Fees & Entitlement

Overheard on the radio this morning, a protesting student “We gotta have free fees so we can get a degree and we can get out of Ireland, get a job, and have a life”.

Hmm. Do I really want to make personal sacrifices (pay higher taxes, take pay cuts..) to help that guy “have a life”? Honest answer – No.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country”, as President Kennedy once said a long time ago in another galaxy far far away..

The problem of fees is a tricky one. I honestly believe that Universities could take a “no frills” approach to cheaper education, and that perhaps this is the way of the future. See for example
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/oct/17/coventry-university-college-half-price-degree
Maybe Michael O’Leary can step up to the challenge? University education costs a lot because the modern university provides so much more than just an education. Perhaps we just can’t afford that anymore.

However I want to teach the best students, not just dumb rich ones (and the occasional bright rich one). So fees must not become a bar to participation in higher education for our cleverest young people, otherwise we all lose out.

Perhaps it would help if we had a Minister of Education who was not so compromised by foolish promises made before the last election. It would be good to have some-one in place with a clear vision and no baggage, who could simply do what was best for the country without having to come up with some elaborate fudge to cover his own political blushes.

Feckless Rankers

Oh dear, the Irish Universities are slipping down the University Rankings again, our own included. On the face of it the most recent Times Higher Education (THE) rankings tell a sorry story.

A University's position in the rankings is, I would suggest, directly proportional to the size of its budget. Rich Universities do well, poor ones do badly. When Ireland had lots of money our Universities rose up the rankings, when the money ran out we slipped back down. So does the money follow the ranking, or does the ranking follow the money? I suggest the latter. In other words money buys you up the rankings, its as simple as that.

I remember replying to an academic blog, written when we were at the peak of our ranking achievement, that the real test of our performance would be our ability to maintain that level when the money ran out. Well as the money ran out our corresponding drop in the rankings was almost instantaneous.

So what benefit is it to a poor country to pour money into Universities? Have the rankings not just become a rather pointless end in itself, a kind of higher-educational rich-list?

Here is a sobering fact. Most software companies are finding it extremely difficult to find good numerate software engineering graduates. The highly ranked Universities of the West are simply not capable of producing them in sufficient numbers. Big multi-nationals and small start-ups alike are heading over to Bulgaria and Romania to find and recruit people with the talents that they need. I was talking to the CEO of a UK-based start-up recently who was just back from Sofia Bulgaria, where he had employed 5 people and set up an office. Microsoft's research centre in Dublin recruits heavily from the same part of the world.

Now the Universities of Eastern Europe are hardly known for troubling the University rankings. Not one in the top 300 in the recent THE ranking....

BYOB

In London in the seventies it was common to see BYOB emblazoned on restaurant windows...

Took me a while to figure out what it meant, as restaurants were then well outside of my budget. It means Bring Your Own Bottle, the idea being that you purchased your own cheap bottle of wine in a supermarket and bought it to the restaurant, which opened it for you (and charged a small “corkage” fee for doing so). Nice to see that the idea is now coming back again into vogue here in Dublin.

In lots of businesses and universities a new mnemonic is also on the rise – BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. The idea being that the employee/student can bring their own preferred computing device to work or college and expect to have it supported by the business/university networks and applications.

There was a time when the business/university IT department would have been horrified by the idea. Indeed IT departments would often mandate a particular make of “supported” hardware, and insist on the use of an out-of-date, but “supported”, operating system. Often a deal would be done with a particular manufacturer to supply the approved equipment at a nice price.

But why shouldn’t the employee/student make their own choice as regards their own individual preference for a particular device? After all they feel comfortable with it, it suits them, why change? Rather than the individual conforming to the restrictions imposed by the IT department, surely the IT department should move to support the individual?

Now there are good and valid reasons for IT departments to be concerned, primarily about security. However gradually they are adapting to the idea, in part because users are voting with their feet. In our labs, filled with identikit PCs fixed to the desks, it is common to see a student stubbornly insisting on using their own personal laptop wedged between the PCs. Project work is often developed and demonstrated on a personal device rather than the standard PC provided.

However with freedom comes responsibility. So the most important advice is, yes, by all means BYOD, but also BYOB (Bring Your Own Brain!)

The Cost of Education

Actually it can be quite cheap.

A couple of years ago I took a summer sabbatical in Malawi, in Africa. A very poor country, where everything has to be done on the cheap. I recall watching a class of maybe 100 toddlers, sitting on the ground in the shade of a Baobab tree, listening to a teacher standing on a box. I guess that’s the same way it was done hundreds of years ago. As the sun moved, children on the edge of the group quietly moved around the other side to stay in the shade. One thing that was there in abundance was an eagerness to learn.

I then visited a secondary school where they did have buildings, but only a few broken down desks. Again mostly the students sat on the floor. The blackboard was so worn only a small corner of it was still usable. I recall a conversation with an Australian accountant who was responsible for checking the expenditure of €150,000 Euro worth of Irish Government aid. I remember him reeling off the list of what that money bought – three new fully fitted school buildings, eight teacher’s houses, 20 outdoor toilets, 100s of desks – the list went on and on. We are not used to that kind of value-for-money here at home, but in terms of life-changing potential that money went a very long way. Here in Ireland €150,000 wouldn’t even make a decent banker’s bonus.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that here in the first world we actually don’t do teaching much differently. Teaching a subject like mathematics still comes down to a teacher standing in front of, and talking to, a classroom full of students. We have all sorts of technical aids, but in fact they are rarely used. I still use chalk and a blackboard, as do most of my colleagues. At the end of the course I set an exam, I collect hand-written scripts, and I mark them with a red pen. Could I do the same under a Baobab tree, or in a class where the students sat on the floor and the blackboard was only partially usable? Well yes I probably could just about manage.

So why don’t we use advanced technology more in our teaching? And if we don’t, why is education so expensive here?

One problem with technology is that you can’t always trust it to work. Chalk and a blackboard always works. Connecting a laptop to an overhead projector never seems to be straightforward. Why is that? Once I recall going to give a lecture in DCU, and looking up to where the projector was, only to see a hole in the roof where the projector should have been. It had been stolen the night before. Sometimes technology actually takes us on a major step backwards. PowerPoint. I rest my case.

So all we have done is to take the ancient teacher-in-front-of-a-class model and surround it with layers of bureaucracy and some ill-fitting technology which arguably doesn’t add much value to the process. Perhaps if we were to strip it back to the basics and then carefully build it back up again we might end up with a much better value-for-money education system. And the way things are going, maybe that’s exactly what we will have to do.

The Tech-Sounding Math-Free Degree!

Surely the solution to all our problems! Maths is completely broken at 2^nd level, we are not in a position to fix it, so go with the flow and extract all math content from our 3^rd and 4^th level courses!

This would result in more students eager to do such a course (its easy!), no problems with retention (no-one fails!), and lots of graduates who will get jobs with companies starved of technical know-how. And while we are at it if its an ICT course take out the programming and software development skills as well, as they are hard to teach and hard to learn.

All of our quality monitors would be quite happy with this, in fact such a course would pass completely under the quality radar. The statistics on completion rates etc. would look great, and no-one would complain. Certainly not the graduates who would think they were the bees knees and expect to quickly get to well-paid top management positions where their lack of technical skills would not be an issue.

(Occasionally I do get such a graduate coming to me with top honours in such a degree and enquiring about doing a Ph.D. It is difficult to explain to them that they have been sold a pup in terms of their 3rd level education, and that there is no way in the world that they would be able for a computing Ph.D.)

And of course the problem wouldn't be solved, just pushed up the food chain. It’s the aghast employer who learns to their horror that the honours science graduate can’t do long division.

Meanwhile big multi-nationals, while going along with the myth of our world class education system, grumble amongst themselves, quietly import people from abroad to do the hard technical stuff, and plan their departure from our shores.

To avoid such dumbing down (for that is what it is) we urgently need to fix math at 2^nd level. Here is where “Project Maths” comes in, which seems to have gone from being a blatant political fig-leaf (politicians must of course be seen to be “doing something”), to being the fount of all our hopes. Frankly the jury is out on Project Math. I have heard good and bad reports. Let us hope it lives up to its billing, as there is a lot riding on it.

Meanwhile in DCU we will continue to insist that graduates emerging from our computing degree courses will have strong technical skills. This is why employers consistently indicate a preference for our graduates. If this means taking the occasional hit from an ill-informed media about poor retention rates, then so be it.

The Media & Mathematics

How often do you hear a media professional say something like “Sure I was brutal at Mathematics at school – hated it with a vengeance - hahaha..”,

the subtext being – look it clearly didn’t do me any harm as here I am on RTE getting a fat fee for jabbering on about nothing in particular and displaying how witty I am. I suppose its only natural that people from a humanities background dominate in the media – after all they need to do something. And these put-downs of the sciences must be taken on the chin – any attempt at retaliation along the lines of “sure you are only a useless bunch of needy navel-gazing wasters” brings on an instant whinge about the humanities not being sufficiently valued. And these people surely need to feel valued.

The other day I heard an hilarious exchange on RTE radio when it was suggested that some-one might actually have been good at maths, and might indeed even have liked the subject. The poor man was indignant as he hastily protested that no, he was brutal at maths, absolutely hated it. He was clearly horrified that he might be considered as being outside of the national consensus. And that consensus is about fear and loathing of math. The damage done by this sort of idle chatter is inestimable. You certainly would not get away with boasting of illiteracy (hahaha, can’t read or write, aren’t I the gas man?), and yet boasting about innumeracy is completely acceptable. And this shows up in numerous ways – billions and millions routinely mixed up and a complete inability to absorb the significance of statistics (and indeed as many politicians would be aware, it is trivially easy to fool the Irish public by misuse of statistics). In fact it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that national innumeracy might have played a part in the mess that is our current financial/economic situation.

And yet as is now generally accepted, producing graduates with world class maths skills is vital to our national well-being. Bluntly put, multi-nationals are not attracted to set up in Ireland because of the theatre scene. Instead we produce commentators whose job is to commentate on other commentators. It’s a national characteristic – we much admire clever commentary on the activities of others, rather than actually attempt something ourselves. This is of course recognised by specifically Irish terms such as “begrudgery”, or “hurlers on the ditch”. Unfortunately it encourages a strongly anti-innovation culture.

It is often claimed that Ireland has a great tradition in Mathematics. However a close examination of the role of honour reveals that most of Ireland’s famous mathematicians were of a distinctly Anglo flavour, and although they may have worked here (as part of the then UK), they could not be considered as representative of a long native tradition.

Which isn’t to say that such a tradition cannot be started right now…

Don't Dun an Doras

Today I got an email from an academic publisher…

They were telling me the good news that I could submit a paper for publication in their journal, and that the cost to DCU (if my paper were accepted) had been reduced to 18 Euro per page. If anyone wanted to read my paper they would have to either subscribe to the journal at the cost of 240 Euro per year (for 4 issues), or pay a hefty price to download the paper from the publishers web site.

I shook my head in amazement. Are there still people out there that do that? In the field of Computing we have long moved over to Open Access publishing. For example all of my academic papers are available for download for free from the Web, and none of them cost me a penny to put them there.

In fact its you, the Irish and European taxpayer, that is paying for most of this research in the first place, so surely its only right that you should have free access to view its outputs.

Here in DCU, and in particular in the School of Computing, we have pushed this ideal to the limit. All of our Ph.D. theses are published on our own open-access repository called DORAS – see http://doras.dcu.ie/. Many of us choose to place all of our published output (conference papers, book chapters, journal publications) there as well.

My colleague Prof. Alan Smeaton informs me that

"DORAS has been in operation for almost 3 years and there are now 578 research publications from the School of Computing available online http://doras.dcu.ie/view/groups/groups2a.html, more than any other School, Faculty or research centre in the University. These have had 34,490 individual downloads of the full PDF of the publications, with the most-downloaded paper being:

Coogan, Thomas and Awad, George M. and Han, Junwei and Sutherland, Alistair (2006) Real time hand gesture recognition including hand segmentation and tracking. In: ISVC 2006 - 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing, 6-8 November 2006, Lake Tahoe, NV, USA. http://doras.dcu.ie/259/

which has had 1,081 individual downloads."

In a new initiative we have decided to make available presentations by all of our Ph.D. students, where in a recorded video of an academic talk they describe their research and their progress to date. These recordings are normally made after the students have completed about 2 years of their research program, and they then appear on this website in a blog posting. So now as well as browsing the printed word, you can also hear our research being presented directly “from the horses mouth”.

Open Access is the future of the dissemination of academic research.

(Of course there are occasions when we might have to keep quiet for a while about what we have discovered – there may after all be valuable Intellectual Property that we would need to take action to protect first.)