DIY University Ranking

Rank your own!

Worried about the methodology (and agenda) of existing university ranking organisations?

Consider this institutional citation count. Note that a variant of this proposed measure is also used, and heavily weighted, by those other ranking organisations. Indeed it is probably the biggest, and least subjective component in the mix. It is based on the number of citations to research papers written by staff members.

Its easy – go to this Web page
http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_authors&mauthors

(I know you get an error message) and input the name of a university in the box at the top and click on “Search Authors”. Then, starting from the top count down (1,2,3..n) through the staff until your count n is greater than the citation count for the next staff member. Lets call this the institutional or i-index. For example type “Dublin Institute of Technology” without the quotes, click on Search Authors, count down through the list, not forgetting to click Next to move to the next page. You get a score of 13. Not bad! (Note all these counts were observed on January 10^th, and are liable to change in the meantime)

Now let’s try and calibrate the method using some world famous universities. In major ranking exercises Harvard and Stanford often comes out ranked number 1 or 2, and Oxford typically 4 or 5. According to the proposed method Harvard scores 233, Stanford scores 159 and Oxford 126. Looks about right.

For Irish Universities (and some prominent ITs) the ranking is (drum roll please!)

1. DCU – 40
2. UCD – 38
3. UCG – 34
4. TCD – 26
5. QUB – 26
6. UCC – 22
7. Maynooth – 15
8. DIT – 13
9. Ulster– 11
10. Limerick- 11
11. Waterford IT – 5

Not quite what you expected? Well you can hardly complain that Google’s algorithms have an axe to grind when it comes to Irish Universities…

Lots of interesting observations can be made. Obviously DCU comes out on top – so no surprise there . Drilling down a little deeper, and from a purely parochial point of view, observe that Computing is still far and away the dominant research school within DCU.

Colleagues from other universities (and departments!) might complain that their staff have not “signed up” with Google Scholar. My response is – if you choose to hide your light under a bushel, who is to blame? You or the bushel?

But of course I accept that as more academics sign up with Google Scholar, the more accurate the measure will become. I have observed that academic applicants for jobs now often attach their Google Scholar citation profile, so its use is rapidly becoming more widespread. Certainly if I am to interview an academic for a research post, it’s the first place I look, and I know that internationally colleagues are doing the same.

Lets fall in Love

Everyone is doing it (with apologies to Cole Porter)

Irish kids are doing it..

http://coderdojo.com/

Regular guys are doing it..

http://codeyear.com/

Girls are doing it…

http://girldevelopit.com/

The Mayor of New York is doing it...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16440126

They are all coding! Also known as Computer Programming.

It would be great to be able to say that Irish Schools were doing it (by and large they aren’t ). But the pressure for coding to become part of the secondary curriculum is building up all over the developed world, and hopefully we will not be too far behind.

Of course I am old enough to have seen all this before. For me coding is still a hobby that I love.

The early 80’s was the era of the coding hobbyist magazine, with titles like Personal Computer World (PCW), Practical Computing (UK) and Dr. Dobbs Journal (US). PCW closed in 2009 having long morphed into a rather dull trade magazine, Practical Computing closed in the 1990’s, and even Dr. Dobbs disappeared as a print magazine, but lingered on as a Website. However interestingly in March last year Dr. Dobbs commenced a resurrected PDF version of the magazine. In fact it would seem like the perfect time for some entrepreneurial type to launch a new hobbyist magazine to ride the current wave of popularity.

In the 80’s inexpensive home computers first became available, and since they didn’t do much of anything unless you programmed them yourself, learning to program was an absolute requirement. I still recall my pleasure in having an article accepted for publication in Practical Computing, featuring a program to solve alphametic puzzles.

Then in the late 1990s personal computers became things you played games on rather than programmed yourself, and the hobbyist scene died away. But now its back with a vengeance, and our discipline will certainly benefit from the renewed surge in interest. Exposure to coding at a young age brings huge benefits to all.

So maybe its time to fall in love with coding all over again.

And the bottom line is - coding is a skill that gets you a well paid job.

Evolving Higher Education

Without variation, there can be no evolution. Darwin may not have actually said that, but he might have.

Consider the seven Universities in the Republic of Ireland. There are all notionally “independent”, and all fiercely protective of that status. And yet they don’t act independently. I like to use the analogy of the chain-gang to describe the way in which they all shuffle together in the same direction, converging on the imagined promised land of “best practise”. Sometimes one of them will make a minor adjustment, which the others will rather reluctantly follow after a short delay. For example Trinity recently decided that all lecturers are in future are to be called Professors. This is by no means a radical move, as they are merely converging on the American norm. However expect the other Irish Universities to follow suit within a year or two.

It didn’t have to be that way. One just might have expected all of the Universities to act individually, to have all assumed radically different approaches to the challenges of higher education, to have leveraged their independence to the maximum. But they haven’t. Ask anyone what is the main distinguishing feature of each of our Universities in terms of how they approach the challenges of higher education, and nothing immediately springs to mind (of more substance than an advertising jingle). With talk of increased collaboration and even mergers, we can expect that trend to continue and to accelerate.

But what if the position we are converging on in ever smaller steps is not optimal, in fact far from optimal? I would suggest that a group of intelligent people with little exposure to our current educational systems, locked away in a room for a month or two, might, just might, come up with a radically improved model for Irish higher education. They might then be funded to establish an experimental third level institution. To avoid the trap of instant convergence to imagined norms, it might be best not to call it a University, but something else, say for example a “National Institute for Higher Education” (!)

Of course in the early 80s when NIHE (Dublin and Limerick) were first established we did just that – and our radical approach was a wake-up call to the Irish third level sector. Maybe we need to do that again.

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.