Last week Tony Bates, arguably the doyen of Canadian digital education, posted an intriguing little article called Why Canada Needs Five New Digital Universities on his blog at the Contact North website. Basically, Bates’ argument is that the future of learning is hybridized learning – that is a mix of face-to-face and online learning – though we don’t yet know exactly how best to mix those two to achieve best results for different learners at different levels in different subjects.  Not only are existing universities and colleges not set up to systematically experiment with pedagogies to figure out what works, they (and perhaps more importantly the instructors they employ) also have some pretty big in-built biases towards in-person learning.

Bastes’ solution: “establish five new regional universities-colleges that are designed from scratch as possible prototypes for the higher education institution of the future, but also designed to maximise the impact they have on existing institutions….These institutions will have a selected range of disciplines, and cover the whole range of post-secondary education, from vocational to post-graduate. They will be expected to experiment with the development of new forms of accreditation. They will award their own qualifications.”

Now, if we are just talking at a theoretical level, I think Bates’ case is unarguable.  We do need to experiment with new pedagogies.  Existing institutions with their existing vested interests are a hindrance to these experiments (or any experiments, really: pretty much the entire history of higher education suggests that systems get reformed through the creation of new institutions with new missions, not gradual change from within existing institutions).  If you think improving pedagogy in post-secondary education is something urgently worth doing (and I recognize not everyone will), then this is the right thing to do.

And from a national perspective, there’s a case here too – rhetorically, at least.  It is, frankly, somewhat ludicrous that Canada isn’t a world leader in distance education.  Just look at a map, for God’s sake.  Yet, Ontario’s universities and colleges have repeatedly joined forces to ensure the province has nothing more serious in this area than Contact North, BC folded its Open University into a mainstream institution, Alberta is allowing Athabasca to flirt with bankruptcy, and TELUQ is…better now, I guess, now that it has been de-merged from UQAM again but it’s not a world-leader by any means.  One could argue that this is a function (or dysfunction) of federalism: there’s a national need and market for this stuff but no single province has a big enough market to do it well.

The problem is when you get into specifics.

On a similar logic to our legendary Superclusters, Bates sees this as a national project which needs must be conducted on regional lines.  We therefore need five of them – one each for the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, the West and (somewhat differently) the North.  And once we head down the regional politics rabbit-hole, we start talking about “local conditions” and “building on existing strengths”, so the Quebec one is aerospace focused, the BC one is digital/design focused maybe built around Emily Carr.  And, of course the whole thing to be funded jointly by Ottawa and the provinces.

So, this is never going to happen.  Quebec is never going to accept federal dollars in this manner and neither I suspect would Alberta or several other provinces.  Even if they did, joint campuses in the west and the Atlantic would almost certainly fail over squabbles about location and shares of payment.  And building around strengths of existing universities and colleges is probably the wrong way to go if you want something actually innovative: the partner institutions will tend to blunt its distinctive edges.

That said, a Northern institution is an intriguing angle, if only because the federal government actually has jurisdiction up in the Territories. The Feds could set up something that way and if it is successful, existing northern-serving institutions (like University College of the North in Manitoba, for instance, or Northern Lights College in BC) might eventually buy in to some of the innovations.  It might also make for an interesting test-case in terms of partnering with another new set of organizations – the Indigenous PSE institutions that are heading towards official status – and who certainly could use a partner with some advanced tech and thinking about distance education.

In other words, Bates’ idea is great in principle and if you had a magic wand to conjure it into existence, it would be a Good Thing.  The problem is it’s not obvious there’s a way to get there short of magic.