Disrupting Class: University CIOs on the Digital Starting Block

The pandemic of 2020 and 2021 has tested Universities to the core. International travel blocked students and revenue. Lockdowns and stay-at-home orders stopped on-campus teaching and flipped to digital learning, financial pressures led to swathes of staff-cuts.

In 2020 CIOs, CiSOs and CDOs were heroes, and had their day in the sun, demonstrating speed, agility, fortitude and preparedness, to enact their institution’s business continuity plans, and deflecting a surge of cyber-security incidents. At last it seemed that University Technology leaders were being welcomed to a seat at the decision-making table with their Vice-Chancellors and Senates.

Then came 2021, the year we thought the new normal would revert to the old normal. The hero haloes fell, and reality stepped back into University boardrooms. While our University CIOs and CDOs were still dealing with the day-to-day logistics of funding and delivering digital education delivery, the forces of global digital disruption hovered. Clayton Cristensen wrote in the early 2000s of the threat of digital disruption to any, and all, business models. Most Universities, comfortable and established, resting on the laurels of a thousand years of history as respected social and economic leaders and shapers, ?considered the threat ‘in theory’ – but failed to embrace Cristensen’s warning, nor embed the sense of urgency of a ‘Kodak-moment’ scenario. In some Vice-Chancellors’ offices, from about 2010, digital roadmaps for the future were devised, but until the pandemic of 2020 the appetite to ramp-up investment in many Universitys’ digital infrastructure and practices remained luke-warm. Proving that it often takes a crisis to open our collective eyes to disruptive forces, threats and opportunities.

Today when State and Federal governments talk about how our Universities will contribute to the ‘job-ready’ graduates we need for Australia’s future prosperity, they look to the Vice-Chancellors for a digital vision. While CIOs have been enacting institutional DRPs and BCPs during the pandemic, and CiSOs have been ramping up cybersecurity defences, University CDOs have been climbing back onto the starting blocks ready to race – and now the digital roadmaps, shaken off and refreshed for 2022, need to be substantially funded.

Therein lies the blocker: while the pandemic provided the perfect space for Universities to continue construction of physical buildings (and no students on campus creates the perfect ‘WH&S’ compliant building site !) … the early pivot in 2020 should have been to building the holistic digital experience, creating the next generation of student learning and teaching systems. Primed and ready to take the post-pandemic student intake. Ready to attract experience hungry, digital native, international students.?

Global competitors from new entrants to the sector are already off and racing.?Australasian Universities could and should offer the world’s students and academics the global ‘gold-standard’ in innovation in digital remote teaching and learning, that eclipses any other country’s offerings. Digital university experiences which could eclipse the physical beauty and safety which pre-pandemic, we used to market our higher education and research. The University with the best digital environment will trump Sydney’s Opera House, the Gold Coast’s beaches, Melbourne’s cool coffee shops, and bring the student dollar (and academic prowess) back home. Without planes, masks, and lockdowns getting in the way.

Designing and building a compelling 21st century digital student experience demands more. It demands creativity, digital capability, and persistence. As well as money and will.?The digital student experience starts with student-centric design, understanding the personas of the consumer from every age group. Universities start with the product of K to 12 education system. Lifelong learning continues until senility takes away the capacity to learn. ?University students are diverse in their digital maturity – from digital natives born this century, to professionals continually up-skilling and mid-life career-changers, to baby-boomers using retirement to pursue new fields of study. The digital bar is also high for academics and researchers, but particularly for teaching staff who must engage with that diverse student community. Lecturers now have to juggle hybrid delivery modes, technologies from Zoom to Blackboard to Moodle, and students who live in a world of influencers and rapid switching from social media to deep content to practical application in workplace projects.

University CIOs and CDOs have tackled the digital design dilemma many times over in the enterprise domain, and even the teaching and learning domain, but the bar has severely risen since COVID19 hit. Now teaching and learning online, off-campus is the norm. Digital roadmaps aiming at the mythical targets of 2025 or 2030 are now truncated. 2021 is the new 2025, and 2022 is when those 2030 visions should ideally be ready. Because if they aren’t, the next intake of students will have unexpected new choices from digital giants or new entrants.

Some entrepreneurial and visionary higher education competitors, whether established or new entrants, did not spend the pandemic struggling financially, pivoting student intake forecasts, or letting seasoned academics take redundancies. The ones who may surge ahead in 2022 may have taken the pandemic as a ‘gap year’, a chance to design and build for the future, devising new business models and preparing for the return to (a global digital) class. Watch out now for the Uber-Lecturer, flitting from digital campus to campus. And the Influencer-Lecturer, attracting thousands or global students with their compelling content and entertaining style.?Or the Tic-Toc Teacher, dancing their way to ‘click-here to learn’. And when the consumer clicks, they may be taken into a learning experience more like a Subliminal or Manifold Garden or Tis100. And when they go looking for work, they may find their student records, personal learning preferences and achievements will be transferrable, secured and validated, recognised across co-operating OECD countries, like a Learning Passport, maintained by ‘the government’. The mythical digital twin of yourself as student is not far on the horizon.

COVID-19 has magnified University’s dependence on high functioning ICT systems and services. As the pandemic dislocated familiar ways of working, those systems and services adapted quickly and flexibly. ??Each year the Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) produces an analysis of the Top Ten priorities for its members, the CIOs, CDOs, CISOs and IT Directors of over 60 Higher Education and Research institutions across this Region. The pandemic’s lessons have substantially influenced the 2021 Top Ten. The top four priorities this year are: CyberSecurity, Student Success, Business Transformation and New Models of Teaching and Learning.

Student Success is central to the purpose of CAUDIT members.?Governments and Higher Education institutions place Student Success as their central pillar and purpose, measured by academic achievement, research innovation, and ‘job-readiness’.?During this current pandemic, ICT in Universities has performed as a dynamic intermediary, linking students with faculty and resources, community and peers, meeting human challenges of isolation, and fear of change, when remote teaching and learning became the new, and only, norm.?ICT has enabled institutions to think, design, and deliver beyond traditional face-to-face lectures, tutorials, and laboratories.?As University populations embraced digital connectivity and formed new virtual communities, University ICT units facilitated interactive experiences, and rapidly transformed remote access to library resources and student support and services. Underpinning those services is big data collection, analytics and AI tools which management use to interrogate and illuminate links between teaching and learning models, academic program design features, and student outcomes.

However in 2020 and 2021, CAUDIT members ranked Cyber Security above Student Success as their number one priority. ?Criminal hackers and politically motivated malign actors see higher education as a gateway to research intelligence and intellectual property, as well as personal information about alumni, students and staff in diverse open communities.?Effective information security practice is a shared obligation across campuses and laboratories, among colleagues and stakeholders.?

In 2019, through fortuitous foresight and disciplined risk management practice, CAUDIT members created a dedicated alliance to strengthen University cyber defences. CAUDIT funded a new organisation, AHECS, the Australasian Higher Education CyberSecurity Service. This was prescient as 2020 brought a surge of serious cyber attacks and incidents into the sector. Some major Universities thwarted week-long randomware and other incidents, which disrupted an already severely interrupted environment.?

Business Transformation ranks third in priority for CAUDIT members in 2021, above other technical, skills, cultural and information concerns. ?And we now know that successful business transformation in Universities can be undertaken within a month or so, not a year, or a decade. For University CIOs and CDOs this is a finding to savour, a lesson to follow. ?

The upside lesson from the pandemic draws on an important attribute for working fast and successfully: teamwork. It takes collaboration across the institution for ICT to enable business transformations that achieve business outcomes that serve stakeholders well.?Business domains in Universities can enlist ICT-enabled data collection and analysis to inform the design of business transformations to aid institutional recovery from the pandemic, and shape the next normal. ?

ICT-enabled retention strategies can help lift student persistence and completion rates, improving student outcomes and fee income. Data management in research and administration could be enhanced by Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation, which automate routine tasks across applications. ICT could fast-track new revenue sources through enabling innovative online learning alternatives. ?ICT endows higher education institutions with opportunities to implement new frameworks for new future student cohorts.

New Models of Teaching and Learning ranks fourth priority for CAUDIT’s members. ICT can accelerate achievement of high quality student outcomes from diverse teaching and learning models.?Today Universities also have an array of novel digital ‘realities’ to choose from: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR).??Emerging technologies can extend the power and immediacy of teaching and learning models, and equip curriculum developers, learning designers, lecturers, and tutors with new student engagement options.??

When campuses closed due to pandemic restrictions, remote teaching and learning became the pedagogical commonplace. Revisioned and re-scaled learning management systems met new necessities. Online education enthusiasts, alongside those unconvinced about its utility, ensured student learning continued, underpinned by quality assessment practices which also had to flip to online invigilation digital ‘exam rooms’.?

Codesign is the watchword for the future of the digital University.?The path to acceleration is inclusive and deeply consultative design. University stakeholders from academic board members to first year undergraduates must engage with technology and digital experts to research, shape, trial, and evaluate teaching and learning models.

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in far-reaching changes to familiar learning and teaching models, research practices, and business processes.?The pandemic left no choice: staying open for quality learning and teaching, research and engagement, compelled fast adoption of new digital capabilities and applications. As we approach the end of 2021, higher education and research institutions continue to work through high speed, high pressure, digital business and operational changes.

One of the greatest social and business disruptors of our time, the COVID19 pandemic, hands University CIOs, CDOs, CISOs and IT Directors an opportunity to become a positive facilitator for institutional change. The pandemic is not over yet, and 2022 may be grim too, but the leap into holistic digital society has been made. There’s no turning back now.?And we have proven that, in our Universities, ?digital and technology leaders can and will pivot rapidly, to continue to serve their student, academic and research communities. Even as we change our most basic assumptions underpinning higher education business and operations models, with courage and purpose ICT continues to be a champion of change and a force for good.

Jenny Beresford CEO, CAUDIT.?Jenny has served as a CEO, CIO, strategist and change-agent in global enterprises, with a three-decade career in the digital and technology industry.

Please note that this article is an opinion piece and may not represent the views of CAUDIT members.

CAUDIT (The Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology) is an incorporated Not-ForProfit association governed through an Executive Committee of elected Member Representatives. We have 63 members, whose representatives are the CIOs, CDOs, CISOs and IT Directors of universities and research institutions located across Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia Pacific.

CAUDIT’s purpose is to support the application of digital capabilities to transform higher education and research, across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.?