Forward Facing and University 3.0

I met the Moreau family for the first time at the Martin Luther King Parade this past January. The Moreau family is special: Pierre and Marie Michelle, both FIU graduates, were one of the first couples to be married at our Biscayne Bay Campus Kovens Conference Center years ago. They have a love for our FIU and are hopeful that their only child Pierre Armand Moreau II attends FIU! I hope he does too, although he has his sights set on a private North Carolina institution known as Duke. 

I assured the parents that we would be there for their son, but I know in the back of my mind that things are quickly changing in our business, as I mentioned in my last post. And what awaits their son--either there or here at FIU is bound to be very different from his parents’ higher education experience. 

 Change is about us. We must move from being student-centric to being learner-centric. We must deliver a compact learning experience that pivots on individualized attention, and just in time data based assessments. We must prepare learners for life-long learning and to work alongside smart machines. And we must master the changing technology landscape—particularly how artificial intelligence will impact learning—both for the learner and the professoriate.

If we can make these changes, I believe that the university can survive and thrive. The Moreau family son might secure his education elsewhere, but both his parents might be frequent learners at the same institution—hopefully their alma mater--driven by their need affinity to our institution and by the urgency to continually upgrade and retool as employment opportunities and pathways change with the rapidly changing nature of the occupational structure. 

The university itself will change as the form and nature of learning changes. Indeed, what I call University 3.0 looks something like this:

• It will be an intense experiential ecosystem that will provide deep brand affinity for those associated with it. Place will continue to matter and so will identity and identification.
• It will depend upon intrusive cognitive measures of knowledge and learning with variable measures of competency. Artificial intelligence, on-line adaptive learning, and big-data will play a large role in this.
• It will provide for the automated matching of interests, capabilities and opportunities at a global level. 
• It will provide for personalized, variable education pathways—populated by traditional learners, just-in-time learners, do-it-yourself and/or curated learning. 

University 3.0 is less than two decades away. We are already witnessing the emergence of biohacking and the shadow of CRISPR looms. New institutional forms for learning will most certainly evolve and disrupt as providers multiply in consonance with the explosion in personalized learning. The educational ecosystem will be populated by traditional and modernizing institutions and new to market quick-fix initiatives. I am optimistic that those that are the most agile and flexible will survive. But their viability will not just be a function of their embrace of the latest high tech and gadgets. They will also fill the human need for belonging and being a part of something larger than oneself. High-touch will be more important than ever.   

I certainly hope that when Pierre Armand Moreau II makes his choice to attend either Duke or FIU that there is a clear demarcation between those institutions that are thriving in the new environment and those that are just holding on. Our FIU can be well-positioned for this brave new world as long as we continue to benchmark against the future and not against the earlier era when most of us received our formative education.