Forces at Play for Technology Enabled Change in Higher Education

What is really driving real change now?

• Globalisation and economies of scale through sharing courses. The possibility of large global providers entering the market.
• Efficiency e.g. assignment handling and online marking – but this is not being translated into lower fees yet.
• Learning Outcomes: e.g. flipped classroom – but this may actually create more work and may not drive down costs
• New markets – online courses are used to reach into the territory of competitors
• Convenience – online courses reach new demographics

Other Forces

• There is a lot of concern about the cost of higher education and the ease with which our children are given loans, that burden them when they are trying to establish families.
• We are currently not leveraging technology very well with most institutions not providing:
• self paced learning.. start any time and go any pace;
• personalised learning – where students are presented material according to a system’s understanding of your understanding of the material, and your optimal learning approach;
• choice of University on a course by course basis;
• online learning option for any course.
• Generation of quality learning material is not achieving economies of scale – with tens of thousands of universities duplicating course material, but at a much lower quality than could be achieved with consolidated resources.
• In some economies education is in the top five 'export' industries (e.g. Australia), while other economies are rapidly building capacity that might threaten this, but if the product is really citizenship (rather than education) then the University will not be threatened and should sure up its services to international students. These countries are not really exporting education, they are importing wealth and high quality new citizens. 
• Degrees are progressively increasing in cost, but decreasing their impact on learning potential.
• As technology accelerates, and technology is increasingly incorporated into course material, the three year degree format becomes a problem. By the time a course is developed, and delivered, and the student completes their degree, what they have learned is out of date.
• Educational technology is raining down faster than ever, meaning an organisation’s ability to development custom software is no longer a competitive advantage. An organisation’s ability to manage change is the new key differentiator. Simply catching up with what the commodity market presents a sufficient challenge, and would make any successful institution a leader.
• The pedagogical skills of instructors have fallen behind technology development
• Pure online degrees are starting to win awards ahead of face to face degrees.
• elearning opens up new geographic markets to all institutions. Universities can teach online, or in blended intensive mode, to reach regional and international students.
• The ability to reach new geographic markets pits universities against each other regionally and internationally.
• An international database and agreement for credit sharing would enable student mobility across institutions.
• An international repository for learning materials would help achieve economies of scale in generation.
• elearning opens up new demographic markets, such as busy working professionals, and the disadvantages or disabled.
• Technology enabled self paced learning, allows students to study at their own pace (get a degree faster or slower).
• Self paced learning requires new ways to enable student to student interactions and collaborations.
• Self paced learning enabled staggered assessment, alleviating traditional exam space pressures at the end of semester, but may required technology enabled testing centres, or online invigilation services with a BYOD policy and equity program.
• Self paced learning across a program would require abolition of semesters.
• MOOCS are just one tool at the end of a spectrum from face to face to online. MOOCS extend the spectrum in the direction of online, towards a more efficient teaching model.
• Credit hours may be replaced with competency based assessment. At Western Governors University you earn your degree based on what you’ve learned, not how long you’ve spent in a classroom.
• Professional degrees are now being taught online http://www.wgu.edu/degrees_and_programs 
• There is a perception that online degrees are inferior, but that is not necessarily so given the low standard of on-campus teaching.
• If an institution demonstrated that learning outcomes were as good or better for an online degree, and it was much cheaper, on-campus degrees would be far less attractive, and that institution would have a significant competitive advantage for a period.
• If a technology enabled degree (e.g. online or blended/intensive) was more in tune with modern technology enabled employer needs, and employers preferred its graduates, on-campus degrees would be far less attractive.
• Caps on student numbers have been removed. If discounted courses were allowed, for online education, with a proven better learning outcome, traditional course student numbers could drop rapidly. 
• Technology can be used to enhance personal learning where for example adaptive tests offer more questions in areas where the student requires development.
• If an online degree provider translated and offered traditional on-campus culture and social interactions into the modern world, the traditional on-campus culture would be less of a competitive advantage.
• A new degree granting organisation not saddled with a campus would be able to deliver degrees at a much lower cost.
• If high school students could try before they buy, it might increase re-enrolment rates.
• The current didactic lecture format dates back thousands of years to when books were so scarce we needed one person at the front to read out the book. We have better options now.
• Flipped classroom has been around for a long time, but both the off-campus and on-campus components are now more empowered with technology.
• In-class collaboration tools depend to some extent on all students having a smart device, which in turn may require an equity program.
• A BYOD device policy with an equity program may be cheaper than fitting out many labs, and provide a much more powerful learning environment for students.
• High school teachers are professionally trained. Higher education teachers very rarely have teaching qualifications.
• In research focused universities student fees are used to significantly subsidise research. Teaching quality suffers.The theory is that research leads to better learning, and research leads to a higher ranking which attracts better quality students, but are students being mislead? Its not been established that using student fees to subsidise research is really in the interests of the students paying the fees and the loans that come with them.
• Open Universities Australia believes it is starting to lose students to MOOCs (Aug 2013).
• Now that teaching and learning is significantly technology enabled (and in many ways driven), like any technology dependant function, it will continue to evolve at a much faster pace than instructors are accustomed to. There will therefore be no single end-state that we have to guess, and then race to. Anywhere you get to you will have to leave very quickly.
• Predicting the future of technology is notoriously inaccurate and unwise, and an unnecessary risk, generally not attempted with other technology dependant functions. The same now applies to elearning.
• Some universities have had experience with the bleeding edge. Most of these endeavours were not practical or economically sustainable, and were quickly left behind by the commodity market, and at the same time diverted scarce resources from central initiatives.
• Academic freedom to use leading edge tools must be balanced against consistency, quality, visibility and the need for support and training at a reasonable cost.
• 44% of post-secondary students in the USA were taking part of their course online in the USA this is predicted to be 81% by 2014 (Ambient Insight Research 2009). e-learning has now moved from the margins to be a predominant form of post-secondary education.
• There has been an increase of around 12–14 per cent per year on average in enrolments for fully online learning over the five years 2004–2009 in the US post-secondary system compared with an average of approximately 2 per cent increase per year in enrolments overall (Allen, I. E. and Seaman, J. 2008)
• With ongoing growth in demand for higher education in China and India, the current face-to-face model may not scale adequately.

Thoughts?
Simon Collyer