A missing skill in the globalization of higher education

Inside Higher Education had an excellent article last week entitled Outsourcing Teaching, Overseas that captures many of the problems faced by higher education institutions as they struggle with globalization:

How to teach university degree programs offered overseas is a complicated question. Does a university rely on faculty from the home campus to travel abroad for a year, semester or month at a time to teach, hire a new cadre of faculty at the overseas location, deliver coursework through distance education, or some combination thereof?

 The article describes one approach used by the Utah State University John Huntsman School of Business to offer a Utah State bachelors degree in economics in China.  This program is described in the annual report of the School in the following way:

Utah State University has been offering degree programs through cooperative agreements with partner universities in China since 2000. Currently, the programs are offered at Northeast Dianli University (NEDU) in Jilin City, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) in Beijing and Institute of Advanced Learning (IAL) in Hong Kong.....

Students in the degree program in mainland China (at NEDU and BIT) pass the rigorous Chinese national college entrance exam, which identifies the top 6% of high school graduates. Once admitted to our partner universities, the students apply for admission to Utah State University and are admitted if they meet our admission standards. The students become matriculated USU students upon successfully passing our intensive English language courses offered by IELI (Intensive English Language Institute)....

In our model, various USU departments agree to provide the specific courses required in the degree program, including general education courses. Departments assign “lead professors” to write the course syllabus, pick the text book and other instructional materials, and to write exams and other assignments for the course. The teaching materials are provided to “local facilitators” (faculty at our partner institutions) who have been approved by the USU department to deliver the lectures and other course material on-site in China and Hong Kong. Lead professors and local facilitators are in contact each week to make sure that the courses are on-track and to deal with teaching and evaluation issues. Final grades are assigned by the lead professor.....

It is anticipated that we will continue to admit 100 students each year into our programs at NEDU and BIT. In our program in Hong Kong, at IAL, we anticipate an increase in enrollments to 150 each year. Hence, we believe that we will have as many as 800 students in our degree program in Asia in the near future (accounting for students who drop out or transfer to Logan). This number is likely to exceed 1,000 once the Hangzhou program is approved. It is likely that we will graduate more than 300 economics majors each year at these locations.

On the “factual” side, these quotes tell us that the program is offered in several sites, and is attracting a pretty significant number of students.  The students are high quality, having passed the Chinese national college entrance exam plus intensive English language tests. The annual report emphasizes that the student body is so small at present because the Chinese government limits enrollment. So it sounds like this is a successful program from the student’s perspective.

The concerns discussed in the Inside Higher Ed article relate to the 3rd quoted paragraph above, describing how the courses are taught.  Phillip Altbach's comments in the Inside Higher Ed article certainly express the concerns of many:

My view, and I am in a small minority on these matters I think, is that foreign degrees should be taught by faculty from the sponsoring university faculty, and not be random local scholars, even if they are ‘approved’ by the home campus faculty. What USU is really doing is ‘franchising’ their degree -- in a McDonald's way -- which is common especially among low prestige British universities in countries like Malaysia these days. Those British institutions have in some cases gotten themselves into hot water with the British quality assurance agencies and the press for low standards, inadequate supervision and the like. USU may well get into that bind.

This captures, I believe, the cultural and philosophical conundrum that a university must resolve as it seeks to globalize.  At one level, it would be nice to have faculty from the sponsoring university teach courses all around the world, as suggested by Altbach.  Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely to happen - past experience clearly tell us that faculty generally do not want to be posted to some other part of the world for extended periods.  Once is fun, twice is a problem, and three times is impossible.  Even regular short stays are often difficult to make work.  I know of one top  university with two offshore sites where courses are taught in a way that only requires their faculty to be there for two weeks at a time, once each year.  After several years of running this program, the only way to get regular  faculty to commit to this offshore teaching is to make two weeks at one site, two weeks at the other the entire teaching load for the year! This is not the way to solve our budgetary problems!

So the only way I can imagine having offshore sites is to have “non-regular” faculty to do the job on a permanent assignment.  The question then becomes, “Who hires these people?”, and where are they from? The US? The offshore country? Inside Higher Ed also had an earlier article that touched on these issues.  People hired in the US may require high salaries; people hired at the offshore site will be hired under the laws of that country, thus requiring enormous caution.  Still, it is perfectly plausible to think of having an offshore program taught by people who were all employed by the home institution. But for reasons given above, these would not be “regular faculty”who are imbued with the educational philosophy and ethos of the home institution. Consequently, an apparatus would have to be devised to carefully monitor educational quality at a distance to see that all was done appropriately. In addition, a significant infrastructure likely would have to be set up to deal with local personnel laws and issues. Opening multiple sites with this approach would require an enormous amount of administrative attention at the home institution in addition to the academic oversight required of the program. This would be an example of what I have previously described as the “multinational” approach (Modularity in university higher education:Education, Aug.7, 2006).

An alternative approach obviously is the USU approach, in which local partner higher education institutions do the actual teaching.  That gets around the hiring issues and their associated infrastructure.  A quality- monitoring apparatus would clearly be involved in this case as well, in order to assure that courses are presented in a way that is acceptable to the parent institution.  The positive is that the home institution is freed of day-to-day site administration problems. This is an example of what I have described as the “globalization” approach (ibid).

Both of these approaches have pluses and minuses.  Both, however, require a set of competencies that traditional higher education generally lacks because of its essentially “local” character. These competencies are those required to manage a large complex operation at a distance, especially if it is located in another country. We have little experience in such management, and in particular, in knowing how to manage educational quality from a distance.  Both the multinational and globalization approaches will fail if we do not understand how to manage quality from a distance.

It should emphasized that managing quality at a distance was also core to both the multinational and globalization periods in corporations, and building the necessary competencies was difficult and took time and experimentation.   Thus we should not be surprised that higher education does not always get it just right at it moves into a wider global role. However, failures and mistakes should not be used as excuses to discard the models as suggested by some.  Rather, they should be viewed as necessary steps in learning to do something that is both difficult, and worthwhile.

Comments

[susan01]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Margaret

http://businesseshome.net

Lloyd replies: Thanks, Margaret, for the kind words.

[FirstTeacher]

I always assumed that the purpose of sending a student to a partner university overseas is for them to experience learning in another culture. How can this experience be authentic if the professor is from the US, quite possibly with very little knowledge of and life experience in the host country? If there was a question of whether or not the foreign partner university or department had a questionable teaching reputation, why choose them as a partner?

Lloyd responds: I agree completely with you if we are talking about US study abroad programs. I do think many US universities and colleges virtually assure that their study abroad programs lead to little fundamental growth in their students by providing an "encapsulated" US experience in a foreign country. However, here, we are talking of US universities that are seeking to educate international students in their home countries, not US students. These are students who want the benefit of a US education, but for one reason or another cannot come to the US.

[Catherine is looking for a Nursing doctorate]

I think that “higher education does not always get it just right at it moves into a wider global role” is true as more and more students are taking up masters and PhDs in a bid to increase their marketability. However, statistics show that it is not in the case for nursing doctorate as the demand for LPN is lowered with some being retrenched in favor of RN. I think what is more important is that companies should not solely base hiring employees on their level of education, but should also look on the work experiences and skills of a prospective employee.

[Study Abroad China]

An international study will measure and compare learning outcomes at universities around the world and could provide the “missing link” for university rankings.I do think many US universities and colleges virtually assure that their study abroad programs lead to little fundamental growth in their students by providing an "encapsulated" US experience in a foreign country.

Lloyd comments: I agree totally with your point about many study abroad programs. They are only barely "foreign".

[study language abroad]

Keep up the great writing. I really like reading what you have to say. Thanks.