Learning from Malaysia, Learning In Malaysia

I am pleased to be part of the five year Sustainable Cities Partnership that MIT just initiated with the Universiti of Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia' #1 Engineering and Science School.  More about the Partnership in a moment.

Malaysia is sometimes overlooked. It has a population of just under 30 million people. It shares land borders with Thailand and Indonesia and maritime borders with Viet Nam and the Philippines.  The country has two segments with roughly equal land area -- the peninsula under Thailand where the majority of the population lives in big cities like Kuala Lumpur and Johor, and where the country is connected to Singapore via a bridge. And,  a second more rural portion of the country, quite far away in the South China Sea, over Borneo.  Malaysia is a progressive Islamic nation, a democracy that operates in the British style.

The population is about one-half Malay, one-third Chinese, just under 10% Indian (Tamil), and the remainder a range of other minorities and aboriginal peoples. So, we are talking about an ethnically diverse Islamic democracy with a GDP that has grown about 6.5% for the past 50 years. Why is Malaysia, with its commitment to democratic ideals and sustainable development not the focus of attention when Americans think about Islamic nations?  It is a country that has invested its oil and gas revenues in education, shifting in just a few decades from a predominantly agrarian and extractive economy to a high-tech, knowledge-oriented economy with excellent entrepreneurial universities. UTM, MIT's partner,  has more doctoral students than MIT does (and two-thirds are women). It has research partnerships with more than 100 well-known universities in the developed world.

While Malaysia faces environmental problems, like air pollution, that are partially the result of deforestation and rapid urbanization, the country has a commitment to promoting more sustainable development.  They are ranked 25th on Yale's Environmental Performance Index (out of 132 nations), making improvements and trending in a sustainable direction, especially with regard to air quality and the management of maritime resources.  They are signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity, not insignificant in a country that has 20% of the world's animal species. They are working hard to preserve the important mangrove forests in a protected Ramsar site across from Singapore, even as they try to develop that area into their own international port.

Malaysia is ranked 64th out of the 186 countries listed on the UN's Human Development Index. It invests a substantial amount of money in improving health care. The status of women's health has improved markedly over the past few decades. At last count, the GDP per capita was about $10,000 (US). Per capita income was about $15,000 (US).  The country is home to two World Heritage Sites, including Georgetown, the city at the center of the northern island of Penang, a predominantly Chinese section of the country where high-tech investment has been booming.

Queen Raja Zarith Sofiah is Chancellor of UTM.  She has a PHD from Oxford in Chinese studies. The Prime Minister, although facing strong pressure from the Chinese segment of the population to ensure that public policy creates the same opportunities for them that it does for the Malay majority, is committed to diversifying and globalizing the country's economy.

The new MIT-Malaysia Sustainable Cities Partnership will bring 10 scholars from universities in developing (G-77) countries, each year for the next five years,  to UTM for half a year and then to MIT for half a year.  These Visiting Scholars will be working to answer key questions about the effectiveness of sustainable development efforts in Penang, Kuala Lumpur (especially Putrajaya, the planned government center about 25 kilometers south of KL) and Johor Bahru. How can developing countries introduce high-tech investment while preserving the culture and traditions of local areas?  How can growing cities in the global South increase their economic well-being while maintaining ecosystem services and achieving sustainable use of natural resources?  How can national energy policies grow electricity supplies needed to support new investment while reducing greenhouse gas emissions?  How can the ill-effects of deforestation and inadequate attention to marine resources be remedied while at the same time permitting investment in eco-tourism, restoration of fisheries and air quality improvements? How can a nationally-driven federal system implement high quality and coordinated infrastructure improvements while empowering states and localities to shape development in ways that reflect their priorities and decentralized ethnic and political concerns?  These are just some of the questions the Partnership will be trying to answer, with reference to actual efforts on the ground in Malaysia.

After spending a half year working with cities, development agencies and faculty at UTM, each year's
Visiting Scholars will then spend a second half year at MIT, working with faculty and doctoral students there (under the umbrella of MIT's Community Innovator's Lab) to prepare video teaching materials summarizing what they have learned.  We hope these video inserts can be distributed through the new MITx and Edx channels currently being used to put MOOCs on-line.  The goal of the Partnership is to strengthen the teaching of sustainable city development in the global South, not replace what is taught there with courses developed in the North.  At the end of five years, we hope to have an international network of at least 50 scholars committed to shifting the city development and regional planning strategies taught at universities around the world from an emphasis on economic growth to a more sensible emphasis on sustainable development -- all with illustrations and analysis growing out of the Malaysian experience.  It is our contention that development strategies taught in the North, about the North,  are not especially relevant to the problems facing mega-cities in the global South.

The Partnership is searching for the next ten Visiting Fellows (malaysiacities.mit.edu).  These must be full time academics teaching about some aspect of city and regional development at a college or university in the developing world. It doesn't matter what there discipline is. They will need the endorsement of their academic department. If selected, they will receive full salaries for a year along with a stipend to cover travel and living expenses in Malaysia and at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). The goal will be for each Fellow to contribute to a growing digital library -- available for free via a video channel at MIT -- depicting the results of their field-based research regarding the success and failure of particular sustainable development efforts in Malaysia. If you are interested in being added to the Partnership mailing list, please email me at susskind@mit.edu.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) vs. Applied Social Science as We Know It

There are a number of authors like Bent Flyvbjerg who have done a masterful job spelling out all the reasons why social scientists should stop aspiring to be natural scientists.  See his books Real Social Science and Making Social Science Matter for a full explanation.  The statistical tools available in the social sciences can only help us understand, not prove, why things happen.  Natural science, because of the elegance of the scientific method, can generate causal generalizations ("proofs")  that apply reliably across time and place.  Social scientists only know something about very specific situations. Generalizing across people, organizations, communities, and countries is a lost cause. The differences outweigh the commonalities, and efforts to "control" everything but the one thing we want to study are either unethical or impossible. This is not to say that social science isn't important.  On the contrary, the most serious problems we face are social and political, not physical.  "We have met the enemy and it is us." So, it is important to understand how to push social science in a useful direction and produce helpful prescriptive advice for those interested in social change.

There are some social scientists, mostly economists, who aspire to the mathematical rigor of the
natural sciences.  They undertake "double blind" controlled experiments. They give half a community something and not the other half, and see if they can detect statistical differences that prove the poverty-relieving effectiveness of a specific policy or program.  First,  you've got to believe that the two halves of the community are initially the same (and stay the same) during the course of the experiment. Second, you've got to believe that everything else stays constant during the course of the experiment. Third, you've got to believe that the experimental effort and not something else caused what statistically significant outcome might be found. Mere correlation, though,  isn't a basis for reshaping public policy or interfering with people's lives. So, whatever appears to be statistically relevant still doesn't explain why good or bad things happen. Put aside whatever concerns you might have about withholding something good or imposing something bad on half a community so that social scientists can test their ideas or a new practice. My view is that social scientists should stop pretending that correlation equals causation. They should admit that the complexity and uncertainty involved make science-like generalizations about people, communities and institutions extremely unreliable.

Instead, social scientists should work harder to make connections to client-communities, agencies and government entities that want help figuring out what they should about a specific problem  (or how they should alter their policies and practices).  And, they should team up with these groups to figure out how to make sense of past and current practices or events.  Alliances of this sort, in which the client calls the shots, may seem less than ideal for scholars who want to make a name for themselves by calling into question the conventional wisdom about some aspect of everyday life or current public policy. Social science scholars who want to be able to frame their own research questions, use methods of analysis that peer-reviewers will approve, remain entirely detached from the places or groups they are studying, and draw whatever conclusions make sense to them are in a special category.  They want to continue following the "lets-pretend-we-are scientists"approach to applied social research.  Instead, I would suggest a very different approach called Participatory Acton Research (PAR).

PAR as described by Action Research and Action Science specialists was developed, in part, by
my MIT colleague, the late Donald Schon. Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change do a nice job of summarizing the current state-of-the-art.  PAR can produce meaningful results even though it tends to focus on individual cases rather than statistical analyses, large samples or controlled experiments.  PAR puts a premium on local knowledge (what people in the actual situation know from their first-hand experience), not just expert knowledge. And, PAR measures its success by the way in which client-communities feel about the "results"of the research  and its usefulness rather than the way in which peer-reviewers in the social science community feel about its methodological rigor (in traditional terms) or the replicability of the findings. All PAR knowledge is "situated."  That means it is place or case specific.  The goal isn't to come up with provable generalizations.  Quite the contrary, the objective of PAR is to generate what Aristotle would have called "practical wisdom" or useable knowledge, believable to those who have to take action if social change is going to occur.

I will be teaching PAR seminars for the first time at MIT next year. I'm sure there will be an extended discussion of whether PHD candidates will be allowed to substitute these classes for more traditional research methods classes. From my standpoint, there are three reasons why PAR methods should be accepted as a viable alternative to the usual applied social research (read statistical) methods that doctoral students in applied social sciences are normally expected to master.  First, unless graduate students learn how to interact with a client-community from the beginning of a research effort, they will never learn how to communicate "with" rather than send messages "to" agencies, groups, organizations and institutions seeking to promote social change. And, I would argue, the only ethically defensible role for social scientists is as partners to those who want to promote social change. Second, unless they learn how to make sense of what is happening in a specific case or context (rather than in a randomly drawn sample of places or situations),  they will always be limited to analyzing superficial correlatiosn when what they are really interested in is causation. One has to "go deep" to have any hope of diagnosing what is actually going on. Third, unless they learn how to build relationships with the users of actionable knowledge, they will always be offering pronouncements to the "cognizanti," not collaborating with the people who have the authority to make change.

There are all kinds of dilemmas that surround participatory action research.  Who represents the community, the agency or the client?  What if power is maldistributed inside the client-community? How does a "friendly outsider" (i.e. a PAR researcher) convince a client-community that he or she can be trusted? Who makes the final decision about which data that will be gathered and how findings will be analyzed or interpreted?  How should case specific information be integrated with findings from other cases or even more general findings produced by traditional applied social scientists?  What role should PAR researchers have in formulating prescriptions for action?  Is some kind of collaborative adaptive management possible, in which the PAR researcher stays involved with a client-community as its seeks to monitor results and make ongoing adjustments?

The resistance to PAR is strongest among social scientists who yearn to be part of the natural science fraternity.  The traditional types are more concerned about being respected by other academics than they are about "doing social change."   They fear that advocates of PAR feed right into the hands of natural science skeptics who think putting "social" in front of scientist is equivalent to putting "witch" in front of "doctor."  PAR practitioners, for their part, are worried that traditional social scientists are oblivious to the harm that they do when they generalize about social and political phenomenon and fail to appreciate the case specific implications of their findings.

We need to start a different conversation.   PAR teachers and practitioners should focus on explaining to their potential client communities what they do, and why they do it (and why it would be best to work with PAR researchers, not traditional social scientists).  They should codify the ethical norms that guide PAR in practice so they can be held accountable.  They should think hard about the best ways of integrating what PAR teaches about case specific situations with the kinds of generalizations that traditional social scientists produce. It may be that graduate students interested in PAR will also have to master traditional science research methods if they want to be taken seriously in the university. That's twice as much work, but it may be necessary.

An Online University? Are you Crazy?

I wish some of the people who are so excited about the prospect of online college courses being taught by famous faculty members understood a little bit more about what a university education is really supposed to accomplish.  The reason students (ought to) go to college is to enhance their capacity to function in the world-at-large once they graduate -- to function as citizens, productive workers, parents and as potential leaders in all walks of life.  When colleges do their job, students learn fundamental skills (like how to master a new body of knowledge, express their views effectively in writing and in spoken terms, and how to listen and respond to others with very different values and beliefs). They are also expected to familiarize themselves with a substantial body of knowledge (the Cannon of Western Literature? Great Books? Key Concepts in Science and Math? Great Moments in History? Competing Theories of Social Change and  Human Progress? ) that educated people use to make sense of what is going on around them.

You can read about all of these things.  There's nothing new about that. And, now we can put these materials and study guides on line.  Big deal.  And, we can capture the best lecturers in the world presenting these materials and post them online so that people all around the world can listen and watch without having to relocate. We certainly do that with recorded music.  But that doesn't a university make!  We wouldn't imagine giving someone a degree in music theory or performance because they had listened to long list of records or disks. Any anyone who thinks that open on-line enrollment in a catalogue of college-level classes equals a college degree, is sadly mistaken.  And, even if we add computer-graded exams to be sure that the many thousands of people taking these on-line courses have read the material, we will still be nowhere near what it takes to master fundamental skills and use a substantial body of knowledge.  Mastery requires real-time interaction with other learners and hands-on coaching by skilled teachers.  It requires, trial and error, feedback and reflective discussion. That's why large lecture classes are almost always supplemented by small sections in which students try to use the skills and knowledge they are reading or hearing about in collaboration with other students and teachers.

There are three reasons that on-line universities or efforts to approximate them will fail.  First, the most important feedback students need takes the form of questions asked, answered and reconsidered in real-time with a cohort of other learners. A list of Frequently Asked Questions with standards responses pre-prepared by instructors won't give each student the opportunity and responsibility they need to try formulating their own questions as they grapple with the material.  Second, students invariably learn more from other students than they do from faculty as they try wrestle with the materials they are trying to learn.  This, in turn, requires a safe and supportive environment in which students dare to ask questions (even if they feel foolish revealing what they don't know) or offer tentative answers to questions posed by others.  This works best when students meet outside of class on a regular basis, study together and  earn each other's trust.  They also need one-on-one time with faculty (or teaching assistants) to talk about assigned materials, review work in progress or get feedback that puts exam results in context and makes sure they figure out why they got something wrong.  Grades (especially when they are machine-generated) can't do that.  Third, when skill development and not just knowledge acquisition is the goal, students need repeated opportunities to try-fail-reflect- and discuss to achieve mastery. Multiple choice, machine-graded exams will never be able to substitute for hands-on faculty coaching and real-time interaction with peer learners.  That's why we need smaller not larger classes (or cohorts of students).

My own university (MIT) is poised to invest tens of millions of dollars in on-line education for the world-at-large. There are some ways in which this could be enormously helpful (and could strengthen residential learning), but merely recording and transmitting on line (even for free) the "best" course in various fields is not going to help very much.  We tried that in the past by writing text books.  People all over the world were encouraged to use the basic economics and physics textbooks developed by MIT faculty. Did that improve and sustain the quality of teaching in other universities?  I don't think so.  The only way to do that is by enhancing the capacity of teachers in those other places and help them enhance their teaching skills.  On-line courses are going to be used as an excuse by college administrators in other parts of the world (and even in the US) to fire faculty members and give students credit for taking on-line courses (offered by MIT and others).  That won't strengthen education in the developing world, for example, it will weaken it.  On the other hand, we could use MITx to create an on-line learning community for economics or physics faculty members around the world.  It would need to be highly interactive.  The focus should probably be on how to meet the culturally-defined learning needs of the students each of these faculty members is trying to teach. An on-line forum -- with the capacity to upload teaching demonstrations by one participant that could become the focus for the larger group to review--would aim to share what we know about teaching key concepts or using various teaching methods.  Strengthening teaching capacity in as many places as possible ought to be our goal, not reducing or eliminating teaching capacity.

I can imagine giving students a lot more video material to look at before classes begin.  I teach city planners about the way certain kinds of resource management challenges can and should be handled.  Seeing detailed video accounts prepared by colleagues all over the world, showing how certain problems were handled, would be a wonderful supplement to the readings I assign.  But, when students come to my class, I will still pose hypothetical scenarios to see if they can use what they have been viewing and reading.  I want each student to be ready to respond to any question another student might ask, or that I might ask.  I want to give them collective feedback on their latest assignment.  I want them to react to the feedback I provided to them individually on the quiz or exam they recently completed. Then, I will ask them to work in teams or small groups to come up with the best response to still another hypothetical situation I have proposed. Finally, I want to gather them together for a cross-group discussion where one person from each group presents their group's "best advice" to the hypothetical client (using everything they viewed or read before class, as well as the ideas that came up during their small group discussion). This is the only way I can help my students master the material I am presenting.

On-line video and other interactive materials can help students prepare for a class or review what
happened in a class, but it can't substitute for the real-time group learning that college education is meant to offer.  Similarly, on-line course, if used correctly by qualified faculty members, can supplement what it taught -- especially if it is accompanied by on-line forums that explain to faculty how they can use new materials to teach their particular students. But, online courses can't substitute for residential (i.e. face-to-face, real-time) learning.

There will never be an on-line university that offers more than minimal vocational training -- learning the material, step-by-step, by yourself, at your own pace and taking a machine-graded test.  That doesn't come close to generating mastery (i.e. an ability to use concepts and methods in an improvisational way). Mastery can only be achieved through trial-and-error-and-coaching-and-correction-and-question-asking in a continuing group of trusted peer learners.