How can you keep your educational institution competitive in a changing landscape?

The competitive landscape in education is dynamic, and institutions that can adapt, innovate, and remain student-focused are more likely to thrive in the face of change.

While the SWOT analysis may be helpful, one of the overriding issues in the educational landscape today is the separation of school and work. Schools have more recently engaged in fulfilling governmental obligations (standardized testing) but ideally begin with what your goal is as an educational institution and then conduct a SWOT analysis towards independent stakeholders, including government and business. No school should really hope to educate everyone on everything, instead focus on your core customers for employment and build that program. Apple ditched every product in the 80;s to focus on their core product and then built out when that core product was sustainable.

Here are some considerations for adopting new tech: 1. Learning curve. How much time will be spent learning how to use the tech? 2. Permanence. How long will you use the new tech? 3. Benefit. How does this improve students' learning? 4. Leverage & efficiency. How can you use the new tech to compound your abilities and save time? 5. Security. How much of your or your students' information is being handled and what happens to that data? 6. Access. Will students be able to use the tech after graduation? 7. Cost. Paying for tech is often better than using your class as an advertisement. Some tech is actually free to give the brand a good name.

Schools that don’t adopt technological and innovative methods risk falling behind. This reluctance can lead to diminished student engagement and learning outcomes, as students and parents expect a digitally-rich learning environment. Teachers in these schools risk missing key professional development, creating a quality gap in teaching. Without tech integration, attracting new enrollments is challenging, and students may be disadvantaged in higher education and careers where digital proficiency is key. Embracing technology is no longer optional but a fundamental requirement for educational competitiveness and student success.

I will go against the grain here and ask, what is the purpose of your tech? For instance, I question the purpose of LMS for many educational purposes. The LMS is more for the administration and data collection than it is for students. How many workplaces have dashboards that look like your LMS? How is using the LMS preparation for that workplace? Imagine instead, you use the technology from their future work. If you are in a coding program, you use GIT for assignments instead of a traditional LMS. Engineers will be using their emails more and may have dashboards. However, I would situate the technology to the educational goals and stop wasting money on all-in-one LMS technologies.

I was always taught, and teach my students that the Mission Statement for any corporation (including educational ones) is its thesis statement. It should be concise. If you look at the mission statements for the largest corporations, they have simple and easy missions—the longer and more complex the thesis, the harder the argument. Once you have a good mission statement, build your processes and metrics to follow that mission statement. Ensure everyone in the org sees that all your processes are intended to support your mission statements like a body paragraph is intended to support a thesis. As a process specialist, this is exactly how I view any org.

Be a Collaborator, or a leader, and not a "boss." We have all these comparisons in business to demonstrate these differences, but often our practices within education are not leader-specific. As a leader, you should be asking yourself how you are supporting your teams, including students. If you have never taken a persons ideas, ask yourself why? Is it that they have bad ideas? If so, why keep them if they are not driving the mission forward? Can you coach them? Be active and supportive.

The employer- educator relationships is essential to remaining relevant in a competitive higher education market. Partnerships where the stakeholders co- design/co-create academic programs, with specific outcomes, along side educators. This type of work starts with highly engaged advisory boards and requires an authentic collaboration.

Develop strong relationships with all stakeholders. Make them active partners in the decision making process. Invite them for engagement and participation. Sustain this!

To maintain competitiveness in the evolving educational landscape, it's crucial to adapt by understanding the cultural context and listening to consumers, namely students and parents. Regularly solicit feedback, implement innovative teaching methods, and stay attuned to emerging educational needs. By fostering a responsive and culturally sensitive environment, your educational institute can better align with the evolving expectations of its stakeholders, ensuring sustained relevance and competitiveness.

In response to Patricia's articulate contribution below, the answer to her two questions are... Not enough. Curiosity and creativity are highly under-valued. Collaboration is becoming a lost 'art'. Current (exam) assessment practices are the obstacle to developing more formative practices in the classroom.

As a teacher I try to 'drill right down' to the changes in my classroom...whilst remaining true to my pedagogical values. Let's tackle technology. It has brought vast amounts of resources to a learner's fingertips and the classroom can potentially be a more stimulating place but at what cost? How often do they browse through galleries or wander in their local environment for inspiration? More concerning is the demise of fine motor skills in young learners. I believe using paintbrushes and pens with sensitivity comes from children making their own models, toys and games when younger and using screwdrivers, knives and hammers when older. 'Pressing buttons doesn't cut it for me!'

Change is key in education, but education systems are historically resistant to change, to the detriment of students. For example, artificial intelligence is disrupting the economic and social landscape, yet no school district to my knowledge has made radical changes to prepare students for this. We need to discuss which skills will be especially needed in an AI-moderated world, and which skills will not be. And the skills that become more important may be surprising. Speaking, communication, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and curiosity in my opinion, will be highly valued. To what extent does our schools develop these skills? To what extent do our assessment practices value these skills?

Change in education is such an interesting paradox to me. I have often wondered why educational institutions say they have the best talent in the world, but produce the worst products: Visit a .edu website and check their UI/UX? See how their communicate to their students? Try to find a professor, or a location? Its so interesting to me that rather than have their professors do service and research on their own products, they hire outside and increase their liabilities. There is nothing but talent on a campus, and the resources are all seemingly chaotically assigned. Re-designing the educational institution from the ground up is in order, but the institutional inertia makes it a patchwork of risks and liabilities.

Keep up with generational changes. Be in alignment with the changing world. Embrace technological advancement and develop systems and practices that are driven by latest inventions and discoveries. Be customer centric. Keep the best interest of students at the heart of all decision making. Represent excellence in everything in the organization.