What Now for Higher Education? From Surviving to a Modus Operandi Fit-for-Purpose in a Digital Era

Please Note: This article should in no way be considered as a criticism of those operating at the coalface of academia who have worked tirelessly over the last few weeks to minimise, as far as possible, the impact of COVID-19 on the student learning experience. Hopefully, your collective efforts will help to drive a new 'way of doing things' fit-for-purpose in a constantly connected world.

Background

In updating an online version of our ‘Leading Digital’ MBA programme, I came across a book chapter I had prepared in 2015, published in The Marketing Book 2016 by Michael Baker and Susan Hart.

The primary focus of the chapter was the future of marketing education in a constantly connected digital world. The chapter included a short section on pedagogy, with leading authors predicting a decade ago that higher education was facing major challenges threatening its very existence. In the absence of profound change, the sector was in danger of becoming the next Kodak, Blockbuster or HMV - a Digital Dinosaur.

The core theme developed in the chapter has become even more relevant now given the potentially crippling impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Higher Education. The genie is out of the bottle in terms of student demand for new agile, flexible, responsive, collaborative, personalised delivery modes.

To stimulate debate and feedback, I have reprinted the relevant section of the chapter below.

Please accept my apologies in advance as I have not had the time to hyperlink all the references listed. Most of these should be found easily on Google.

Reprinted from The Marketing Book 2016 by Michael Baker and Susan Hart

In addition to reinventing our courses to educate the new generation of digital marketing leaders, should we, as marketing educators, also be asking questions about teaching and delivery modes? 

In an era when all our students are digital natives, has the traditional ‘sage on the stage’ lecture become redundant?

Tapscott and Williams (2010) certainly think so. In Chapter 8 of Macrowikinomics, entitled ‘Rethinking the University: Collaborative Learning’, the authors present a thought-provoking analysis of the future of Higher Education in a digital world.

In the absence of profound change, Higher Education may be on the road to becoming the next Digital Dinosaur. Writing in 2013, the late Clayton Christensen commented that half of all US universities would be bankrupt within 15 years, by 2028.

Given the current predicament, his prediction may have been out by 8 years.

According to both authors, higher education is facing major challenges which threaten its very existence. These include high drop-out rates; the high cost of attending; escalating student debt which, in turn, is leading to a change in ‘mindset’ among young people regarding the benefits of having a University degree and whether it is worth it; declining public sector funding support; the growth of online alternatives, especially Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs); the market for new graduates, whether Higher Education is producing graduates with the right skills; high non-attendance rates for lectures; and even when they do attend, short attention spans which, in turn, are a consequence of digital technology.

The response to these challenges has, in most cases, been to cut costs. However, according to the authors, more revolutionary change is required. There is a fundamental need to reinvent the University especially in two main areas – pedagogy and ‘modus operandi’.

Pedagogy

In terms of the former, Tapscott and Williams argue that it is time to toss out the old pedagogy, replacing it with a new model based on collaboration. The current model is built around a pedagogy of absorbing content and recalling it in exams. The teacher is essential a broadcaster; a ‘sage on the stage’, a transmitter of knowledge to an inert audience in a one-way linear fashion.

In a digital age, this is anachronistic - ‘yesterday you graduated today your knowledge is obsolete’. Because of digital technology, what really matters is the capacity for life-long learning. We need to focus less on what we learn and more on how we learn – the ability to think, research, find information, analyse, synthesise, contextualise and critically evaluate; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.

This, according to the authors, requires new collaborative social media models of learning that change the actual pedagogy in fundamental ways; involving the active participation of students in content development and delivery supported by digital technology. We should all spend less time lecturing and more time collaborating with our students online. Replace teaching with more collaborative approaches to knowledge development including the shift from mass production to mass customisation - not one lecture for 60 students, but 60 lectures of one.

A key premise of their argument is that the collective knowledge of the network (the crowd) will always exceed that of the ‘expert on the stage’. Students have at their fingertips the most powerful tools ever for discovery, constructing knowledge and learning.

Modus Operandi

Tapscott and Williams also raise serious questions concerning the ‘modus operandi’ of Higher Education. The existing ‘textbook’ mode is slow and expensive; entirely new ways of operating are required, especially in terms of how Higher Education content is produced. Universities, professors and research staff should contribute to an open platform of world-class educational resources that students anywhere can access anytime during their lifetime.

In a highly connected world, universities still operate as largely autonomous islands of scholarship and learning. There has been a failure to seize the opportunities provided by the Internet for breaking down the walls that divide institutions, professors and students.

The 21st-century University should be a network and an eco-system rather than an Ivory Tower. Enormous opportunities exist to create excellent student experiences by assembling the world’s best learning resources online, allowing students to select a customised learning path with support from a global network of instructors and facilitators. However, this will require deep structural changes and a new ‘mindset’; a ‘meta university’ – a communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms.

The web provides the communications infrastructure to support this. A global open-access library of course materials is required to provide the content. The rapid growth of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) in recent years could be a move in this direction. 

The need for radical change in Higher Education has been extensively discussed by other authors. Indeed, a Special Edition of the Economist magazine was devoted to the topic. Entitled ‘Terminal Degrees, it contains the following hard-hitting statement:

‘If universities were to face the same conditions over the next 10 to 20 years that daily newspapers faced over the last 10 to 20, then revenues would fall by more than half, employment in the industry would drop by nearly 30% and more than 700 institutions would shut their doors.’ (Economist, 2014).

Other articles published around that time included the following (again apologies for no hyperlinks but very short of time just now and wanted to get this published):

• Higher Education: Creative Destruction - from ‘The Economist’; a cost crisis, changing labour markets and new technology will turn an old institution on its head.
• The Future of Universities: The Digital Degree - also from ‘The Economist’; the staid higher education business is about to experience a welcome earthquake.
• Do MOOCs Upend Traditional Business Education? - interesting research results from Knowledge@Wharton; free Massively Open Online Courses do not undermine traditional Business Schools. They can complement existing programmes by reaching new audiences, enriching the student experience while providing an opportunity to engage with a wider and more diverse student population.
• Teaching Business in the Digital Age - from Emory News Centre; business education is in the throes of a historic transformation. Changes driven by technological advances and the corresponding demands of business are affecting how students learn, how professors teach, and how schools both organize and market themselves. 
• How Innovation and the ‘Reimagined’ Classroom Will Change Learning - from Knowledge@Wharton; Higher Education is undergoing a revolution. New technologies and new approaches to learning are altering the way educational programs are delivered and are changing the way we learn. But there is no silver bullet. No single innovative teaching method has become widely promoted or adopted; the traditional lecture hall is still the norm.
• The Unfulfilled Promise of Educational Technology - from Harvard; with 50 million public school students in America, technology holds much potential to transform schools. So why isn’t it happening?
• $60,000 Online Degree: A Lesson in Digital Business - from Information Week; the title says it all.

Leaders of Change for the Digital Era Urgently Required

I am sure that there have been numerous other similar articles published since then so why has progress been so slow in transforming the sector? Has there been a collective failure of senior leadership in this regard? Does the sector urgently require leaders of change for the digital era?

With coronavirus threatening the very existence of many institutions, it is time to accelerate the debate concerning the future of Higher Education in an online world. Will the emergency shift to online delivery over the last few weeks provide a platform for a new modus operandi or will the sector revert back very quickly to the ‘way things have always been done around here for the last 500 years or so’?

As always, comment and feedback are very welcome.

Jim H