Artificial intelligence should not be used as a tool to scale higher education but to reinvent courses, an edtech pioneer has argued.
Speaking at the Times Higher Education Innovation & Impact Summit in New Delhi, Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva University, said the conversation about the intersection of technology with education was “unlike the conversation about technology in any other sector”.
“In any other sector, the perspective is: our product is limited, it’s broken,” he said. “Technology comes in, it allows us to rethink it.
“In education we say, ‘We know our product is broken’, and when technology comes in, we ask, ‘How can we get the same product to more people?’”
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Mr Nelson argued that the traditional higher education model was not fit for purpose because it “serves the wealthiest and most powerful, not best and brightest”, with top universities selecting “already good students” and then saying “look at all the wonderful things they’ve done”.
The “most selective universities” show the “poorest” improvements in student outcomes, he claimed. “Maybe we shouldn’t be as focused on the inputs”.
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Since establishing Minerva University in 2011, Mr Nelson has advocated for a renewed approach to higher education. In 2021, the organisation designed degree programmes for Zayed University in the UAE, which aimed to move away from lectures and instead focus on interdisciplinary, blended learning in small groups.
Speaking later at the same event, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, chairperson of HCL Technology and a trustee of the Shiv Nadar Foundation – from which the Indian university of the same name stems – said she felt that the “disruptive value [of technology] is often overestimated”.
While there is a lot of discussion about investment in AI, “from a true tangible profitability perspective, we’re still waiting to see results,” she said.
Instead, Ms Malhotra argued that higher education institutes should focus on having an “agile curriculum” focusing on the use of technology and how that will change the landscape going forward.
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In India, she said, many students who entered engineering schools wanted to study computer science.
“Whereas if you look at industry and you talk about AI, you know that AI is going to completely disrupt those early jobs and software development life cycles are just going to get shorter,” Ms Malhotra said.
“So I would be really keen if the institutions of higher education could focus a lot more on the changes that technology is going to bring about in the workplace, regardless of whichever industry is there, and then, from that lens, really guide students as to what they should be taking.”
For example, she said, to find opportunities in India’s burgeoning semiconductor industry, engineering students needed to study materials science.
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“I still don’t think that’s happening,” she said. “The job of philanthropic institutions such as ours is: we can use patient capital to change curriculums to be much more agile and, more than anything else, to guide students as well as parents towards other avenues.”
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