Ehwa Womans University

Ehwa Womans University

Lecture by Sir John Daniel
KNOU Fellow – 2012

20 September 2012

Education for the Future:

What role for Educational Technology in a Women’s University?

Summary

Sir John Daniel will reflect on his involvement with issues of gender in education during his 17 years as a university president in Canada and the UK, his tenure as Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO and his years as President of the Commonwealth of Learning. He will then explore the greatly improved situation of women in higher education and the world of work.

How can a women’s university build on these gains and, in particular, what role can educational technology play in ensuring the women’s higher education maximizes their potential for personal and professional fulfillment? He will ask how a women’s university should respond to the expansion of eLearning. Can a women’s university use eLearning to strengthen further its role in promoting gender equity and gender equality?

Introduction

It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation. You have asked me to speak about Education for the Future and I have added a subtitle: What role for Educational Technology in a Women’s University?

My talk will be in three parts. First I shall reflect on my experience of girls and women’s education over the last 30 years. I have had a very varied professional life, which has involved me in the education of women and girls in different ways.

Second, I shall explore the situation of women in higher education and make some comments on women’s universities. For this part of the talk I am indebted to Professor Asha Kanwar, who succeeded me four months ago as President of the Commonwealth of Learning.

The Commonwealth of Learning, or COL as we call it, has made an institutional commitment to openness and to sharing its work as Open Educational Resources. I shall talk about Open Educational Resources more later, but let me just say here that COL staff share their papers and presentations so that others can build on them. I am building on addresses that Professor Kanwar gave to the SNDT Women’s University and the Vardhman Open University, both in India.

In the third part of the talk I shall look at the role of educational technology in a women’s university. How can you use eLearning, in particular, to give your students the 21st century skills that will take them to personal and professionalsuccess?

The Education of Girls and Women: Trends

For the last 40 years much of my work has been in open and distance learning (ODL). Historically ODL has provided educational opportunities for women that many of them could not get elsewhere. ODL institutions, particularly Open Universities, not only provided study opportunities but also routes into posts in universities.

It was a striking fact that from their early days the open universities had a higher proportion of women in academic and professional posts at all levels than traditional universities. I think there were two reasons for this.

First, women were more flexible than men in risking a career in a new type of institution. Second, because of their strong commitment to openness and equal opportunities, open universities were the first institutions in higher education to make a real commitment to equality of opportunity in selection processes. These two factors fed on each other.

I sensed this combination of factors when I had my first contact with the UK Open University exactly 40 years ago.

After completing my doctorate in Nuclear Metallurgy at the University of Paris and becoming an assistant professor in the Engineering Faculty of the University of Montreal, I enrolled in a part-time Masters programme in Educational Technology at another Montreal University. I suppose it was the beginning of my personal commitment to lifelong learning.

The programme required an internship, so I spent three months – the summer of 1972 – at the British Open University. It was then in its second year of operation but already had 40,000 students. That summer was a conversion experience for me.

Everything about the University inspired me. There was the terrific eagerness of the students, many of them women, seizing with both hands this first opportunity of their lives to study at university. This eagerness was matched by the commitment of the academic staff, who put students at the centre of their work in a way that I had not seen before. Then there was the sheer scale, the reach into every corner of the country. There was the use of media, particularly the brilliant radio and TV programmes broadcast on national channels so that the public could take part as well.

At the end of the summer I returned to Canada wanting to join this movement. Teaching in a traditional university seemed a bit stale. I wanted to join the open and distance learning revolution. Fortunately I was able to do so very quickly and joined the Open University – called the Télé-université – that was being set up in Quebec province.

After four years there I went to Athabasca University, an open university in Western Canada, just as that was beginning its phase of rapid development. I am very proud of having been associated with the early days of Athabasca, which has been very successful.

From an unlikely base of a very small town in northern Canada it offers programmes that are sometimes the largest in their subject in Canada. It has students all over the world and is constantly pioneering new ways of doing things.

From Athabasca University I went to be Vice-Rector, Academic at Concordia University, a large university in Montreal that specializes in serving working adults who want to study part time. It operates by teaching in classrooms in the conventional way but schedules most classes in the evenings and on weekends so that people can go there after work. That was where and how I did my Masters in Educational Technology.

From there I went to be President of Laurentian University in northeastern Ontario. This is a huge region; about four times the size of Korea, and our university had four campuses. I want to say a word about the campus in Hearst, marked in green here. It is one of the smallest universities in the world, serving a sparsely populated region with an economy based on forests and mines.

When I was there in the 1980s a huge social change was taking place. Not long before the young men of the region, even with just a high-school education, could get very well-paid jobs in the forestry and mining industries. But that had changed.

These industries were becoming mechanized. They needed fewer people and better-trained people. Some of the machines used in both forestry and mining cost a million dollars each.

This meant that the young men no longer had easy access to well-paid jobs – or indeed to any jobs at all. Many of them reacted to this in a defeatist way, hoping that good times would come again.

It was the women who responded with flexibility, enrolling in the university, obtaining degrees and taking jobs in the government and service sectors. This produced social strains. It was good that the women were bringing in money to support their families, but this was often resented by the men, who used to be the breadwinners but now had to defer to the women.

I mention this example because it has become, in different ways, a worldwide phenomenon.

Let me now jump forward to my next job as Vice-Chancellor, or President, of the UK Open University. This is a wonderful institution. Its motto is Open to People, Open to Places, Open to Methods and Open to Ideas. Many women took advantage of the Open University to study at home for a university degree while bringing up their young children.

While I was there a book was written, OU Women, documenting the amazing stories of some of these female students and how they managed to combine child rearing with study and sometimes a job as well. One would get up at four in the morning in order to study before the rest of the family woke up. The subtitle of the book is ‘undoing educational obstacles’.

My next job was quite different. I went to Paris as Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO. My responsibilities covered education at all levels.

The urgent priority was the campaign to provide Education for All that had been kicked off at a World Forum at Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 and been given new momentum by the World Forum in Dakar in 2000.

The Dakar Forum set out six aims for expanding education at all levelsbut the major focus was on two goals that were part of the Millennium Development Goals set by Heads of Government at the United Nations in the same year. One was to achieve universal primary education; the second was to promote gender equality.

These goals were the major focus of my work at UNESCO. At the level of primary education they were really one goal, because if you get all children into school then by definition you have achieved gender equality – at least as far as access is concerned.

In those years I learned a lot about the obstacles that prevent girls going to school. Within the school it is helpful to have both male and female teachers, whereas in some countries the teachers are either nearly all men or all women. The school environment is very important too. Parents need to know their girls are safe, which means having toilets in the schools and fences around them.

From UNESCO I moved to the Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver. COL is a micro UNESCO focused on helping Commonwealth countries use technology in education. Naturally, I brought my UNESCO experience with me and talked a lot about girls’ education. But education ministers from some Commonwealth countries quickly set me straight. Those from the Caribbean and southern Africa told me: ‘we do not have a problem with girls’ education. By and large the girls all complete school. It is the boys that drop out and underperform’.

Women in Higher Education

This brings me to the second part of this talk where I shall look more generally at the situation of women in higher education.

Ehwa Womans University is a visionary institution that has pioneered the empowerment of women through higher education. But if the goal is gender equality and gender equity, why do we have a separate institution for women? In some countries a separate institution was – and often still is – necessary because parents will not allow their daughters to attend a coeducational institutions. Many women have had their education truncated for this reason.

But women’s institutions have brought great benefits even in countries that claim a culture of equality like the US. In a study of women who attended US women’s colleges between 1920 and 1973, it was found that women who graduated from women’s colleges were twice as likely to obtain doctorates, as were women from co-educational institutions. Why? Research suggests that one reason for the higher achievement of women’s institutions is the explicit commitment of their leaders to the advancement of women.

By being better at empowering women women’s institutions have important impacts on the wider society. The World Bank links the success of development policies firmly to women’s empowerment. To quote its report:

Gender equality is an issue of development effectiveness, not just a matter of political correctness or kindness to women. New evidence demonstrates that when women and men are relatively equal, economies tend to grow faster, the poor move more quickly out of poverty, and the well-being of men, women, and children is enhanced”.

India provides an example. Reserving one third of the seats on local councils for women has led to improvements in the provision of water, sanitation in schools, a reduction in corruption, teenage girls marrying later, having few children and aspiring to higher education.

Thanks to institutions like Ehwa Womans University, women are making great progress. Yet more is needed. Women represent more than 40% of the global labour force, 43 % of the agricultural workforce and more than half the world’s university students, yet we find fewer women at higher levels.

It is naughty of me to generalize from one event but the other day I was present with the dignitaries when the Prime Minister opened the eLearning Korea 2012 Conference. In the first two rows of the ceremony I counted two women among the thirty men present. Yet when we went into the exhibition and there was a demonstration of an eClassroom to the Prime Minister, the large majority of children in this specially chosen class were girls. That suggests that by 2040 a similar ceremony might look very different.

Women are indeed making great strides. More and more evidence indicates that they have – or are more ready to acquire – the skills required for good employment or self-employment in this 21st century. These are the non-cognitive skills such as leadership, communication, honesty/ethics, teamwork and flexibility. Women score particularly well on flexibility, as in the example that I gave from the response to change in the mining and forestry industries in northern Ontario.

The nature of the economy is changing. Earlier, in a manufacturing economy producing goods, strength mattered and men dominated the work force. Today we have a knowledge economy in which a different set of skills is required for success. Today we need intelligence, the ability to sit still and focus, to listen carefully, to communicate openly and to work in teams. Women can do all these things very well and so they are earning higher salaries.

What should you do? What should Ehwa Womans University do?

I shall conclude, in this third section, with some advice to you as future graduates and some advice to Ehwa University.

As graduates of Ehwa University you have been given a great start, not only in the academic and employment markets but also, I am told, in the marriage market. To consolidate your gains I suggest you remember three things.

First, remember that what you have learned here is just a start. You could have two to four careers in your lifetimes, so you will still need to continue to learn, unlearn and re-learn many different things during the course of your life. In short you will need to be lifelong learners if you wish to succeed.

Second, be ambitious. Scholars have shown that women are less ambitious than men. So reach for the stars. Successful women have shown that you can be ambitious, confident and compassionate while maintaining a balance between work and life.

The third key to success is hard work. Talent may contribute to success, but hard work makes the difference between success and failure.

Did you know that when the Beatles were still a struggling band in 1960 they were invited to play in Germany? They had to play seven days a week, eight hours a day. That was where they found their form and gained the confidence that they could do it. When they experienced their first major success in 1964, they had already performed 1200 times!

Research has put some figures behind this. It suggests that to achieve world-class performance in any field you have to start with some talent and then practice for 10,000 hours. That applies to top musicians and in other fields. Bill Gates had put in 10,000 hours of practice at programming before he achieved his breakthrough. Henry Ford said that genius is a great capacity for hard work.

That is my advice to you as students and graduates. What is my advice to the University?

Last week Dr. Peck Cho gave a powerful talk at the eLearning conference. His subject was: What should we do with eLearning to develop creative talents in Korea?He was really talking about the 21st century skills I mentioned earlier. Lots of people are doing research on creativity and claim to have identified 170 concepts related to it.

Dr. Peck Cho reduced them to six: Basic Knowledge; Fuzzy Thinking; Curiosity; Sense of Adventure; Positive Mindset; and ‘Slack’. Slack is the ability to communicate and empathise.He said that ‘slack’ is a very Asian concept but that Asian countries have lost their heritage of creativity by slavishly following the West.

For Dr. Peck Cho the problem is that Korean students are packed with Basic Knowledge at the expense of developing the other five qualities. Furthermore, they have a great fear of failure and always search for the ‘right’ answer.He stressed that creativity requires a better balance between the affective and cognitive domains, which in terms of education means a balance between liberal arts and technology.

I cannot comment on the curriculum balance that you have at Ehwa Womans University. I assume that it includes the liberal arts and I hope it includes a good dose of technology. I mean not just technology for technology but technology applied to real situations.

But let me focus on educational technology. Can the University use educational technology to enhance students’ development of creative talents and 21st century skills?

Some would answer ‘no’ immediately and argue that educational technology – eLearning and all that – dehumanizes teaching and learning. I profoundly disagree.