A Global Online Land-Grant University?
March 19th, 2007 by Ken UdasWell, I’ve been thinking a little bit about the possibilities. What if a land grant university really took its mission globally, and if it did, what might be the role of online learning?
After all, there are many parallels between the environment in which the U.S. land grants were established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the current environment in much of the modern developing and developed world. When the land grants were established in the U.S. there was social unrest, post-war reconstruction, profound economic and social stratification, expansionism paved by the systemic genocide of native populations, epidemics, economic migration, the need for developing civil infrastructure, agricultural capacity, education, health, and human service systems to support economic and social capacity to scaffold the civil society. Although things aren’t perfect, by many measures they are considerably better, and I would argue that the land-grant universities have played a significant role in making things better by fueling development through outreach into communities by integrating educational activities, practical research, and cooperative extension.
If the basic model has promise, how can we leverage the benefits of online learning? I believe that there would be a pretty practical curriculum focusing on business, work force development, engineering, natural sciences, education, etc. Unlike the elusive Global Online MBA this program would be intensely international because of the applied research and extension activities grounding the online component in practice onsite in places like Uzbekistan and Liberia. Think about the possibilities for study abroad programs and internships.
Although online learning has great potential for reducing barriers to education, whenever we work globally there are considerations about technology and connectivity, and access to educational resources. We would have to assume that this global land grant would have the same financial challenges as its more-or-less state bound counterparts in the U.S. are suffering and would have to fit the budget of a global audience. How might we reduce the financial and access barriers to infrastructure and educational materials? My experience suggests that western textbooks carry too big a price tag. How would we localize the learning environment and content? Would the organizational model be a network or a centralized institution? There are a lot of questions. Are there examples of institutions that might look something like the global online land grant, and are they delivering the promise?
