What has changed in Higher Education

For a long time the main learning tools were a book and lecture from that book. Later on we had power point slides, and a syllabus, recreated disparately at 20,000 universities around the world. The book and the lecture model is 500+ years old. With the advent of personal computers and the internet and increasing globalisation there is far less need for coordinators to individually create what essentially amounts to lower quality homemade courses. Publishers how have large multimedia development teams informed by the best professors, pumping out globally relevant learning materials that work better and cost less.

• Improved quality of learning technology and learning materials: New itelligent multimedia  learning materials offer dramatically improve learning through. These materials and systems usually cannot be created by individual instructors any more. New electronic learning materials allow personalised learning, customising material presentation to the needs of the individual student.
• Lower Cost: new electronic learning materials are dramatically cheaper to acquire than the old materials cost to build homemade, because they are sharing cost across 20K universities.
• Access: Universities are no longer the repositories of knowledge. Information is now in the cloud. Universities used to be relevant as a repository and transmitter of knowledge… but in the future students will not be reliant on 3/4/5/6/7/ year uni educations to build a career.

Strategies to take advantage of economies of scale:

Strategy	Advantages	Considerations
Sit on your hands	Saves $ in the short term	Soon other providers will get a reputation for having more effective and flexible leaning experiences.
Participate in MOOC production and incorporation of MOOC materials into degree courses.	Gain some economies of scale	In the global internet world the top 10 win, and if you don’t have a program already in the top 10 its going to be hard to make an online version that makes the top 10, let alone get the investment required to make that so. Soon other more serious providers will get a reputation for having more effective and flexible learning experiences through use of professionally built publisher materials made by large multimedia teams combining with experts from around the world and established distribution networks. Try to pick one program and fund it properly, or get out and focus on adding clear value to a local market.
Participate in publisher production and consumption	Higher quality materials. Chance to enhance reputation through contributions. Save $ on learning materials. Likely to survive.	Not open access unless you can get the publisher to agree to that.
Bet on the Gates Foundation LMS of the future project or changing your LMS.	May save LMS costs and give a better user interface.	The learning experience is still delivered by traditional unis saddled by campus costs. LMS costs are tiny compared to campus and generation of learning materials, and labour costs for coordinators. The key concepts of the ‘LMS of the future’ already exist in most commercial LMSs e.g. Interoperability, collaboration, analytics etc. so the only advantage may be a slight saving on the licence which is an irrelevant cost already. Any personalisation may require more labour than the average course coordinator can deliver. A better model is to leverage economies of scale by inserting global learning materials from a MOOC or a publisher or a LOR (learning object repository), or some kind of app store for LMSs. Migrating LMS will set a uni back 2-3 years.
Cull courses and specialise in the most viable programs.	Focus on areas where the university is a clear leader in face to face teaching, or research.	The demise of the generalist university.
Focus on a residential learning and cultural experience for students.	Clear distinction in a global market. Leverages sunk costs in the campus. Trains future national leaders.	Expensive and elitist.

One line of thinking is that technology should only be used where it enhances learning outcomes. While learning outcomes are clearly part of the picture, it may also be a dangerous over-simplification of what is happening in higher education. We have to accept that technology creates opportunities where problems had not been identified, and a missed opportunity can be a big problem. The problem becomes especially big if a competitor is leveraging that opportunity. Higher education may have two problems in combination:
1. While we have established that technologies can be used to improve learning outcomes, and in some cases improve efficiency, universities are poorly positioned to leverage this capability. They are saddled with legacy support structures and resourcing focused on the physical environment, and in some cases a significant focus on research at the expense of teaching.
2. We have discovered that new technologies increasingly pit all universities against each other in a national or global market, where once they were comfortable and protected in geographical markets. The problem is that some level of rationalisation may occur, and new players are gunning for a share of the market. The flip side is that technology opens up opportunities for collaboration and outsourcing to protect or grow market share, or achieve efficiency gains. While the education market is growing, cost expectations may be going down. A university’s vision and strategy might do well to articulate where its emphasis will be, noting it must hold up against competitors. For instance, will it have a focus on:

• enhancing learning outcomes while retaining a face to face component (e.g. flipped classroom),
• enhancing research, or community engagement (e.g. MOOCs) through efficiency gains,
• simply giving more learning options to increasingly busy students, or
• lowering costs to students.

The crux of the ‘problem’ we are trying to solve therefore is which combination of the above will best allow our respective institutions deliver on our charter in five years' time, noting this may significantly depend on our ability to retain or attract students in an international market of providers making full use of technology enabled opportunities. Have a read of Scenario Planning Delivery Models for Higher Education for ideas on this.
Thoughts?
Simon Collyer