Australian business of education

MELBOURNE (JP): If there is an example of a field where the flow of commercialization alongside the rapid stream of technological advancement have taken aback many players, education is one.

Businessizing Education and Teaching and Learning is a Business, were two of the topics discussed in the Joint Australia Indonesia Business Council-Indonesia Cultural and Education Institute Conference held in Melbourne from June 16 to June 18, 1996.

While education has always progressed with time, it was mostly in the confines of ideological reappraisal and the methodology resulting from this continuous reevaluation. Changes, ideological and sociological, invariably occur slowly and gradually. The rapid change in educational practice, spurred by the incredible force of globalization of commerce, has caused considerable confusion and insecurity to the art of traditional providers of education in existing institutions.

In Australia, state education funding has been gradually cut, forcing schools and tertiary institutions to restructure, reevaluate their priorities and reset their strategies. Education bodies have been driven to seek funds elsewhere; the key word being: privatization.

Australia began exporting its education. Schools and universities sent representatives to various countries in the region to promote the virtue of their high-quality education and safe environment. Students from these countries streamed in to study in Australia and now, some can even take advantage of the schools and universities set up in their own countries, such as the Adorna RMIT in Penang, Malaysia.

While teachers in schools and universities feel overwhelmed, finding their tasks expanding with increasingly bigger numbers of students, the administration has to keep up with the fast development of business practice.

For those who know how and have the necessary resources to take advantage of the plethora of learning sources, the trend is undoubtedly exciting. Technology has provided learners with an increasingly-open sky: international delivery of education, known also as transnational education, where classroom teachers are no longer indispensable.

Together with the gradual phasing out of traditional classroom teachers emerges a new clusters of nontraditional providers. Those who produce electronic educational packages, where the interaction does not necessarily occur between students and classroom teacher but between the learner -- individually or in groups -- and the person or persons on the other sphere of the cyber, be they teachers, industry practitioners, law practitioners or other experts.

Schools and universities that do not join the race and claim space in this "pool of excitement" are likely to become relics of the past -- fast -- from lack of funds.

So, education has become a business. As Simon Fraser, RMIT University's manager of research business development, puts it, it is especially so in these days of economic rationalism, where, if you cannot financially justify your existence, your existence is doomed. Fraser also warns that Australia is not the only player in the field. Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand are all competing for international student dollars.

Dr. Nirwan Idrus, director of Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand, draws parallels between education and business. For instance, it is customer-focused, mission-oriented, continually improving, and managed by devolution and empowerment. The obvious problem here is the essence of business is somehow watered down, that essence being, purchasing choices are made by consumers in competitive markets.

However, in education, the products are not visible at the time the customers make their choices. It is debatable whether the quality of the product can ever be assessed accurately. What criteria can be used? The employability of the graduates? The quality of life of the graduates and those around them? More immediate still, how do we apply, here, quality control and quality assurance like in any other industry?

Quality control and quality assurance are indeed an inherent problem Prof. Leo West, Pro Vice Chancellor, International, of Monash University, admits. How does an employer know that the program offered in-country is as good as that offered in Australia? Is the curriculum offered, presumably Western-based, relevant to the country? Are appropriate pedagogies for Australia necessarily appropriate for the country? At present, there is no national body in Australia to standardize the code of practice.

The answer, it seems, comes in the formation of Global Alliance for Transnational Education. This alliance will provide an umbrella code of good practice, the process for assuring compliance with that code of practice, as well as a database to assure this compliance.

Even presuming that all the proviso are taken care of, the lingering questions is, will the next generation be able to and even be bothered to retain values peculiar to their areas or countries, when across the region, even the world, they all learn the same things?

Since the process has already begun, it is no longer strategic to consider whether it is a good thing but a great deal of thought will have to go into finding ways of assimilating it into a good thing, so to speak.

The writer is a free-lance journalist based in Melbourne.