What’s the plan for Foundation University?
The idea was to work on the physical part and better training for the teachers. The plan is to provide more value for everybody– students, teachers, staff–to provide a real university-type of atmosphere, a real university kind of education.
We’re starting to move outside the walls of the campus, and try to get the community more involved, and understanding what value is in everyday life, especially when it comes to the environment.
How is technology used at FU?
We’re applying it seamlessly so it is part of your lives. You don’t need to specialize in any particular part of technology, whether it be computers or cameras. We’re educating so that it’s seamless to education, it’s a piece of you, it isn’t a specialization.
What kind of students do you want to produce here at FU?
We want to produce students who can make a difference. In the Philippines, not many institutions have really guided citizens on how to make a difference in society. Many institutions make you feel important just because you graduated from there although in reality, what we’re talking about is respect, and you can’t buy respect — you have to earn it. And going to a prestigious school or paying way too much for an education is not the route to respect.
How is FU helping the community?
We started doing this through the sports program, where we organized a database so that everybody understands who’s eligible to play. We also set up clinics so that we know who we’re addressing, and who needs the training.
The new area which we’ve been doing for about six years now is about the environment. Many people really don’t understand the environment, and they also don’t understand that the environment does cost. There is no price tag that you can put to the environment. If we don’t take care of it, if we don’t address the fact that it does cost more money that you’d really like to spend, it’ll be gone.
Just last night, I took my brother out to show him how bad the air pollution in the City has become. Most people say, “Well, that’s just because of the motorcycles.” That’s so untrue! A lot of it is because of uncontrolled burning of rubbish at everybody’s back yard. You can see all the particles in the air all night long. That’s never been like that. Today, it happens everyday, and that’s bad.
A lot of people don’t understand why the City’s polluted. This thing about burning to kill mosquitoes is not killing mosquitoes — it’s killing people. A lot of people [continue to]burn plastic and they don’t understand that.
So that’s how we’re getting involved in the community. There’s been a lot of resistance, a lot of people don’t like the idea of change.
The Province probably has the ugliest rivers in the entire world. The rivers [here] used to be the most beautiful, and now they’re the ugliest. They’re making it ugly and less functional by whatever mitigation measures they’re taking right now. A river is part of the environment.
Everyone says only God can make a tree, well, only God can make a river. Man can try, but only God can make a river. So that’s another area that we’re getting into. We anticipate a lot of resistance, a lot of resentment, but at what price can you place on the environment?
How is FU changing education?
There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of education, but something is wrong with the methods we use.
Most institutions force a student to digest all this information, and then three times in a semester regurgitate it in the form of an exam.
But students should understand certain subjects like physics — simple machines, the lever, the pulley, the ramp. I see construction workers who don’t even know how to use a ramp, a pulley, or a lever! You learn all this in grade school.
So let’s keep the fundamentals of education but let’s also find a way to apply all this knowledge.
How is the iPad program in high school and grade school helping?
The first thing we noticed last year during the iPad pilot program was that grades were a lot better. We had less students failing than the previous year.
The biggest challenge with technology, especially the iPad, is that the iPad is also a seamless tool for multimedia, especially for games. So there are a lot of management issues that have to be re-learned, like how teachers manage the classroom.
Parents also have to re-learn parenting. How much game time should their kids have? How many videos can their child watch each day?
Parents also need to manage themselves. If their child is not using the iPad, the parents themselves could lose themselves in the technology by Facebooking, playing games, or watching videos.
Everybody has to learn how to re-manage themselves with this technology because you can get completely lost in it to a point where you become extremely unproductive, you get nowhere fast. It’s a new discipline.
How are the faculty and staff at FU taking the integration of the technology into their teaching?
They’re handling it very well because the iPad is so easy to use. They are actually discovering how to manipulate content on their own, beyond what we had trained them to do. The iPad may seem intimidating at first but as soon as you get past those mechanics, it is just unbelievably easy to use.
How much more work is there to be done?
There’s way, way more. One of the things about the iPad program that people don’t understand is we’re redesigning education. We’re using things like flip classrooms, telling the teachers to redesign the curriculum so it isn’t just the publishers telling us what there is to be learned. We’re telling the publishers that what they’re giving us is not good enough. We want to just redesign it — we want more.
How are you dealing with any resistance to the new programs?
Many people don’t really understand what kind of risks an institution will take to benefit others.
This iPad program a year ago could have fallen on its face. We could have looked really stupid, we could have lost a hundred kids not just in the high school or grade school, but that ripple effect would have gone up to the university level also. And with change, there’s always resistance. Sometimes it’s just a little bit, sometimes, a lot. You just got to roll with the punches.
We want people to come here at FU because we have value and knowledge. We want people to realize : “Hey, a town of 200,000 way out in the boonies of the Philippines has value.” And they actually have something to contribute to society.
Any university in the world has that same mission. Otherwise, why else would they exist? Every university has a mission to progress, every university has a mission to contribute to the community.
You take any university in the United States– they’re not just targetting the state of Washington, the state of California– they’re [going] international! Even the smallest university is international in its scope.
So that’s our direction. We want to have an impact. I know many people have considered Foundation University as an institution for the poor, and I have to admit that the previous administrations really messed up, and narrowed down the scope to that. And for me, that is an extreme injustice to the community, to narrow down the scope to keep people where they are. That we’re an institution for enslavement? That’s so wrong!
We are moving towards a larger community. This is the mission of any university, not just Foundation University. But unfortunately, many universities don’t understand the real mission. We here at FU do!
What has been FU’s greatest contribution thus far?
That we don’t ever get discouraged about anything — that’s our greatest contribution. We don’t quit.
We don’t want to produce students who hate their profession. We want students to love what they do. We want our graduates to love what they do; they can’t wait to make an impact on a person’s life. That’s what we want to produce.
The question is out there: What do you want to be?
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