EDUCATORS CORNER Continued from p. 49


The Changing Face of Universities Traditionally, universities hire professors both as teachers


and researchers. Teaching and research go hand in hand; they reinforce each other. Research funds support graduate students too. A full-scale online education can create divides and wedges in the education and employment schemes of universities.


For instance, some brand universities may offer affordable undergraduate online courses and degrees, and since online classes can include a large number of students, this may hurt many other universities. Or a select number of “Star” teach- ers may be hired by several universities, and this would limit the employment of other teachers or fulltime teachers. These developments may eventually decouple the undergraduate and graduate studies in many non-brand universities, pushing these universities toward focused post-graduate education and research. Or the universities, in their struggle for survival, may not accept (or extremely limit) credits transferred from other universities.


Irrespective of how the future unfolds, one thing is certain:


The online education successes and lessons that colleges and universities earned and learned in 2020, the year of Covid-19, will help them to operate during the possible future emergen- cies.


Concluding Remarks Online teaching is entirely new, but it is a new trend and


still an evolving process with various levels. At the one end of the spectrum, online teaching may be totally “passive”: Simply upload the syllabus and course materials, and let the student study on their own and finish the course. At the other end of the spectrum, online teaching may involve virtual classes, regular interactions between teacher and all students, and a strict timeline for assignments and exams. This “interactive” format is more preferable as far as learning outcome is concerned.


2.


Most of us – teachers – learned the art of teaching in classroom and for classroom students. Naturally, it will take more time, and perhaps a whole new generation of teachers, to prefect the art of online teaching. Nevertheless, real-life, face-to-face teaching and learning will not go away because it will always have its own usefulness, need and demand, and it is also the best format for certain subjects involving practical learning skills. Universities, for their own survival, will not abandon real-life campus education, either. However, we will increasingly see hybrid (blended) online and real-life classes offered by all universities.


Online teaching makes high-quality education available to


many people who are not able to attend a university because of time, distance or finance. This is all good for society and for education.


The popularity of online education may also motivate high


IT companies to become involved in universities and higher education. Scott Galloway, who teaches marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, goes as far as saying that partner- ships will emerge between IT tycoons like Google and Microsoft and elite universities like Harvard and Cambridge, and in this way, a handful of universities will monopolize higher education and destroy many brick-and-mortar universities.2 This sort of market speculation about the future of universities indicates that high-tech online education has added a new dimension to university life which, to a large extent, remains an uncharted territory, but full of opportunities and challenges. Education in the 21st century will be different from that in the 20th century which was different from the one in the 19th century. Digital technologies are changing the face of education worldwide but the core components – good teachers, good textbooks (and other teaching materials), and attentive students – will still be critical requirements, and in some practical areas, noth- ing will replace face-to-face education that dates back to the beginning of the humanity itself.


Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolizehigher education,” by James D. Walsh, New York magazine, May 11, 2020. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html


prestigious medical schools in the UK, and then had gone on for specialist training in Moscow.


I also began to realize from conversations with these offi-


cers, from Terence Faria’s inside line to the CIA (more of that in another episode), and from information that was public, how tenuous Zambia’s control over large parts of its territory really was. The Zambian Army had four regiments of 1,000 men each: three were in barracks near the main cities and the fourth regiment was out patrolling the frontier. There were two Zimbabwean guerilla movements with military bases in Zambia, one guerilla army from Mozambique, and two rival


“


guerilla forces from Angola. This was all public knowledge: only the locations and sizes of the camps were “secret”. But one of my colleagues had stumbled upon a large Zimbabwean camp (it was in his Prospecting Area) and had been beaten within an inch of his life: his driver had risked his own life to get him away. The Zambian police had called in the army, who had reconnoitered the camp and had decided that they could not bring enough force to bear to take on the guerillas without the latter being fully alerted. Besides, it was politically impossible for the Zambian government to attack the forces of freedom movements that it had welcomed to the country.


I was included by the officers in sev-


Besides, it was politically impossible for the Zambian government to attack the forces of freedom movements that it had welcomed to the country.


60 TPG • Oct.Nov.Dec 2020


eral more rounds of drinks, and ended up driving back to camp through water up to the axles quite merrily. This hap- pened three or four times before the rains ended. My big regret was that the Officers’ Mess operated on the chit system, so there was no way that I could repay my officer friends’ hospitality.


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