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Preprints & Reprints EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY AND CHANGE - (A Personal View) A resurrected Archimedes would be staggered by the technological advancements made by the human race since his death. At the same time he would be amazed to find that little progress had been made in the teaching methods for science and engineering! He might well ask the obvious question; why are you not using all of this wonderful technology to help you teach and enlighten your students? As a result of accelerating technological change, engineering education is coming under increasing pressure to ve more responsive to the needs of industry and society, whilst at the same time becoming more cost effective. In the UK this is posing significant difficulties because we do not have any large universities. It is not unusual to find electrical engineering departments of only 20 - 50 staff trying to teach across a rapidly expanding range of topics at depths ranging from first degree through to post graduate research. The pressures are now approaching, or have exceeded, a level that challenges the very existence of these small departments. The key problem is the lack of critical mass that would allow staff to specialise and treat topics in sufficient depth, whilst at the same time supervising research students, and developing new courses and teaching material. It is highly unlikely that the pressure will recede and it is therefore both inevitable and desirable that some integration is realised. Due to various economic and political factors it is unlikely that critical mass departments will be realised through the collocating or coalescing of existing units across the UK. The danger is, that the present system of raw market forces will ultimately see departments, and/or universities, effectively destroyed. The system of competition now in place is a blunt instrument that mitigates against any conventional physical reorganisation or optimisation. With staff numbers and funding paired to the bone, there is no visible slack, and the system is already brittle. There is however, an alternative method of achieving critical mass by electronic media to bring together students and staff for lectures, tutorials and one-on-one interaction. It is thus worth asking the following fundamental questions :-
Could it be that staff overload is precluding any revolutionary application of the latest technologies in our EE Departments? After all, we already see students selecting the university of their choice on the basis of computer terminals and facilities. Other professions such as architecture or medicine, humanities and arts are already proactive in using IT to promote their topics. Bluntly, engineering is renowned for being boring and difficult among the potential and actual student population. At a time when we are trying to attract more students into engineering and science, we have to ask; are we investing in our own technology to promote and enhance our teaching abilities, are we making the best of our situation, are we selling our profession? I think not! Probably the principal conclusion that springs from all the above is that our university staff are indeed overloaded, and fully occupied to the point where they have no time to contemplate, or take appropriate action. However, if we do not do so, then we could well see engineering science in the UK damaged through technical stagnation. Experimental systems in the USA and UK (principally in medical schools rather then engineering) have demonstrated that it is possible to teach and interact with students at a distance using telecommunications and IT. Closer to home, in Scotland, night school classes have been conducted over the telephone by broadcasting to over 250 students from one institution. We should also remember the open university in the UK has been an unparalleled success with mature students attending courses by way of television. Granted none of this is "as good as? attending a real lecture, in real time, but it is a start. High definition television, wide bandwidth transmission, virtual reality displays, surrogate head and rotary cameras are already at a research and development stage. Numerous simulation and demonstration packages that allow students to enter into the world of animation are also being developed. Electronic libraries and databases are available over internet and we are perhaps not too far from eradicating our dependence on Dickensian libraries full of books. Further, we have Super Janet being implemented and 100% ISDN availability already. In short all the base technologies are available, all that is required is the resource and the will to implement and commence trials. If we do not pick up this challenge and initiate solutions to our very obvious problems then it could prove terminal. There is no doubt that the linking of universities to industry in the UK has improved over the last decade, but in contrast to many of our competitor countries, it is still weak. There is a mind set in the UK that says: I went to school, I went to college, I went to university, I graduated, and I paid my taxes - I paid for my education! This is no way for industry, individuals or education to interact. Whilst education is for life, it is only a partial event - updates, new skills and true understandings are continually required. As technology and society speed up, this will be even more evident in the coming decade. Early in the 21st Century we are likely to see more change (in the next 20 years) than mankind has seen since the birth of Eve. Given that we are already working hard, and that there is no possibility of dilating time, and probably no possibility of devoting more energy to work, then we have to find ways of working better. This is really what quality is all about, although you would not think so listening to many of the protagonists, and looking at many of the quality systems. You could be forgiven for thinking that quality was about paper and bureaucracy. This is not the case! If anyone finds themselves loaded down with an immense amount of paper and bureaucracy and procedures that have a quality tag, then they should ask a very simple question. If I place ?1 on the quality table at the beginning of the year is there another ?1 returned for this investment at the end of the year? If the answer is no, then the system needs overhauling or replacing. Quality should be in the blood of an organisation and be the hallmark of change, not a predicator of overload, demise and/or collapse. If the quality system adds nothing then it should not be there! We should be able to harness quality to alter and improve our situation - it has to be dynamic, it has to be beneficial, it is not about static processes. How then might we change this world, and how might we invoke a system that will help us? Consider the process of solving problems. We probably spend more than 90% of our time collecting and gathering information before we can perform any analysis, gain understanding, form a view, take action and make decisions. It is no fun gathering or finding information, in fact it is exceedingly frustrating and wastes and immense amount of energy. But a modest investment in artificial intelligence can realise agents that roam databases and libraries at our behest, assembling and formatting information for us so that we can devote a higher proportion of our time to the productive process of solving problems and making decisions. We could also banish an awful lot of work by recording information electronically rather than consuming increasing amounts of rain forest in the form of paper. The raw technology to do this is available today - as is the capability for electronic publication and dissemination of lecture notes, ideas, research results and ?on screen? experiments. It is still not widely recognised that students (and staff) can often gain more from experimentation and interaction with simulations on the screen, than could ever achieved with hardware in the laboratory. That is not to say that we should abandon the laboratory and ??reality?, far from it, but we have to realise the futility and waste of preparing limited physical experiments when simulations are now far better. After all, do we make our students use log tables and slide rules, do we ask them to make components and assemble sub-systems? No - they have moved up the value chain! If the UK engineering profession is to prosper and benefit from laboratory experimentation, it has to be far more selective and higher value add, and the simulations need to be universally available as they are developed - not hidden away as some coveted prize by the originator. Research and development is the very life blood of the UK - for we only have our brain power to sell. Increasingly the fruits of this research is being used on the world stage as our companies go global. These same companies are now looking at the wider perspective of offshore R&D - they no longer see themselves tied to the UK, the home company or education system. Fortunately, overseas companies are operating in a similar mode, and perhaps the two effects will balance out! Whilst the university sector represents only a small fraction of the total UK research activity, it is a vital (and should be a vibrant) part of the system. Ideally we should link undergraduate, post graduate and research students to industry through projects that present meaningful challenges at all levels. Programmes of work can be farmed out as undergraduate and postgraduates with sponsored R&D supporting out-placed researches in both industry and university. It is also essential that the best of UK industry becomes involved in the development of academic programmes. Both sides can experience a positive win, with the university people bringing a freshness, and very often a naivet?, that is quite powerful, devoid of administration and constraint, and generally not on critical path and pressurised. In the reverse direction it also exposes these people to the very real and difficult world of commercial R&D and operations. On the downside, it takes effort on both sides and, in an ideal world we would encourage university and commercial research organisations to act far more vigorously and exchange staff on a secondment basis. In all cases the R&D effort should be focused on the high value add, with a balance of short and long term objectives, and adequate funding. Whilst the market in the UK has a predilection for low levels of investment and risk, and of course the lowest price - cheapest is seldom best! It also tends to create low revenue streams, and ultimately, a downward spiral. In this context it is interesting to reflect that the bulk of the risk capital in the USA, which largely has a long term focus, is generated in Europe. Perhaps in the USA the positioning of R&D, links between university and business, and the straight selling of ideas, is better? We also have to recognise that by and large the hardware war is over, the software war is well developed, and we can see almost with precision where both are going. The next big challenge is the information war, which is about to begin! That is to say that we should not abandon our efforts on hardware or even contemplate abandoning software to devote all our activity on information engineering, quite the reverse. What is actually required is a balanced approach, for we can expect the cyclic nature of development to again swing back to hardware, probably within the next decade - or two. It is already evident that hardware is gradually moving into a position where it will be able to eradicate large slices of software. Clearly, in electronics a focused education is of no real benefit to the UK - a student and research population educated in the 8086 micro-processor degree would posses a transitory ability. Nor is it in our interest to go down the track of vocational training as a means of satisfying immediate demand. As technology speeds up we are going to find an increasing need for students to be educated over a broader range of activity. For example, in the last 20 years we have seen a move from electronics to photonics in telecommunications and perhaps in the next 20 years we may see biological systems integrated into electronics and computing. We also have to realise that the understanding of devices, components and materials, sub-systems and systems is becoming ever more necessary. Today there is an awful tendency to think in terms of modularised realisations of handy ?off the shelf components?. Whilst this might be appropriate, and indeed be immediately effective, it very often leads to poor performance and unknown, unclassified, and untested risks. Systems integration and systems engineering are not a soft or easy option, but something we have to pay more attention to. It is not possible to produce good designs without a broad based and sound understanding of the principles and the components. If ever there was a time that our students needed a broad and flat education, this has to be it! We therefore have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we may have to lower the level of the first degree but broaden the base as a consequence. It is unfortunate to reflect that the intake to university we currently see represents a gradually falling level of expectation and attainment. There is nothing wrong with the raw material - the people are good, but unfortunately, they have very often been educated in A level chemistry, physics and mathematics by teachers whom themselves went to school, to university and became teachers! Even worse, we have teachers teaching A level with only an A level in the topic themselves. Perhaps even more frighteningly, people qualified to degree level are teaching A levels, but not in their own subjects! We might therefore expect to see an increasing need for what amounts to a remedial period in our first degrees with a higher level of staff-student contact time. Perversely the proposals in this editorial, for the distributed university using electronics to teleport students and lectures to the virtual lecture theatre, may enhance our ability here by releasing staff time for individual one-on-one attention. The notion that 1000 students in a converted cinema, with one lecturer presenting his material on stage at some distance, being cost effective is frightening! However, it is already a fact of life for some UK students today. Far better that the students are treated to expert lectures, by specialists in each topic, that are later backed up by local staff members giving tutorial sessions. This would seem a far better and more attractive option. Coming together electronically is not only possible for staff and student, but also for industry. There is an increasing demand for first and higher degrees, plus a need for refresher courses and higher levels of technological understanding throughout industry. As technology speeds up this will have to become a near continual attainment by company staff who simply cannot be released to travel to university. If they could attend at a distance and mix and match courses to create a degree, or education, of their choice, then everyone would benefit. In technological areas our universities have to be skills' factories. They should be ahead of industry, and ought not to be merely in the business of putting bottoms on chairs. They should not be in the business of just getting the financial and people numbers to add up, or satisfying the transient whims of industry and politicians - they represent far too vital a resource. They need to find ways of creating, and selling, the new skills and abilities, pertinent to the technological world about them. It is vital for the UK that they do so, and highly unlikely that they will be really effective unless they rise to the challenge of realising distributed universities through the technology that they already advocate. In the 21st Century the distributed degree, with a mix and match of courses from a selection of disparate universities and departments, will be a necessity. The pace of research and development will speed up. Companies will be smaller and more dynamic, as will the technology sectors, and more of us will become self employed, consultants and multi-disciplinary workers. Education has to rise to this challenge! |