Week 2 : Higher Education Governance, Management and Practice

Governance of traditional Universities, public demand, profit-margins, quality education and MOOCs.

As intense as the discussion above was at the last session, there are a few truisms in the Singapore context that I note below:

1. Government wants quality education for its citizens but there are simply not enough spaces in their universities (Singapore is simply too constrained by land size). Often this forces many middle class families to send their children abroad. Government feels that this is risky as in many cases people study abroad, get a taste of greener grass, start life overseas and never return. This in turn results in a problematic 'brain-drain' and leads to a declining population.

2. At the same time, MOOCs (using COURSERA as an illustration https://www.coursera.org/) and  Distance Learning are currently not being seriously considered yet because there will be a profit loss at local Universities and one cannot control quality education using it. I am thinking here of National Education policies and the national agenda. From personal experience, we have one Brother who was forced to study overseas because his London external degree was flatly not recognised by the Ministry of Education. Not on their list of approved Universities, they said.

3. By the way things are going and with many institutions being 'spooked by the MOOC', as it were, Singapore will have no choice but to keep up with shifting trends (or buy more Indonesian sand to reclaim more land - lots of it!) and allow (and recognise) qualifications offered by MOOCs and Open Distance Education. I was involved in initial talks for a joint venture between our Order & the Ministry of Health and an Australian University (Flinders) but we pulled out citing too much of a risk on our part.

I wish I had a crystal ball to have a peek into the future of how Governments of the world and the traditional University system will respond creatively to the emerging MOOC bandwagon.