E3L3

September 1999

The recent research Green Paper having set vice-chancellors at each others' throats, I was unsurprised to read in a national magazine that I belong to a group which is looking backwards, freezing the university in ancient tradition and missing the opportunities of the future. We are content, my attacker might have continued, to aspire to be Harvard, Oxford, MIT, so we are blind to the path of Humberside, Western Colorado or to institutions serving a single industry or firm, Motorola University or Petronas.

Sunning under a jacaranda tree ringed by golden sandstone, what do I know of the three L's of lifelong learning? The E3 of early Elysian experience is presumably my stock in trade.

We all know that times are changing. Jobs change faster and people change jobs more often. Technical vocational training becomes irrelevant more quickly and updating needs to be delivered to a range of clients in the workforce. Developments in information technology enable us to be more flexible and to use a combination of home, workplace and institutional delivery. As always custom design is desirable but cost of individuation is a limiting factor. Should a time-honoured university like mine enter what could be a market for specialist providers?

In fact I argue that the large comprehensive research-intensive university is particularly well placed to resolve the issues that challenge modern higher education provision.

What I have dubbed the early Elysian experience is modern campus-based learning of a liberal kind. It is no accident that we have moved medicine to postgraduate entry, that other professions are taking notice, or that new liberal arts programs for high achievers are over-subscribed. The acute awareness of the ephemeral nature of strictly vocational training emphasises the value of generic skills acquisition. The capacity to communicate and the capacity to learn can be more important than knowledge itself.

I predict that, despite internet, employers will increasingly prize the graduates of an all-round campus experience which encompasses sport, debating, parties - political and merry - in addition to classroom learning. In that classroom the teacher must embody active learning if the message is to be that learning never stops. Sometimes the self-absorbed researcher teaches poorly but the non-researcher cannot teach at all.

A powerful base of research activity, provided that an appropriate proportion is directed to industry concerns, provides the ideal substrate for refresher programs of various kinds. Here there are exciting developments in flexible delivery where inter alia the whole definition of distance learning is changing. Currently there are experiments in interactive joint programs taught cooperatively between Japanese and American universities, possibilities denied to us until our international telecommunications improve. A global market is forming and alliances amongst major research universities crossing national boundaries are essential for our future.

It has never been easy to analyse higher education delivery in provider/client terms. Some academics fall at the first hurdle by refusing to accept that the very language is other than insulting. For E3, which is where most current university activity occurs, there is a prodigious reliance on the notion that the provider knows best. There is some input from the student as client from exit surveys and loose input from the employer as client from advisory committees and meetings with recruiters. In L3 there is a healthy shift from provider to client and a useful clarification that, for the most part, it is the employer as client who pays and therefore can call the tune.

In many different disciplines the L3 dialogue between provider and client has scarcely begun and I freely admit that universities like my own, despite their enormous capacity, have much to learn from others such as Deakin who have blazed a trail.

Watch us move..