Will EdTech replace Higher Ed?

I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Michael Crow ?when he says we ought to stop worrying about Higher Ed replacement. Equally, innovating at the margins is not enough. Instead, as we shape the Brave New World, also the central theme of this year's conference, we need to march head on here. We need to ask ourselves, how can we innovate the core of Higher Ed?

I have, for as long as I can remember, been passionate about Higher Ed and innovating at its core. And as we do so, there is so much to learn from challenger institutions and the private and EdTech sector at large. What the CEO of an EdTech company in me, would say to the Principal of a College/University, in shaping the latter, is to take back the following ideas from EdTech back into HE:

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Virality coefficient-This concept was front of mind when we shaped our EdTech company from scratch. With the ambition to have a million learners we only really thought big. This wasn’t merely about #scale; it was also about impact. Adoption and adaptation of this in the mainstream university context is not different. Were the first universities around the globe not established to achieve community outreach, cohesion and impact? Indeed, even today, many of our universities aspire to do this anyway, but again, much more on the margins and certainly not at scale. I believe there is much to learn from content channels, their strategies and their CEOs. This is in how we shape leadership, strategic plans and outreach definition in universities. Virality doesn’t need to be seen as a proxy for scale alone, Virality = Impact

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Metrics - Now this is not new. Every Higher Ed regime, being a regulated sector, as it should be, has to take responsibility for the collection, analysis and responsiveness to its data-whether that be student, staff, financial, experiential or destination data. But there is some serious work to be done both from an institutional and regulatory perspective. This is to widen and deepen the nature and reporting of the data we concern ourselves with. So for example, how can graduate destination data for our international graduates in the UK HE context for example, not be a part of our regular returns just baffles me?! With over 600k international students in the UK contributing circa GBP 25bn to the economy, should we not take some responsibility to report on their #graduate #destinations as part of our promise? More generally though, from NPS to CAC to CLV and several others, are metrics deployed in a different guise at our universities but don’t often take centre stage in our #decisionmaking like they do in EdTech’s, the takeaway for me here is that there is some value in revisiting what data and in what form is important to us as we shape universities for a brave new world.

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Creator-Consumer Journey- One of the most refreshing things for me, when shaping my EdTech company was the people I got to work with, most from the #SaaS world. Among the many learnings, one pertinent for me, as I once again shape a new Higher Ed institution is how my colleagues and as such an EdTech company minimizes the distance between the #creator and the #consumer, yet in mainstream HE, certainly in my experience, there is some work to do to bridge the power-distance between #faculty and #students. For me innovating the core would require #creative models of #contentcreation and #dissemination for sure, but also a blurring of lines between the creator and consumer and, therefore, celebrating #cocreation in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

Let us change the question we posed at the outset, instead, let us deploy EdTech and its many pluses to re-invigorate Higher Ed!