As an educator, a Jewish woman, and the provost of Brooklyn College, I recently traveled to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to see how my counterparts in Israel have responded to the challenges of fostering higher education while engaging a student body that is often sidetracked from their goals by the country’s on-going security issues.
I wanted to see what lessons I could gleam from a society that, while putting a premium on education, has risen to the challenge of teaching its citizens in times of crisis.
The Open University embodies one of the most successful responses. With 38,000 students, it is the largest university in Israel. The Open University is the archetype for creative, hybrid education, based on independent study but united with a strong community-building component.
This means that young soldiers can take college courses while on active duty. It means that young parents with children at home can take college-level courses whenever they find time. It means that people who thought they would never have the opportunity to pursue a college education are given the tools necessary to earn a degree. Yet all of these students come to feel as if they are participating in a shared learning experience. This is accomplished by designing courses around individual websites that facilitate discussion groups, and provide library and research services.
A vibrant learning community is fostered further by lecture and study groups offered at seventy Open University-run study centers located throughout the country, and by personalized sessions transmitted via satellite to home computers. Individualized tutorials and other academic support are extended throughout the semester to help guide students through the course work and to cultivate a beneficial, close educational environment that is almost unheard of in distant learning.
I toured the new campus, an impressively modernistic facility with five technologically rich buildings that opened in October in Ra’annan, north of Tel Aviv. Since the majority of the teaching is conducted through distance learning, there are few classrooms. Instead, the campus is dominated by a five-story warehouse, filled with the best teaching materials in the world.
At the beginning of each semester, students enrolled in one of the University’s 40 undergraduate or 4 master programs receive packets of material, which may take the form of textbooks, study guides, videocassettes, or tapes-or some combination of these. Gathered from around the world, the material is chosen by the University because it is considered to be the best that is currently available.
The University faculty works collaboratively with their colleagues at other Israeli universities to create and choose these materials, and they pay scrupulous attention to content and pedagogy. This emphasis on collaboration and standards has engendered a unique degree of partnership among academic institutions in Israel; as a result, more traditional colleges use the Open University’s materials and readily accept their students and course credits.
In short, the Open University represents a creative response to the complexity of modern society. It offers its students unprecedented flexibility in choosing how and where they will earn their college degrees, and they do it with the collaboration and cooperation of other colleges and universities. Their flexibility, strong sense of partnership, and stringent adherence to high standards are noteworthy.
While Brooklyn College has made strong moves on its own that follow the deliberate direction taken by the Open University, we can do more. We are the most technologically advanced campus in the City University of New York system: we are now ready to develop an approach to using our technology that will allow us to target specific areas of interest to our students.
Learning to be flexible is also imperative. Last year, for instance, I made pre-medical courses available in the evening when it came to our attention that yeshiva students could not complete their undergraduate science courses while continuing their daily Talmudic studies. We must take into consideration the particular needs of all our various communities, of adults who are returning to college to finish their degree, and working people who want to advance into a more rewarding career.