Structuring Universities for Effective Teaching and Learning

On April 18, 2012, Dr. Feridun Hamdullahpur delivered remarks on teaching and learning at Canadian universities at the International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure to be in Riyadh and to be a participant in this prestigious conference.

The 21st century is proving to be an incredibly exciting but also incredibly challenging time for post secondary education.  As we’ve heard over the last day and a half, multi-dimensional shifts in the world are inspiring new dialogue about the role of universities, what really matters in post secondary education, and how we can remain relevant to our students and our communities.  My remarks will address the key question implied in the background paper to this conference: Does a focus on research inevitably cause universities to neglect basic teaching and learning? My short answer is no. On the contrary, I would argue that in today’s knowledge and creative economy, the two must go hand in hand. In fact as we’ve discovered over the course of my own university’s history, they reinforce each other and ensure continuing relevance. In fact, as we’ve discovered over the course of my own university’s history, they reinforce each other and ensure continuing relevance.

In our experience, a powerful approach that combines experiential learning within a research environment, plus connectivity within and exposure to business, industry and the community, ensures relevancy and stimulates curiosity.  

This combination creates the perfect environment for innovation across the spectrum -- from the futuristic knowledge being developed in our Quantum Nano Centre to the start up businesses and new products that emanate from many of our study areas.

My presentation will support this view by covering three points:

  1. The first is a perspective on what students need in order to be well equipped to prosper in an environment of accelerating change.
  2. The second is to describe a Canadian model that is very well adapted to deliver to these needs.
  3. The third will offer some observations from our experience.

1. What do students need in order to be well equipped to prosper in an environment of accelerating change?

The longer I spend in the world of higher education, the more I see truth in the old saying that the more things change the more they remain the same. Despite all the changes that have taken place in the last 50 or so years, the basic needs of human beings haven’t changed fundamentally. We all still need food, shelter and, for most people, a job.  From an educational standpoint, we continue to need to transfer what scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi described as “explicit” knowledge, that is, information or content that can be easily shared and understood possibly through conversation, a lecture or reading. We also need what Polanyi calls “tacit” knowledge - the cultural and value-based real world experience that no amount of theory can effectively convey. 

Most students still come to university to learn skills that are relevant to today’s jobs. Most employers are looking for recruits with immediately employable skills and, increasingly, the ability to remain productive as the world changes. Most countries want citizens who can contribute to their social and economic health.

What has changed is that 50 years ago, jobs were somewhat more predictable than they are today or will be in the future. A recent study estimates that by 2015, IT cloud services will have generated nearly 14 million jobs worldwide[1]. Many of today’s students around the globe will create those jobs as well as others we can probably not conceive of today.

What has also changed is the expectations of students who fill our universities now. They bring very different attitudes towards teaching and learning than their predecessors even a decade ago. Raised in an environment of fingertip access to global information, constant personal interaction, inclusion, sharing and instant feedback, their expectation is that they will have a voice in decisions affecting them and an opportunity to make a difference.

In this environment, what and how can we teach them, so that they can become the next Einstein or Hemingway or Abdullah Bin Khamees?

I think we all agree that it is not enough to simply arm our students with an academic credential or skills learned from textbooks where much of the content can be out of date by the time they reach the university bookstore.  What we teach, and what our students must learn, needs to be relevant in an environment of continuous change. In information technology parlance, content needs to be in “real time”.

“Real time” education means a variety of things. It means our professors and lecturers need to be on top of what’s happening at the cutting edge of knowledge. It is not enough today to simply know the work of your own region or country. To be on top of your game you need to be connected, you need to be open to collaborations and partnerships within both your local and international communities. You need to be on the frontier of innovation.

To keep their knowledge current, or as we like to say at Waterloo, relentlessly relevant, we need to foster a level of curiosity in our students that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Without compromising academic excellence, we need to encourage the open mindedness of the young: to new ways of thinking and new discoveries; and to the diversity of experience and expression of people from different cultures. We need to help them develop the skill of critical enquiry; the instinct to question the question and understand that there can be more than one solution to a problem.  We need to help them develop the entrepreneurial skills that will turn ideas into viable businesses or implementable solutions, whether in science, technology or society.

Given the changing nature of work, we need to help them learn how to learn, a skill they will need, not just while they are at university, but throughout their adult lives. More than “employer ready”, they need to become effective citizens of the world – flexible, forward looking, innovating visionaries. Increasingly, the role of universities is to challenge and inspire them, to paraphrase Nelson Mandela, to do better than they think they can do.

 I can see you’re thinking, it’s easy to create this wish list but how do we need to structure our universities to fulfil it?

 At risk of sounding immodest, I’d like to suggest that we take a look at the model the University of Waterloo established right from its inception in 1957. I justify this by pointing out that Waterloo has had the honour of being considered the most innovative university in Canada for the last 20 years. As such, I am hoping that sharing what we have learned over our 54 years may be useful.

2. How is the University of Waterloo structured to deliver relevant outcomes?

We’d like to claim that we were prescient about today’s needs when the University of Waterloo was founded in 1957 but in fact its roots were rather more pragmatic. At the time, much of the world was transfixed by the space race between the United States and Russia. Clearly there would be huge potential gains for qualified players in this developing area. But in the wake of the Second World War, Canada didn’t have enough qualified engineers to keep up with industrialization let alone participate in space exploration in a meaningful way. The question was: How would Canada fast track the development of more engineers and technicians?  Part of the answer was the creation of the University of Waterloo.

Necessity being the mother of invention, we needed to develop a new model to achieve our goals. One advantage was that while we didn’t benefit from hundreds of years of successful history, we weren’t constrained by tradition either. We were committed to excellence, relevance and practical outcomes; a commitment that has not changed.

The university’s approach was based on what at the time was a revolutionary system of co-operative education. Alternating terms of academic study with paid work provided immediately applicable real work experience and solved the problem of how to pay university fees, a perennial barrier to broader university entry – at least in North America. From our first year intake of 75 engineering, mathematics, and science students we now have over 30,000 in undergraduate and graduate programs that include health sciences, finance, environmental studies and architecture.

Well before open-mindedness, diversity, collaboration and integration were recognized as building blocks for innovation, Waterloo was building connections between formerly unconnected ideas and disciplines inside and outside the university. Collaboration with industry and the community ensured that students received an excellent education grounded in real needs. Students graduated, found work and were immediately productive. Industry benefited from appropriately qualified graduates.

Industry and business quickly learned that collaborating with the university reaped valuable mutual benefits. Ideas for research flowed in, along with advice, feedback and large cheques. A virtuous circle ensued that still continues. Today, over 3,500 employers in business and industry around the globe collaborate with us on content to ensure that their needs are met and in turn make coop work opportunities available. Waterloo is now the largest cooperative post secondary institution of its type anywhere. Our 16,000 coop students earned $161 million dollars in 2010-2011.

In the early days, academia and industry walked two very separate paths and until this point no one in Canada had attempted to build bridges between them. There was considerable opposition on both sides. Far from holding the new university back, its competitors’ opposition inspired a maverick spirit in Waterloo shared by faculty, staff and students.  This has led to a culture where no one is afraid to try something new. It’s a culture that encourages that open-mindedness I mentioned earlier, so that our students, as quantum theory physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it: “... not so much see what no one has yet seen, but think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees."

The forward looking nature of our culture has inspired world class research that has won numerous accolades, including two Killam Prizes in the last two years – the Canadian equivalent of a Nobel Prize.  It’s a culture that differentiates Waterloo from its Canadian peers and attracts high achieving students and top entrepreneurial faculty and staff. Recently, we were delighted to welcome Dr. Philippe Van Cappellen in 2011 as Canada Excellence Research Chair in Ecohydrology. He is recognized internationally as a leader in this emerging field which combines the sciences of water and ecology to determine how to protect the Earth's fresh water supply in the face of climate change and pollution. Philippe says Waterloo is “the ideal place for research that will revolutionize global strategies for managing water resources.”

He will add to the knowledge we have created in water-related research throughout our 54-year history. Today, through The Water Institute, more than 100 faculty members from all six faculties and close to 20 departments, as well as staff, students and partners, work together to advance water science, technology, and policy. 

This type of collaboration across disciplines has always been part of our culture. In our first decade it led to the creation of North America’s first separate computer technology faculty, which combined mathematics and computer engineering. In those days, computers filled huge, heavily air-conditioned rooms that were often locked.  It was typical of Waterloo’s culture that undergraduate students were, effectively, given the keys. Encouraged to work directly with the equipment, four of our undergraduates were inspired to create a new computer language, the WatFor compiler, in 1965. This was not simply a clever idea, it was quickly adopted by IBM, has been constantly updated and is still in use today.  This was pure experiential learning with a very tangible, positive outcome.

Interestingly, in their 2011 book “A New Culture of Learning”, Douglas Thomas (Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California) and John Seely Brown, former head of the Xerox Research Centre in Palo Alto and cofounder of the U.S. based Institute for Research on Learning, suggest that the most effective learning is based on “play, innovation and the cultivation of the imagination”. Again, without being particularly prescient, this is one of the approaches to learning that the University of Waterloo has fostered from Day One.

The WatFor compiler was the first in a long list of inventions and breakthroughs that stemmed from Waterloo’s innovative culture.  The concept of the Euro is another. It evolved from work on monetary integration by Nobel Prize winner Robert A. Mundell while he led Waterloo’s Economics department from 1972 to 1974. We don’t take responsibility for its problems today!

In the 1980s, Mike Lazaridis was an undergraduate at Waterloo when he came up with the idea of the Blackberry. Rather than push him to complete his degree, his entrepreneurial-minded professors encouraged him to develop the concept commercially.  The result: Research in Motion was born and has created 17,000 net new jobs in facilities around the world. While it has had challenges recently, it was a breakthrough that has changed business communication forever.

It is typical of Waterloo’s culture that our inventor-owned intellectual property policy allows students and staff to retain the intellectual rights to their inventions. The policy makes the lines between the university, business and industry even more porous and leads to productive partnerships and a solid record of commercialization. More than 75 high-tech spinoffs have been incorporated to commercialize technology developed at the University of Waterloo by our faculty, students, and alumni. 

As the University of Waterloo’s reputation grew, we became a magnet for a cluster of technology and science based industries that today form Canada’s “new technology epicentre”[2]. It boasts more than 700 high technology enterprises including Research In Motion, Google Waterloo and Open Text. It is also home to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics of which Professor Stephen Hawking is Distinguished Research Chair. Several University of Waterloo faculty members hold associate or affiliate positions within the institute as part of our shared goal to integrate our research activities. This helps create a rich learning environment that brings cutting edge knowledge and passionate inquiry into our classrooms and inspires ever more interesting research.

Does this open-minded, cooperative approach work? Are we generating the desired learning outcomes? I could cite various measures, some of which are on the screen behind me, but, in my view, the true measure of a university’s success is not our professors’ performance; it’s the performance of their students.

Our teachers tell us that our coop students ask really insightful questions that can lead to advances in the curriculum, new research ideas, even new approaches to teaching.

Our students are eminently employable. The world of technology and innovation is studded with Waterloo alumni. There are an estimated 350,000 Canadians working in Silicon Valley. Many received their undergraduate education at Waterloo and were recruited by world-class employers, including Microsoft and Google. Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft and a Waterloo donor, says Waterloo is “always in the top three universities in terms of the number of graduates we hire”. Why? Because our graduates have the intellectual and subject matter skills they need to sustain their businesses.

A commitment to being at the frontier of innovation has naturally led us to be on the ground floor of leading edge research fields such as bioinformatics and nanotechnology.   By 2015, nanotechnology products will contribute about $1 trillion to the global economy and employ two million workers directly. Waterloo has Canada’s largest nanotechnology undergraduate engineering program based in our Quantum-Nano Centre, which is part of the Institute for Quantum Computing. Devoted to pure science, the centre will build even greater interaction between our mathematics and engineering faculties. It’s a measure of the value of their education that our nanotechnology graduates are courted by the world’s most elite doctoral programs.

In addition, our graduates’ performance in the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology put Waterloo in the top three clinical psychology programs in North America.

Not all students will go on to become PhDs, nor should they.  In NSSE surveys, students tell us they choose Waterloo because a degree from our university virtually guarantees employment and offers the prospect of a fulfilling career in many parts of the world.

3. Observations from the Waterloo model

What does all this add up to? Let me conclude by offering three observations.

The importance of being connected

The first is the importance of being connected. We have found that by grounding education in the real world and creating inter-disciplinary, inter-mural and international connections, we have been able to build mutually beneficial relationships with our stakeholders. Our industry connections are a key part of remaining relevant.  The learning outcomes are valued by graduates, industry, business and communities alike. This has led to more investment in the kind of leading edge research that delivers a real impact - whether in the fields I’ve already mentioned or in others such as architecture, finance or clinical psychology.

Culture

The second is the importance of culture. Waterloo would not have achieved so much in five decades without a culture that fosters open-mindedness and risk taking. Our history is one of seeking out and relishing opportunities to explore new frontiers in the pursuit of solutions that can have a direct, beneficial impact on other people's lives. The Waterloo Pump was a very simple solution to a life-threatening problem in many parts of the developing world. Today over a million people in Africa and Asia rely on this inexpensive device to maintain an accessible water supply.

We have found that minds are opened in many ways.  Experiential education is one. Exposure to diversity is yet another. We are fortunate that in Canada, difference is accommodated and multiculturalism is a way of life.

Another is exposure to new ideas and knowledge. This means having not only stellar researchers in every discipline but also stellar teachers. Great researchers are great teachers when they respect their students and harness their own passion for critical inquiry to stimulate intelligent, adult discussion. It means creating an environment where students feel safe not only asking questions but challenging the answers. It means allowing students to fail and learn from their mistakes. Critical inquiry leads to profound learning. Inquisitiveness feeds the imagination and is a great breeding ground for new ideas.

Innovation

The third observation I’d like to offer is that innovation is central to a mutually reinforcing balance between research and learning. We can only maintain relevance if we are willing to innovate, not just what, but how and where, we teach. 

It’s what we mean at Waterloo when we say we will innovate everywhere, every day. This may involve some risk taking for instructors more comfortable with teaching the way they were taught but increasingly, we need to work to make even the most academic information experiential. At Waterloo, we are constantly exploring, testing and sharing new ideas and possibilities. Some of our approaches include fostering critical inquiry and peer learning through social media including Twitter and YouTube.  VeloCity, an undergraduate live/work centre dedicated to mobile communications creates a community of people from diverse backgrounds and with a broad range of skills and experience. In sharing ideas, they stimulate inquiry into hitherto unimagined opportunities and learn how to commercialize them. One start-up company launched through this approach has already been successful enough to donate $1 million back to support others.

We have begun offering every one of our undergraduates, in every discipline, the opportunity to participate in primary research. This is real research, in real world applications.  It is one of the many ways that teaching and research truly intersect and where real, sustainable learning happens. 

Conclusion

I opened my remarks by stating that research, teaching and learning must go hand in hand in the 21st century model for post secondary education. A focus on excellence, relevance and practical outcomes leads to broader prosperity – which is an outcome we can all support.

I don’t claim that universities, including my own, have all the answers, but I hope our results show that we have quite a few of them. We have worked hard and continue to work hard, to support a symbiotic relationship between research and learning. Moving forward, our expectation is that this relationship will continue to be productive for our students, industry and business, our local communities and the international community of dedicated researchers and teachers with whom we partner and with whom we intend to continue to connect and collaborate.

Thank you.



[1] IDC study 2012 Cloud Computing's Role in Job Creation

[2] The Globe and Mail