The government’s efforts to improve quality in Swedish higher education are overshadowed by dramatic changes in access to prestigious courses from globally ranked universities. But, many Swedish students are still forced to refrain from these internationally respected courses, writes Stefan Fölster, Managing Director for the Reform Institute in Stockholm.
The Swedish National Audit Office found in a recent audit that validation of foreign higher education programmes involves an unacceptably excessive tangle of governmental authorities, inadequate information for applicants, and long processing times.
A blend of protectionism and bureaucratic inertia is forcing many Swedish higher education students away from internationally prestigious university courses, to instead make do with lower quality courses at the higher education institute (HEI) where they are enrolled. For students starting this fall, this may limit their ability to compete internationally.
The current centre-right coalition government has prioritised improving quality in higher education. But these higher education quality reforms are now overshadowed by dramatic changes in access to prestigious courses offered by high-ranking international universities. When courses in other countries improve relative to Swedish course, multinational companies react accordingly. Research operations get localised in other countries; companies in these other countries succeed more often in their product development; and it becomes more difficult for Swedish operations to compete.
Many fast-growing economies are currently investing in improving their higher educational systems, and meanwhile, two game changing global trends in higher education are increasing in impact. The first involves significantly greater access to high-ranking international courses, and the second involves the spread of more effective teaching methods.
In 2011, Associate Professor Andrew Ng at Stanford University held an online course on artificial intelligence that reached over 100,000 students world-wide. Similar successes led to the formation of Coursera with Stanford colleague Daphne Koller, award-winning Professor in Computer Science. These courses offer students more than simply the opportunity to follow course lectures on video and access course material online, students also receive advice and the opportunity to personally take final exams. Several similar initiatives have since been launched, including Udacity (with Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun), while the non-profit edX was started by MIT and now is joined by Harvard and University of California in Berkeley). In the short time since, over two million students have enrolled in these programmes.
Distance courses have been used for years in Sweden, with increasing frequency in recent years. The new approach with the larger Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) phenomenon, is these involve a small group of the world’s most reputable university lecturers at globally high-ranked universities who offer well-planned and well-executed courses open to all. This includes access to the lecture videos and course material, naturally, but also to mentoring, testing, and the opportunity to take the final exam, which, if approved, leads to a passing certificate.
Now, these US universities are offering credit for MOOC courses, where the highly reputable University of Washington was the first. The American Council of Education, the largest higher education association in the US, is working on plans to approve more such courses.
But currently, Swedish universities are moving entirely too slowly to meet these trends. This should be understood in the context that even currently accredited foreign higher educational programmes – in principle approved for credit in Sweden – still must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis for individual students seeking to validate their credit. When the Swedish National Audit Office recently audited this validation process, they found it involved an unacceptably excessive tangle of reviewing governmental authorities, inadequate information for applicants, and long processing times.
One argument against moving faster in regard to accepting credit from MOOC course, though, is natural fears that the international distance courses cannot teach a student the required course content. But this fails to consider a second global trend where more effective teaching methods are being understood and implemented.
These methods, already used around the globe, involve more evidence-based courses and programmes. Many trials and studies have shown that students learn many times better with teaching methods where they first can, in advance, watch recorded lectures or study an assigned text on their own. Then, the traditional live lecture is replaced by an interactive workshop where students respond to questions and solve written exercises. Nobel Prize winning Professor Carl Wieman and several others have experimentally shown how this working method provides significantly better educational results.
This insight opens significant opportunities for even smaller regional HEIs to offer programmes that can compete globally by replacing their own lectures with MOOCs, but supplementing these with interactive workshops. Any HEI that does not incorporate this development into their offering will quickly find their students become less attractive on the labour markets.
This, therefore, calls for a coordinated approach and investment in Swedish higher education from both the educational system and the government. They must establish a functional method to validate and approve higher educational credit from foreign courses and from MOOCs. If participation in these is combined with local workshops or seminar courses, this can also provide leverage to modernise the Swedish higher educational system and drive it closer to the top of international elite in learning.
STEFAN FÖLSTER
Managing Director of the Reform Institute in Stockholm
Open Swedish Universities to international competition
A blend of protectionism and bureaucratic inertia is forcing many Swedish students away from internationally prestigious university courses, to instead take lower quality courses at the higher education institute (HEI) where they are enrolled. The current centre-right coalition government has prioritised improving quality in higher education. But these reforms of higher education quality are now overshadowed by dramatic changes in access to prestigious courses offered by high-ranked universities from around the world. Swedish student’s international competitiveness is thereby undermined. How Sweden can open universities to international competition. (in Swedish)