- Email: [email protected]
An Information Age Business Model for Tertiary Education
Copyright @ IFAC Advances in Control Education, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 2000
AN INFORMATION AGE BUSINESS MODEL FOR TERTIARY EDUCATION
Renate Sitte*, Joaquin Sitte**
* Faculty of Engineering and InformatIOn Technology Griffith University PMB 50 Gold Coast Mail Centre, Queensland 9726 - Australia E-mail: [email protected]
** School ofComputing Science,
Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434 Brisbane 4001 - Australia E-mail [email protected]
Abstract: This paper presents a business model for Tertiary Education. The business model emerges from a visible trend towards globalization and the need to offer competitive cost effective tertiary education and the growing opportunity of certified courses offered by large corporations. It changes the role of universities from being a sole education provider to an assessor coordinator and facilitator of industry based learning. Competition among industries maintains high quality state of the art and takes a financial burden away from the universities. There is benefit for all three the industries the universities and the student ifit is properly managed. Copyright ~, 2000 IFAC
Keywords: Control education, Models, Economic systems, Industrial Training
1. INTRODUCTION
education and the Australian university provides for the fmal year and graduation. Although these schemes were conceived by the Australian universities as a way of increasing the number of full-fee paying students, in effect they are selling their reputation and capacity for certification. In this arrangement the less prestigious institution supplies the initial undergraduate education, which is then recognized and certified by the Australian University upon graduation of the foreign student.
Globalization and increasing competition among themselves forces universities to market their services aggressively to students. Universities increasingly perceive their market as extending beyond their traditional regions of influence. Faced with shrinking public funding for education Australian Universities have discovered their advantageous position in the Southeast Asian education market. Although the main effort is to attract foreign students for full time study at their attractive Australian campuses, new interesting initiatives have ansen. Australian universities have made agreements with institutions in other countries, mainly in Southeast Asia and India, to share in the education for a degree. The foreign institution provides the first one or two years of
Student numbers are increasing fast, not only by population growth, but also by the desire for a tertiary education that hopefully warrants employment later on. Their number has grown to over 40% of school-leavers from a mere 15% ten years back (Biggs 1999). There is a
133
growing conflict between the diminishing government funding for Australian universities, and the need to remain internationally competitive. Quality is compromised by having to deal with a fast increasing student staff ratio. Lecturers' efforts end up in tutoring and marking large classes, instead of updating their expertise with innovative material. This has a detrimental effect on the quality of education. But education is no longer free and students demand competitive skills as part of their study package. Universities are increasingly looking for an affordable ways in mass education. Flexible Delivery in the form of Web Based Instruction and Distance Education are becoming widespread . The preparation of Flexible Delivery material is laborious and expensive in itself (Taylor 1997, Taylor & Joughin 1997).
graduates to achieve certification. Several collaborative programs between Industry and Engineering Faculties are implemented. They range from work based accreditation in the mining industry to strategic industry-university partnership (John 1998) The cost of developing study material for flexible or distance delivery either over the internet or in traditional printed form is many times grater than the cost of traditional face to face delivery. Therefore universities or other organizations that engage in preparing such material will have to recover development cost trough increasing their customer base (students). Microsoft and other large corporations are already marketing their study material globally. Universities will have to follow in their footsteps. It is quite likely that universities will not be able to produce high quality study material for flexible and distance delivery for all their courses. There will be a growing pressure on universities to specialize on areas where they have outstanding expertise. As this global educational market develops and matures, and geographical location become irrelevant due to better and cheaper communication, only a handful of the best providers will survive in each topic area. In the same way as the global textbook market has been dominated by a few top authors, the flexible delivery market will be dominated by a few providers. The burning question is what will be a viable business model for the future education market. If current trends are an indication, then universities will increasingly leverage their capacity for certification.
We can observe the convergence of a number of trends. On one side the promise of improved delivery of study material via the internet to distance students is inducing universities to invest into the expansion of their distance study offerings. On the other side there are large corporations that offer specialist and application oriented courses (Siemens, National Instruments, IBM, Sun, Cisco, Motorola, Honeywell and more). The most well known example is the Microsoft curriculum that leads to Microsoft Professional Certification (Microsoft 2000). More examples of certified courses are: Embedded Technology Specialist Certified by Motorola; Siemens Certified Systems Engineer in HiCom 300E; National Instruments Certified Programmer; Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (e.g. Routing and Switching and others); IBM Certified Specialist for Visual Age Java, for WebSphere Application Server; Sun Pro-fessional Certification for Java Platform, Solaris System, Network Administration; Honeywell has already implemented co-operation with several high standing Universities in the USA, such as UCBerkeley, UCLA, Cal Tech., Camegie Mellon, etc. This list of companies or courses is not exhaustive. Many of those courses are being offered also at Universities, but with less or no emphasis on a particular product.
2. THE BUSINESS MODEL A business model describes the dynamics of sale: "what" is being sold to "whom, and how to make a profit of it. In what follows we describe a business model for the interaction between universities and commercial companies with the example of a typical four year Engineering degree. The model can be applied to other disciplines. The basic idea is to take advantage of the industry training resources offered, and delegate teaching - at least part of it to accredited enterprises. In this way the universities adopt more the role of a convener than a teacher. Before going into the details of the model we look what each side
How to align some degrees with Industrial certification is increasingly being discussed at universities. The intention is not to imitate the industrial courses but to provide key educational elements that will make it easier for university
134
requireS/offers and whether there is overlap in contents.
We have found that there is overlap between courses that are offered by computer companies and subjects taught at our Universities. The overlap is not in the first, but rather in second and third years of the Engineering degrees, and it does not apply to all the subjects offered.
2.1. What the Universities offer. We have looked at the curricula of a four year tertiary education Engineering course that lead to a Bachelor in Engineering majoring in Computer Systems Engineering at three major Universities located in Brisbane. The curricula are accredited by the Institute of Engineers Australia (lEAust). Therefore all three curricula have in common that they have at least one year of Engineering foundation subjects that include calculus and physics or science. In their second and third year students take subjects such as Electronic Systems, Computer Systems, Software Engineering, Communications, Control, etc. Fourth years are mainly taken up by industrial projects that include project management. Elective subjects can be specialized and often depend on the skills of faculty staff, nevertheless, there is noticeable overlap also in the elective subjects offered. These three Engineering curricula are typical Engineering degrees in their field not only in Australia but anywhere in the world (Newton, 2000).
It is quite common for modem students to complement their tertiary education with industrial training certificates after graduating. They do it to increase their chances and preference in the employment competition. Skills requirements in the IT industry are perceived in a different way than what academics commonly tend to believe. The skills of new graduates entering the IT workforce are often unsatisfactory. This became manifest in a forum held between IT Industry professionals and IT academics (Sitte1999).
2.3 The emerging model and its features. A new business model emerges from the visible trend towards globalization and the current education market dynamics. The industries do no longer act as providers of commercial goods, but also as providers of education. There is no one better to teach state of the art knowledge than those who successfully produce the marketable goods and forge the industry.
2.2 What the industries offer. The model works in the following way: We have also looked on what training courses are offered as certified courses by major computing companies such as Cisco, Honeywell, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, National Instruments, Siemens, Sun. This list of providers is obviously not exhaustive. The training they offer ranges from small two-day intensive courses (Motorola) to self paced (Microsoft) or set courses, that can include labs (Cisco), followed by a rigorous up to two days exam (Cisco) before qualitying for certification. Siemens and Honeywell have already established industry-university education programs. The courses offered by these comparues are varied and range from programmers, to highly specialized training. They can be anything such as "Beginning Programming Training for Non-Programmers" (Sun), or "Sun Certified Architect for Java Platform", or several kinds of Network specialists (IBM, Cisco).
Universities assess and endorse the material developed by a multitude of providers: corporations, independent educational entrepreneurs and traditional tertiary institutions. Students learn from a variety of sources in a variety of delivery forms. With this framework the Universities can structure degrees "a la carte" . Students can choose a variety of learning sources and subjects. Some of these are on Campus and others from the courses offered by industries. After fulfillrnent of the requirements the universities award the degree. Figure I (see page after bilbiography) shows the interaction and process dynamics of the business model. It is the Universities' responsibility to advise a student whether a given combination of courses fulfills the degree requirements . This requires additional effort, hence a fee is charged. The fee will have to be substantial, to finance the effort of assessing the various courses and levels of
135
achievement of the candidates. For this wllversities have unmatched expertise and infrastructure. Student administration will have to deal with maintaining heterogeneous student records.
engineering is suitable to be prepared as flexible delivery course material. It can easily be based on simulation and animated workbooks. The infrastructure is readily available in the form of popular tools: Matlab, Simulink, LabView.
A simple thought experiment illustrates the viability of this business model. Consider any mayor city. It is not uncommon to have several wllversities within a radius of 100 km. Consider an introductory Communi-cations subject. All the universities in one area offer one or more similar subjects on the topic. It is conceivable that one or two academics could deliver these units in the whole area with the help of flexible delivery. This would be complemented by courses offered by corporations who are leaders in the field. Their courses and assessments are certified by the Company and by the university. The Company certifies the quality and standards associated with a brand name; the university certifies the suitability and sufficiency of the corporations' courses. Both have a fmancial and prestige gain.
3. CONSEQUENCES AND FINANCIAL BENEFITS The system moves towards an overall increase of efficiency. Universities do not bear the responsibility and expense of running each subject, they can delegate this to certified external providers. For example, why should a Brisbane University invest effort into developing a course in for example Computer Architecture, when the world renowned experts Hennessy and Patterson (Hennessy 1996), who have already written the leading textbooks in the field, could produce with little additional effort the whole teaching package. We can see symptoms for this development in the many CDROMs attached to textbooks and the webaddresses pointing to their well maintained websites.
By tradition Universities have a monopoly on higher education. This is warranted by two things: (a) the financial barrier of high investments for building facilities and hiring staff, that universities have to overcome; (b) a geographical neighborhood capable of providing a large enough student clientele. With the advent of the Internet, this barrier does not exist any more, taking the monopoly away from the universities.
As a consequence, universities gam increased independence from government funding. Universities face more competition in teaching and the delivery of teaching packages, but they retain the monopoly in the certification in conjunction with the professional societies e.g. IEEE,IEAust. Universities can focus on tailor made curricula benefit from this because they can afford now to allocate more effort and resources into screening personalized curricula for compliance with the overall degree requirements.
In the current economic climate emergence of educational entrepreneurs is just a matter of time. The initial signs are already clearly visible. In the area of computing there are already a number of such entrepreneurs. These are the authors of successful textbooks who increasingly offer supplementary material on CDROM and maintain their associated web sites. These educational entrepreneurs also offer face to face course in a variety of settings. Universities cannot fence off their captive markets for much longer, where they force students to buy the whole educational package, with the mixed quality components, they have on offer.
Tertiary education becomes more effective because it prepares students better for the workforce. Maximum quality of student learning can be offered, while future employment is practically assured. There is more flexibility for personalized careers. This in turn allows quicker response to job market demands, at the same time, promising better training and expertise in specialized areas. Job markets can forecast and place orders for certain skills a priori and in concordance with their own planning. Symptoms of this occurring already are the industry's mass recruitment and recruitment fairs held at universities. For example CITEC,
Control Engineering is an excellent niche for an education entrepreneur. This is because control
136
Telstra, Anderson Waterhouse, etc.
Consulting,
REFERENCES
Price
Biggs 1., "Teaching for Quality Learning at University", Open University Press, Buckinham, 1999 Hennessy 1. L, Patterson D. A, "Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach", Morgan Kaufrnann 1996 John S. A, Tobin L , Jancauskas E., "The Gladstone Philosophy Creating a Success-ful Industry -University Partnership", A ustralasian Association for Engineering Education, Waves of Change September 1998, pp 417-421 McConnell S. , Tripp L., "Professional Software Engineering: Fact or Fiction", IEEE Software NovemberlDecember, 1999, pp 1317 Newton M.l., "International Engineering Education through Collaboration", 3rd UICEE Annual Conference on Engineering Education, Hobart, Australia, Feb. 2000 Sitte R , Australasian Association for Engineering Education, Waves of Change September 1998, pp 555-559 Sitte R, "Reducing Complexity With 'Zoomed-In Modeling' - An Economic Model Case Study" - ESS'99 European Simulation Symposium, ESS'99, October 1999, Erlangen (Germany) pp 503-507 Taylor P., "Flexibility and the Context and Goals of Higher Education", Griffith University Institute for Higher Education, 1997 Taylor P., Joughin G., "What is Flexible Learning" Griffith University Institute for Higher Education, 1997
Universities act as the trading place between the courses offered and the demand by students and industries. This trade, as any trade - if correctly managed, provides revenue. Their main role is to award certification to courses offered by education entrepreneurs, to deliver industry certified teaching (service teaching) and maintain their position as curriculum custodians. Companies benefit from opportunities in rmding and opening new niches. They are driven by competition and either survive or end up as service providers to the giant Corporations. The role of professional societies will be more than ever to monitor and assure standardization and accreditation. An example of this is the IEEE/ACM project for the establishment of Software Engineering as an Engineering Profession. This is a comprehensive project, with participants scattered around the globe, working towards recommending a curriculum, accreditation at undergraduate and graduate level, conditions for licensing, etc. Giant Corporations become more powerful and as trend setters may drift towards monopoly. For better or worse, we all have witnessed this phenomenon with Microsoft. Work is in progress for developing the quantitative model and simulating this system, using a control theoretical approach (Sitte 1999).
4. CONCLUSION We have presented a business model for tertiary education. This model is derived from visible symptoms that are emerging from an Information Technology driven interaction between industry and universities. The model adapts easily to other disciplines. Future work is aimed at quantitative modeling of the system.
137
'" 00
Educational entrepreneur n
Educational entrepreneur 2
person sylla
certification
Students
fetes
aduates
4ruitm ent
./
~duca. n ..
skilled
Job
..... celtification ..... ..... specialization ..... skill demand
marketable kills
develop curri~ula course matenal teach
Universities
accredit and
Professional Societies
Figure 1: Diagram of the business model for teriary education
J
Educational entrepreneur 1
[Indu stry 1
AN INFORMATION AGE BUSINESS MODEL FOR TERTIARY EDUCATION
Renate Sitte*, Joaquin Sitte**
* Faculty of Engineering and InformatIOn Technology Griffith University PMB 50 Gold Coast Mail Centre, Queensland 9726 - Australia E-mail: [email protected]
** School ofComputing Science,
Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434 Brisbane 4001 - Australia E-mail [email protected]
Abstract: This paper presents a business model for Tertiary Education. The business model emerges from a visible trend towards globalization and the need to offer competitive cost effective tertiary education and the growing opportunity of certified courses offered by large corporations. It changes the role of universities from being a sole education provider to an assessor coordinator and facilitator of industry based learning. Competition among industries maintains high quality state of the art and takes a financial burden away from the universities. There is benefit for all three the industries the universities and the student ifit is properly managed. Copyright ~, 2000 IFAC
Keywords: Control education, Models, Economic systems, Industrial Training
1. INTRODUCTION
education and the Australian university provides for the fmal year and graduation. Although these schemes were conceived by the Australian universities as a way of increasing the number of full-fee paying students, in effect they are selling their reputation and capacity for certification. In this arrangement the less prestigious institution supplies the initial undergraduate education, which is then recognized and certified by the Australian University upon graduation of the foreign student.
Globalization and increasing competition among themselves forces universities to market their services aggressively to students. Universities increasingly perceive their market as extending beyond their traditional regions of influence. Faced with shrinking public funding for education Australian Universities have discovered their advantageous position in the Southeast Asian education market. Although the main effort is to attract foreign students for full time study at their attractive Australian campuses, new interesting initiatives have ansen. Australian universities have made agreements with institutions in other countries, mainly in Southeast Asia and India, to share in the education for a degree. The foreign institution provides the first one or two years of
Student numbers are increasing fast, not only by population growth, but also by the desire for a tertiary education that hopefully warrants employment later on. Their number has grown to over 40% of school-leavers from a mere 15% ten years back (Biggs 1999). There is a
133
growing conflict between the diminishing government funding for Australian universities, and the need to remain internationally competitive. Quality is compromised by having to deal with a fast increasing student staff ratio. Lecturers' efforts end up in tutoring and marking large classes, instead of updating their expertise with innovative material. This has a detrimental effect on the quality of education. But education is no longer free and students demand competitive skills as part of their study package. Universities are increasingly looking for an affordable ways in mass education. Flexible Delivery in the form of Web Based Instruction and Distance Education are becoming widespread . The preparation of Flexible Delivery material is laborious and expensive in itself (Taylor 1997, Taylor & Joughin 1997).
graduates to achieve certification. Several collaborative programs between Industry and Engineering Faculties are implemented. They range from work based accreditation in the mining industry to strategic industry-university partnership (John 1998) The cost of developing study material for flexible or distance delivery either over the internet or in traditional printed form is many times grater than the cost of traditional face to face delivery. Therefore universities or other organizations that engage in preparing such material will have to recover development cost trough increasing their customer base (students). Microsoft and other large corporations are already marketing their study material globally. Universities will have to follow in their footsteps. It is quite likely that universities will not be able to produce high quality study material for flexible and distance delivery for all their courses. There will be a growing pressure on universities to specialize on areas where they have outstanding expertise. As this global educational market develops and matures, and geographical location become irrelevant due to better and cheaper communication, only a handful of the best providers will survive in each topic area. In the same way as the global textbook market has been dominated by a few top authors, the flexible delivery market will be dominated by a few providers. The burning question is what will be a viable business model for the future education market. If current trends are an indication, then universities will increasingly leverage their capacity for certification.
We can observe the convergence of a number of trends. On one side the promise of improved delivery of study material via the internet to distance students is inducing universities to invest into the expansion of their distance study offerings. On the other side there are large corporations that offer specialist and application oriented courses (Siemens, National Instruments, IBM, Sun, Cisco, Motorola, Honeywell and more). The most well known example is the Microsoft curriculum that leads to Microsoft Professional Certification (Microsoft 2000). More examples of certified courses are: Embedded Technology Specialist Certified by Motorola; Siemens Certified Systems Engineer in HiCom 300E; National Instruments Certified Programmer; Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (e.g. Routing and Switching and others); IBM Certified Specialist for Visual Age Java, for WebSphere Application Server; Sun Pro-fessional Certification for Java Platform, Solaris System, Network Administration; Honeywell has already implemented co-operation with several high standing Universities in the USA, such as UCBerkeley, UCLA, Cal Tech., Camegie Mellon, etc. This list of companies or courses is not exhaustive. Many of those courses are being offered also at Universities, but with less or no emphasis on a particular product.
2. THE BUSINESS MODEL A business model describes the dynamics of sale: "what" is being sold to "whom, and how to make a profit of it. In what follows we describe a business model for the interaction between universities and commercial companies with the example of a typical four year Engineering degree. The model can be applied to other disciplines. The basic idea is to take advantage of the industry training resources offered, and delegate teaching - at least part of it to accredited enterprises. In this way the universities adopt more the role of a convener than a teacher. Before going into the details of the model we look what each side
How to align some degrees with Industrial certification is increasingly being discussed at universities. The intention is not to imitate the industrial courses but to provide key educational elements that will make it easier for university
134
requireS/offers and whether there is overlap in contents.
We have found that there is overlap between courses that are offered by computer companies and subjects taught at our Universities. The overlap is not in the first, but rather in second and third years of the Engineering degrees, and it does not apply to all the subjects offered.
2.1. What the Universities offer. We have looked at the curricula of a four year tertiary education Engineering course that lead to a Bachelor in Engineering majoring in Computer Systems Engineering at three major Universities located in Brisbane. The curricula are accredited by the Institute of Engineers Australia (lEAust). Therefore all three curricula have in common that they have at least one year of Engineering foundation subjects that include calculus and physics or science. In their second and third year students take subjects such as Electronic Systems, Computer Systems, Software Engineering, Communications, Control, etc. Fourth years are mainly taken up by industrial projects that include project management. Elective subjects can be specialized and often depend on the skills of faculty staff, nevertheless, there is noticeable overlap also in the elective subjects offered. These three Engineering curricula are typical Engineering degrees in their field not only in Australia but anywhere in the world (Newton, 2000).
It is quite common for modem students to complement their tertiary education with industrial training certificates after graduating. They do it to increase their chances and preference in the employment competition. Skills requirements in the IT industry are perceived in a different way than what academics commonly tend to believe. The skills of new graduates entering the IT workforce are often unsatisfactory. This became manifest in a forum held between IT Industry professionals and IT academics (Sitte1999).
2.3 The emerging model and its features. A new business model emerges from the visible trend towards globalization and the current education market dynamics. The industries do no longer act as providers of commercial goods, but also as providers of education. There is no one better to teach state of the art knowledge than those who successfully produce the marketable goods and forge the industry.
2.2 What the industries offer. The model works in the following way: We have also looked on what training courses are offered as certified courses by major computing companies such as Cisco, Honeywell, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, National Instruments, Siemens, Sun. This list of providers is obviously not exhaustive. The training they offer ranges from small two-day intensive courses (Motorola) to self paced (Microsoft) or set courses, that can include labs (Cisco), followed by a rigorous up to two days exam (Cisco) before qualitying for certification. Siemens and Honeywell have already established industry-university education programs. The courses offered by these comparues are varied and range from programmers, to highly specialized training. They can be anything such as "Beginning Programming Training for Non-Programmers" (Sun), or "Sun Certified Architect for Java Platform", or several kinds of Network specialists (IBM, Cisco).
Universities assess and endorse the material developed by a multitude of providers: corporations, independent educational entrepreneurs and traditional tertiary institutions. Students learn from a variety of sources in a variety of delivery forms. With this framework the Universities can structure degrees "a la carte" . Students can choose a variety of learning sources and subjects. Some of these are on Campus and others from the courses offered by industries. After fulfillrnent of the requirements the universities award the degree. Figure I (see page after bilbiography) shows the interaction and process dynamics of the business model. It is the Universities' responsibility to advise a student whether a given combination of courses fulfills the degree requirements . This requires additional effort, hence a fee is charged. The fee will have to be substantial, to finance the effort of assessing the various courses and levels of
135
achievement of the candidates. For this wllversities have unmatched expertise and infrastructure. Student administration will have to deal with maintaining heterogeneous student records.
engineering is suitable to be prepared as flexible delivery course material. It can easily be based on simulation and animated workbooks. The infrastructure is readily available in the form of popular tools: Matlab, Simulink, LabView.
A simple thought experiment illustrates the viability of this business model. Consider any mayor city. It is not uncommon to have several wllversities within a radius of 100 km. Consider an introductory Communi-cations subject. All the universities in one area offer one or more similar subjects on the topic. It is conceivable that one or two academics could deliver these units in the whole area with the help of flexible delivery. This would be complemented by courses offered by corporations who are leaders in the field. Their courses and assessments are certified by the Company and by the university. The Company certifies the quality and standards associated with a brand name; the university certifies the suitability and sufficiency of the corporations' courses. Both have a fmancial and prestige gain.
3. CONSEQUENCES AND FINANCIAL BENEFITS The system moves towards an overall increase of efficiency. Universities do not bear the responsibility and expense of running each subject, they can delegate this to certified external providers. For example, why should a Brisbane University invest effort into developing a course in for example Computer Architecture, when the world renowned experts Hennessy and Patterson (Hennessy 1996), who have already written the leading textbooks in the field, could produce with little additional effort the whole teaching package. We can see symptoms for this development in the many CDROMs attached to textbooks and the webaddresses pointing to their well maintained websites.
By tradition Universities have a monopoly on higher education. This is warranted by two things: (a) the financial barrier of high investments for building facilities and hiring staff, that universities have to overcome; (b) a geographical neighborhood capable of providing a large enough student clientele. With the advent of the Internet, this barrier does not exist any more, taking the monopoly away from the universities.
As a consequence, universities gam increased independence from government funding. Universities face more competition in teaching and the delivery of teaching packages, but they retain the monopoly in the certification in conjunction with the professional societies e.g. IEEE,IEAust. Universities can focus on tailor made curricula benefit from this because they can afford now to allocate more effort and resources into screening personalized curricula for compliance with the overall degree requirements.
In the current economic climate emergence of educational entrepreneurs is just a matter of time. The initial signs are already clearly visible. In the area of computing there are already a number of such entrepreneurs. These are the authors of successful textbooks who increasingly offer supplementary material on CDROM and maintain their associated web sites. These educational entrepreneurs also offer face to face course in a variety of settings. Universities cannot fence off their captive markets for much longer, where they force students to buy the whole educational package, with the mixed quality components, they have on offer.
Tertiary education becomes more effective because it prepares students better for the workforce. Maximum quality of student learning can be offered, while future employment is practically assured. There is more flexibility for personalized careers. This in turn allows quicker response to job market demands, at the same time, promising better training and expertise in specialized areas. Job markets can forecast and place orders for certain skills a priori and in concordance with their own planning. Symptoms of this occurring already are the industry's mass recruitment and recruitment fairs held at universities. For example CITEC,
Control Engineering is an excellent niche for an education entrepreneur. This is because control
136
Telstra, Anderson Waterhouse, etc.
Consulting,
REFERENCES
Price
Biggs 1., "Teaching for Quality Learning at University", Open University Press, Buckinham, 1999 Hennessy 1. L, Patterson D. A, "Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach", Morgan Kaufrnann 1996 John S. A, Tobin L , Jancauskas E., "The Gladstone Philosophy Creating a Success-ful Industry -University Partnership", A ustralasian Association for Engineering Education, Waves of Change September 1998, pp 417-421 McConnell S. , Tripp L., "Professional Software Engineering: Fact or Fiction", IEEE Software NovemberlDecember, 1999, pp 1317 Newton M.l., "International Engineering Education through Collaboration", 3rd UICEE Annual Conference on Engineering Education, Hobart, Australia, Feb. 2000 Sitte R , Australasian Association for Engineering Education, Waves of Change September 1998, pp 555-559 Sitte R, "Reducing Complexity With 'Zoomed-In Modeling' - An Economic Model Case Study" - ESS'99 European Simulation Symposium, ESS'99, October 1999, Erlangen (Germany) pp 503-507 Taylor P., "Flexibility and the Context and Goals of Higher Education", Griffith University Institute for Higher Education, 1997 Taylor P., Joughin G., "What is Flexible Learning" Griffith University Institute for Higher Education, 1997
Universities act as the trading place between the courses offered and the demand by students and industries. This trade, as any trade - if correctly managed, provides revenue. Their main role is to award certification to courses offered by education entrepreneurs, to deliver industry certified teaching (service teaching) and maintain their position as curriculum custodians. Companies benefit from opportunities in rmding and opening new niches. They are driven by competition and either survive or end up as service providers to the giant Corporations. The role of professional societies will be more than ever to monitor and assure standardization and accreditation. An example of this is the IEEE/ACM project for the establishment of Software Engineering as an Engineering Profession. This is a comprehensive project, with participants scattered around the globe, working towards recommending a curriculum, accreditation at undergraduate and graduate level, conditions for licensing, etc. Giant Corporations become more powerful and as trend setters may drift towards monopoly. For better or worse, we all have witnessed this phenomenon with Microsoft. Work is in progress for developing the quantitative model and simulating this system, using a control theoretical approach (Sitte 1999).
4. CONCLUSION We have presented a business model for tertiary education. This model is derived from visible symptoms that are emerging from an Information Technology driven interaction between industry and universities. The model adapts easily to other disciplines. Future work is aimed at quantitative modeling of the system.
137
'" 00
Educational entrepreneur n
Educational entrepreneur 2
person sylla
certification
Students
fetes
aduates
4ruitm ent
./
~duca. n ..
skilled
Job
..... celtification ..... ..... specialization ..... skill demand
marketable kills
develop curri~ula course matenal teach
Universities
accredit and
Professional Societies
Figure 1: Diagram of the business model for teriary education
J
Educational entrepreneur 1
[Indu stry 1