The Digital Education Revolution and the Future of Higher Education

Speech

Global Human Resources Forum

I’m honored to be with you today. This is my second time in South Korea in as many months, and my second opportunity to address educators and thought leaders on this important topic: what we should and must do to provide education that lifts up everyone in our communities, not just the few who have the time, money and resources to better themselves.

That is why this conversation, about a digital education revolution, is so important.

The power of online technology has added a new dimension to this conversation. We now have at our disposal tools that can revolutionize the way we teach and spread knowledge to all of our communities. But a tool can be used either to build or to destroy.

It’s up to us to determine the best way to implement this new dimension into our system.

There is no easy answer.

Many of our countries still have a significant educational divide, and I do not believe that technology is a silver bullet that will solve that problem. Rather, online technologies are precision instruments that must be incorporated into what we already know how to do: teach and mentor.

Today, I’m here to tell you how UCLA is using this tool to build a future for higher education that reaches everyone.

And that we can do this without sacrificing what we know already works: mentorship; camaraderie; collaboration; and the ability to live and work in a community of diverse frames of reference, backgrounds and thinking.

Because in the end, education is not just the memorization of facts, figures and formulas. It is the transformation of the mind.

We challenge our students to think differently, to understand other people’s backgrounds, experiences and points of view. Students cannot do any of these solely by using a computer, or by staring at an interactive screen, or by participating in a virtual chat room.

We must still provide our students with the human experience.

We must provide them with the opportunity for debate and the ability to work together to solve mysteries and discover solutions.

So at UCLA, we have decided that online technology should augment the classroom experience, not replace it. UCLA offers more than 7,000 online-enhanced courses that serve about 27,000 undergraduate students. These enhanced courses do not take the place of classrooms. Rather, they create online environments — such as chat rooms and message boards — that foster vibrant interactions between students and their faculty.

We also offer about 40 fully online courses that enroll 3,500 to 4,000 students per year.

At the graduate level, we offer 70 fully online courses, and that number is growing rapidly. Our engineering school offers a fully online master’s degree with 67 online courses, which has proven to be very popular. At our UCLA Anderson School of Management, we have an MBA program for employed professionals. It blends online and face-to-face learning so students don’t need to come to campus every week. UCLA Extension, our continuing education unit, has 500 online certificate courses that enroll about 22,000 people. Students come from every state in the U.S. and 80 countries.

Above all, with each of these programs, it is essential that we maintain the highest quality instruction and learning commensurate with a UCLA degree.

Within that context, we want to use online technologies to help us reduce the amount of time it takes students to earn their degree, to manage student costs, to streamline the path to a degree for our students who transfer to UCLA from other institutions and to enhance the educational experience for all students.

But what we will not do is digitize an entire curriculum, especially at the undergraduate level. This deliberately slow adoption of online technology is a move supported by most of our students, even though the majority of them grew up in a fully digital society.

In a recent survey of our fourth-year students, we asked whether they would consider taking a course that was completely online.rn

 

60 percent gave a flat “no.”

One student told us, “Online courses are no substitute for face to face interaction. It would be far more difficult to concentrate and learn.”

Another student said, “If I was okay with taking online courses, I would not pay to come to UCLA.”

As institutions of higher learning, we have to understand the drawbacks of online technology.

As I said earlier, education is not just about learning a profession or mastering a skill. If that were true, then perhaps online learning would be the solution. But part of our mission in higher education is to mold global citizens. We want our students to understand our complex world and to be able to interact productively with those who agree — and disagree — with them.

These invaluable skills cannot be taught online. Rather, they are taught through interactions with peers, through contact with those who are different, through experiences that can only be learned on a college campus.

At UCLA, we consider the entire city of Los Angeles to be our classroom. Our city is vibrant and complex — in its ethnic diversity and socioeconomic structure — and in the challenges it presents. So we must expose our students to much more than textbooks and online courses. We must expose them to the real world.

Every September, we hold an event called UCLA Volunteer Day, which sends more than 6,000 students out into the city. They paint schools, plant community gardens and interact with elementary school students and spend time with our military veterans. Volunteer Day deepens UCLA’s engagement with Los Angeles. But it also gives students invaluable lessons about service and citizenship.

Another critical way students engage with the community is through internships and service learning. Last academic year, more than 2,000 students earned academic credit while serving our local neighborhoods and institutions. These service learning courses explore subjects ranging from hunger and homelessness to educational equity and environmental justice. They give students the opportunity to work alongside community leaders, to build skills in critical thinking, to be directly involved in addressing real-world challenges.

And even for students who stay on campus, the experiences they gain by being physically present in a classroom or a seminar far exceed the benefit of anything relayed online. For example, our Fiat Lux seminars were started in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Initially, their mission was to provide a forum for students to process and understand the tragedy.

But the program has continued, and it has become a vital part of the curriculum for our students. We now offer 200 seminars each year. All of them are taught by highly respected faculty members who share their intellectual passion and expertise. The seminars are small discussion groups — with about 20 students in each — and designed to foster in-depth discourse on a given topic.

Although they began with a focus on the September 11 attacks, they now encompass a wide variety of subject matter, from chemistry to literature. This fall, our offerings include “Buddhism and the Art of Living Mindfully in the Present,” “Women and Math: A Modern History” and “ISIS, Syria and the New Middle East.” Every winter, another seminar gives students the opportunity to interview survivors of World War II concentration camps, and to digitally record their stories for future generations.

These are unique and irreplaceable experiences for our students. No online program could replace them.

But the holocaust class I just mentioned is a perfect example of how technology can propel education in the right direction — if we use it wisely. In fact, that can be said for many of our new initiatives in the humanities. I’m proud to say that UCLA is a leader in what we like to call “the New Humanities.”

We are committed to respecting the traditional underpinnings of a strong liberal arts education — one grounded in humanistic principles. It’s an education that exposes all of our students to an array of languages, religions, cultures and philosophies, and then challenges them to make sense of it all in the context of our modern society.

But in this digital age, we have the opportunity to take those lessons even further, to use the future to unlock the past. We call it “digital humanities,” and it is one of our most exciting programs. Digital humanities teaches students to create, apply and interpret new digital and information technologies. We believe this gives our graduates a competitive edge whether they pursue careers in business, technology or the media. Digital humanities has been used in scholarly projects across our campus, from mapping the migration patterns of Holocaust survivors to using Twitter to study the progression of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

This is what the future of higher education looks like. It’s a landscape where modern informs traditional, where digital solutions can address ancient mysteries and where online technologies can reinforce, but not replace, the transformative experience of a college campus.

As I said earlier, there is no silver bullet that will solve the challenges we face in modern higher education. We must be deliberate in our reforms. We’ll make sure we solve the right problems with the right solutions, and understand what practices we must preserve.

I look forward to the continued discussions and innovations in the years to come. And I appreciate this chance to share my thoughts with you today.

Thank you.