Coronavirus Curriculum Planning 2020-1

This is essentially me thinking aloud about the four post-grad modules I am scheduled to teach next academic year. Two weeks ago I said that if I was still here in the autumn – and I am planning to be:

Whatever happens, if I am here in the autumn, I will I know be teaching the social, political and economic consequences of coronavirus on at least two postgrad courses I lead.

In fact, I now think I will be teaching it on all four modules. All my teaching, aside from guest lectures, is in the October-January period, so I need to start some outline preparation. Here goes as I brain-dump some initial course thinking in a public value business school.

Government from the Inside – From the Minister’s Viewpoint (PLT435)

You can find a link to the module overview here. It is essentially an overview of the Ministerial life, from appointment to leaving office. It looks amongst other things at Appointment and the first 100 days, Ministers in Cabinet, as departmental leaders, in the Chamber and Committee, working with and against the Opposition, Ministers and the Media, pressure groups and ministers, evidence for ministerial policy-making, leaving ministerial office. It covers UK and devolved ministerial life.I am planning a book for Palgrave Macmillan based on the course which I have now taught for the last three years.

Students are assessed through an end-of-term essay. These are on topics they choose and are always interesting. Last year one student elected to look at Norman Fowler and the Aids Crisis, which has some parallels with today’s crisis. If I took a coronavirus lens I guess I would look through the course at how the virus has disrupted the marking of Boris Johnson’s 100 days in office; how COBR (A) has worked in co-ordination, including with the devolved administrations, how scrutiny of evidence has developed in Parliamentary committees, how pressure group and media criticism has influenced ministerial policy, and the role of daily press briefings in crises, the collation of evidence in an emerging crisis and the building of ministerial discursive capacity, Opposition input in the crisis, and maybe some futurism about ministerial reputations in the crisis and their likely scorecards after leaving office.

I am already collating materials, from press reports to parliamentary inquiries and government documents, which includes much of the advice that went to SAGE. (To be fair to the UK government, a lot of material has been published in respect of the evidence base and their assumptions). There is also a considerable amount of material on managing crises in the interviews with former ministers on the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect series. No question then that coronavirus will feature on this module.

International Business Management (BST448)

This is one of the core modules on Cardiff Business School’s MSc. in International Management. I have been teaching this module for the last two years and it has had a significant ‘tech’ focus, which has enabled the exploration of themes around globalisation, based on my recent research. In postgrad terms it’s a large module with about 140 students, a very high proportion of them from China. Who knows how or if this will change next year? The COVID-19 outbreak has sparked all kinds of writing about the future of globalisation, networks, re-localisation, etc. The COVID-19 outbreak also lends itself to a straightforward introduction for management students to PESTLE analysis.

There are significant opportunities here obviously to look comparatively at governmental and political responses, business impacts in different sectors, the role of technology in surveillance of the disease (and obviously surveillance more generally), and how the disease may affect international business development, including global value chains. It may allow students to bring their own country by country observations to the forefront.

Think I will definitely be teaching COVID-19 and its impact on the the global economy this course, but it may require some re-writing.

Leading Policy and Delivery (BST652)

I was involved in co-developing our new part-time MSc in Public Leadership . This autumn I will be teaching the module about leading policy into delivery over three sessions. I guess that COVID-19 will become one of the cases that we will interrogate as it will be directly relevant to everyone’s immediate experience. Our students come from a variety of public service backgrounds.

Unlike the ministerial module above, the focus will be more about the impact on public service delivery. So I can see us covering its impact on the relationship between the making of policy and its implementation on the ground; thefeedback loops between frontline delivery and policy-making; collaboration between services,  both devolved and non-devolved; integration of third sector in delivery; what this means for target-setting, capacity- building, resilience planning, governance.

Much of this would have been discussed on the module in any case. But there is quite a lot to plan for here. And I think the agenda will expand as time goes by.

Strategic Planning and Innovation (BST680).

This year we began teaching a postgraduate Diploma in Healthcare  Planning in Wales. I am one of two academics teaching on the Strategic Planning and Innovation module. To a degree, our emphasis, as the NHS Wales Deputy Chief Executive, Simon Dean, said at Cardiff Business School in 2019, is that what matters most is the planning, not the plan. Though this was devised before the COVID-19 outbreak, we already had considered planning for unexpected emergencies and crises and ways in which governments did this in a variety of spheres, from terrorist outbreaks to a no-deal Brexit. COVID-19 forces consideration of previous planning exercises for pandemics.

This module from my perspective probably needs some adjustment but less overall than the others, as the key themes are there in outline, but need drawing out with reference to the current crisis, and the evidence materials published by the UK Government already mentioned above are directly relevant.

That was a brain-dump on behalf of my course planning. Now I need to allocate time for teaching preparation for each of these modules.

 

Against car-cophony

I intend to buy a new car soon. My nine-year-old Saab can keep going for a while longer, but they don’t make Saabs anymore, the keys are falling to bits and the cost of buying and then programming a new key is disproportionate to the value of the car. The Saab I bought back in 2007 was equipped to run on both lead-free petrol and bio-ethanol – (once memorably described in the Guardian as a sort of ‘flammable muesli’) though the only petrol station I knew that supplied bio-ethanol soon dropped that option, and in any case early on there were serious questions raised about the ethics and sustainability of the product which continue today.

It’s worth considering the failure of the bio-ethanol option in the UK as those who subscribe to a technologically determined view of the future now seem to be out to persuade us that we will all be driven around in self-driving cars in the not-too-distant future. At a recent discussion at Cardiff’s Innovation Point on Educational Technology, the audience was asked if they expected to be riding in a self-driving car within ten years, five years, two years, or never. I believe I was the only person to opt for ‘never.’ I’ll come back to why I think that in due course.

A good summary of what the technological determinists claim was given by Simon Kuper in Saturday’s FT (my comments in brackets). Simon’s a good writer but this time round I found myself saying ‘I don’t agree with his take on this’:

  • driverless cars could allow cities to cut vehicle numbers by about 90% (fanciful weasel word ‘could’)
  • they will reduce accidents by around 90% (not convinced)
  • pollution and carbon emissions will drop, because the cars will be electric (begs a lot of questions on the production of that electricity)
  • ‘the old, the disabled and teenagers will suddenly gain mobility’ (my 86 year-old mother could drive now thanks, when she gets her new hip sorted, plenty of teenagers and disabled people do now)
  • people will save fortunes by ditching their cars (we’ll see)
  • driverless cars won’t need to park because ‘the driverless car is the perfect cheap taxi – it can drop you at work, then go off to collect somebody else’ (when does it recharge?)
  • cities will charge you for owning your own car – ‘if you think personal cars will survive as status symbols, remember that horses were once status symbols’ (but TV didn’t kill cinema, Khan Academy hasn’t killed schooling. Remember, back in 2000 Michael Lewis forecast that TiVO meant the end of commercial television as we know it. ITV has had a great run)
  • congestion will drop ‘as driverless cars can drive in dense packs, won’t get lost and won’t have to circle around looking for parking’ (guess we’ll have lots of wifi recharging then somehow – how?)
  • The police won’t racially discriminate by pulling over black drivers – or indeed any drivers (racial discrimination isn’t stopped by autonomous cars)
  • The tedium of commutes will disappear as you can use your driving time for other things. (commutes are tedious on trains, buses and tubes – why would driverless cars be different?)

Kuper also warns of job decimation in the automobile and associated industries from car manufacturers to taxi drivers to insurance companies. He acknowledges that ‘only 6 per cent of the biggest US cities’ (not sure what that 6% actually represents) have factored driverless cars into their long-term planning though industry experts expect driverless cars to be on our roads by 2020. (wait till there’s insurance against failure of autonomous cars)

Meanwhile, in the Harvard Business Review this month, the CEO of Nissan and Renault, Carlos Ghosn, sets out how these companies are planning for drivers to be able to choose whether to drive or not and explains why he isn’t scared of Tesla, Apple or Google parking their vehicles on his lawn. He says ‘I don’t hear anyone say “I love driving in traffic jams” or even on highways with miles and miles of road ahead’.

Well, personally, I do enjoy driving on highways with miles and miles of road ahead, particularly on French Autoroutes, though not so much on the A470. Has Ghosn never heard of Route 66 (https://roadtripusa.com/route-66/ ) and the romance that thousands if not millions have attached to that over the years? The song itself has been covered by Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones and Natalie Cole.

But it’s not the determinists’ rejection of the human factor that drives my scepticism of driverless enthusiasm. Nor is it the aesthetic objection that driverless cars are ugly, outlined by Tyler Brule. After all, I guess if Apple gets involved, design will be a key factor  . Nor the safety issues resulting from potential DDoS attacks on the Internet of Things with their dystopian nightmares of self-attacking cars (very Maximum Overdrive ) or state-sponsored Russian hackers running amok although these are real, terrifying and unresolved issues. Nor that, according to the FT, aggressive drivers see autonomous cars as easy prey. I expect there’s a video game for that. Presumably, being more of a luxury product, cars will have better security than cheap cameras, but little is ultimately impregnable.

Nor am I hostile to technological developments. I love my iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro and digital technology generally. Though I realized as soon as I started this article that I would sound to some like the DCMS civil servant whom Damian Green once described to me in the mid-nineties (when he was working in John Major’s Policy Unit and I was working for the BBC), as someone who was ‘not quite convinced that television would catch on’.

I don’t doubt the innovation that is going on at Tesla, which announced last week that it has installed the hardware – a camera, ultrasonic and radar package – in its cars in preparation for when the software becomes available, which it will then download to you. Build and they will come? Maybe. After all, with an alleged $4.5 billion in government subsidies you’d hope that was true. Tesla’s pitch is clear:

Self-driving vehicles will play a crucial role in improving transportation safety and accelerating the world’s transition to a sustainable future. Full autonomy will enable a Tesla to be substantially safer than a human driver, lower the financial cost of transportation for those who own a car and provide low-cost on-demand mobility for those who do not.

But as Ben Evans points out (hat-tip Dave Jones for the reference) :

Very few people in the field think that autonomy will be possible without a LIDAR sensor any time soon (LIDAR makes building a 3D model of your surroundings much easier), and very few think it will be possible even with LIDAR within 5 years. Many think 10 years (or longer) is more realistic. [LIDAR = Light- detection and ranging]

In the States, outline Federal policy on driverless cars has now been produced. You can watch a video on that here:

 

My objection to all this driverless car-cophony is that, as ever, it is putting the product before the people: the question shouldn’t be, how do we adapt cities to driverless cars, it should be, how do we ensure cities are liveable spaces and design transportation systems that help people live healthy, sustainable lives in those cities? To take a European city which has probably done more than most to achieve this goal, Copenhagen, where an estimated 40% commute to work by bike, it has been the investment in high-quality public transport systems – including driver-less light metro, by the way, and cycle-friendly routes – which matters.

image

That doesn’t mean Copenhagen isn’t thinking about the future of transport in its city: it’s thinking smartly about how to capture and use data, including mobile phone data, to continue its development as a sustainable and green city, with its intelligent traffic lights giving priority to buses and bicycles – not cars, driverless or otherwise.  Focusing on cars, autonomous or not, will give you car-focused not people-focused solutions. Let’s focus on the human space, and develop the technology to make it more human, not focus on the technology as the pivot. Back in Wales, this guy has some good ideas too.

Back in the 1980s, the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams warned against the notion of ‘technological determinism’:

The basic assumption of technological determinism is that a new technology – a printing press or a communications satellite – ‘emerges’ from technical study and experiment. It then changes the society or sector into which it has emerged. ‘We’ adapt to it because it is the new modern way.[i]

In fact, argues Williams, there is always a social context for the development of a technology, and how technologies advance depends on the material and corporate interests of those who have developed the technologies. As John Gray subsequently argued, ‘new technologies never create new societies….they simply change the terms in which social and political conflicts are played out.’ When it comes to decisions on regulatory issues, corporations seek to co-opt regulators and politicians into a belief that the technological needs prescribe certain outcomes, or as Des Freedman  puts it:

That there are no alternative paths and that resistance is futile because technological development is pre-determined. Technological determinism, therefore, is a discursive means of highlighting novelty and paving the way for structural changes that are seen to be necessary.[ii]

Or back to Tylor Brule again:

There’s also something rather depressing about all the hoo-ha surrounding driverless vehicles and the general demonisation of four wheels under private ownership. For starters, a car that does everything in automated fashion for the owner is yet another nail in the coffin for common sense, aiding and abetting in the abdication of responsibility for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians (or bringing a spike in lawsuits).

Second, it renders most of the taglines of the established carmakers completely redundant as they cower from lobbyists and the tech sector alike. And third, it’s eradicating all the sense of thrill and risk that makes it exciting to be human.

So, no, I don’t plan to be riding around in a driver-less car. Aside from my bike, which I’ve been pleased to ride into the university on many occasions since I started in September, I want a small, fuel-efficient car with great Bluetooth and a fabulous sound-system. Any recommendations?

[i] Raymond Williams, Towards 2000, 1985, p 129.

[ii] John Gray, ‘The sad side of cyberspace’, Guardian, 10 April 1995; Des Freedman, ‘A ‘Technological Idiot’? Raymond Williams and Communications Technology’, Information, Communication and Society, 5:3, 2002, p432