead to many firms' adoption of new technologies, generated in the university. The physical proximity to 21st century academic research institutions will play a crucial role in spreading the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

• Governance, Organization & Management

This issue is becoming one of the most critical and complex issue facing higher education. The 21st century university will use new governance and leadership structures, cultures and policies to effectively manage and grow in response to many internal and external challenges of modern higher education environment. Traditional governance structures were built following a pyramidal shape with the decision making power being confined to the very top of the pyramid. The conventional views of university organization and management are still   widely spread in most higher education institutions. In a modern university the delivery of quality higher education is fundamentally based on the effective synergy of tasks and sharing of responsibilities thus a collegial decision making  process.

Twenty-first century university governance organization will recognize this development and enable the engagement and empowerment of the total university community to ensure the delivery of the university's objectives.

The core of the university overall system is that university ought to be self-reliant in operation and democratic in management and this under public macro control. The administration structure will be the engine and nucleus of a 21st century university. Flexibility of internal structure and efficient processes are required to enable the organization to plan and adapt. Another challenging  management issue that 21st century university will face is the legal and economic management of intellectual property.

• Transfer of technology and university "TTO"

In a 21st century university faculty members are also increasingly asked by their institutions and governments to take the additional step of converting the knowledge of their research lab into commercial products. This brings additional revenues into the institution and provides highly visible justification for the government expenditures on research at universities. When they get involved in the process of technology transfer, the faculty members need to be aware that this process is the way to running a “real world” business. To succeed in this business-management-like task they need to draw from their experience in managing university research lab and get prepared for it.

Depending on the size of the university and the volume of it research activity and outcome, establishing an office dedicated to the transfer of technology [TTO] or dealing with external one will be mandatory. Such structure has multiples tasks ranging from screening and assessing new technologies with market potential and financial returns to the universities, and securing the intellectual property protection to technology marketing through a variety of partnership and other mechanisms.

While good arguments can be made for the value of such faculty driven university research, the commercialization of R&D outcome and the creation of spin-off companies,  result in a faculty with new sets of demands and responsibilities that were largely nonexistent at the middle of the last century. These demands must be considered in any discussion of changing higher education and moving university toward a 21st century model.

Physical set up

Would the university as a physical place hold its relevance in the 21st century? If we consider the role of “teaching,”: Although we generally think of this role in terms of a classroom paradigm, that  is, of a professor teaching a class of students, who in turn respond by reading assigned texts, writing  papers, solving problems or performing experiments, and taking examinations, it is clear that today’s generation of students may demand a quite different approach. Today’s plug-and-play generation will likely demand that this universe replaces the classroom lecture with highly interactive and collaborative experiences.

Furthermore, the shape of the library, a cornerstone of the university, will no longer be a collection house but rather a center of knowledge navigation, a facilitator of information retrieval and dissemination. The 21st century university library will allow the access to vast amount of digital data in physically dispersed computer systems, which can be remotely accessed by users over information networks.
The 21st century university will be a closely bonded, widely dispersed communities of people interested in sharing new experiences and intellectual pursuit created within the human mind using digital means.

Nevertheless, in the near term it seems likely that the university as a physical place, a community of scholars and a center of culture will remain.  

Conclusion

Since the business of the university is all about knowledge, the extraordinary advances in information technology will have profound implications in all aspect related to delivering the mission of the 21st century university. The abstract knowledge-centered roles of the university have existed for over a thousand year and will certainly continue to exist as long as this remarkable social institution survives. Would this institution survive? If we want an answer to this legitimate question we need to analyze this interesting quotation from MIT economist Paul Krugman, article entitled   "White Collars Turn Blue,"

“The diminishing economic returns for academic credentials will lead to the devaluation of higher education (and a return to academia's 19th-century role as a primarily social institution for the children of the wealthy)” .

Published by the New York Times Magazine ( p.106 of the 29 Sep 1996 edition).

Is  this occurring nowadays?

By Pr Med Dahmani Fathallah
MSc. PhD. MBA.
Director of the Biotechnology Program @ the Arabian Gulf University
International Expert in Technology Education & Technolgy Transfer