Higher Education, far from being the poor relation in terms of early adoption, is leading the way in using emerging technology to promote a culture of innovation and collaboration. These institutions are breaking new ground and using the opportunities that emerging technology offers as a USP – for both students and potential research partners.
As with every disrupted environment the pace of change in Higher Education is impressive at best, bewildering at worst. But for the purposes of this article, we are going to focus on five trends – and ask how can we harness these emerging technologies in our pursuit of the Holy HE Grail – improved innovation, increased collaboration, better outcomes for students.
The disruptive potential of AI is already becoming a bit of a cliché – the focus of every business blog and keynote. But what marks AI out in Higher Education is its potential to transform not only how HE institutions are run, but how students learn.
Examples include:
There has been some debate around whether gamification – playing at learning – is appropriate in Higher Education (let’s be honest our parents wouldn’t approve). However, there is mounting evidence that there is real value in using aspects of play in how we learn beyond Kindergarten. In particular it has significant advantages when we want pupils to innovate and invent. Both in person and on online platforms, reward systems and immersive environments are making a real difference to motivation and outcomes. If we allow ourselves a touch of cynicism, we can argue that if we are educating the TikTok/CandyCrush generation we need to hold their attention by borrowing from the enemy – applying techniques that appeal to short term attention spans, used to immersive environments and short-term rewards. This doesn’t imply the dumbing down of education – it can break the monotony of traditional learning environments, as well as promoting creative, provocative thought.
Let’s start with micro-learning. We’ve all seen the social media ads – “Replace doom scrolling with micro learning”! but if we look beyond the ads, microlearning is gaining a significant following in academia. Often referred to as “bite-sized” this concept offers students intense, short, focused opportunities to absorb content. It often also has the benefit of being student-led – a 10 min podcast, a virtual flashcard, a short animation/visualization – that can be consumed at a time and place that suits the student.
We grew up with the idea of the flight simulator and in the last decade we have seen the concept role out into other high-risk professions – police, military, medicine etc. However both VR and AR can now create immersive learning environments for almost all subjects and professions. By going beyond classroom boundaries, mitigating risk, expanding access, and improving practical learning, VR and AR can transform how students learn, both in terms of quantity and quality. VR immerses users in a fully digital environment, while AR enhances the real world by overlaying digital information onto it. We are all familiar with the idea of medical students performing virtual procedures, but VR has as much capacity to transform the study of the humanities with historical reconstruction, or VR geographic exploration. It can also enable the professions we didn’t realise were risky until they went wrong – teaching, audit and accountancy, social work etc – allowing simulated environments to reduce risk and simply equip individuals better for the real thing.
It also allows pupils across institutions to be together despite distance – collaborating on research, sharing experimental outcomes, attending seminars from disparate centres. Combined with cloud-based learning platforms, which we discuss next, VR/AR are key to the growth of institutions expanding their online campuses globally. And while a decade ago that was primarily high prestige institutions expanding to locations with potentially very high profit areas like UAE, Dubai and China – the technology is allowing new markets to open up, with niche offerings democratizing access to higher education.
Higher education is prohibitively expensive – whether the pupil is paying for it or the state. Cloud based learning platforms have the capacity to emancipate education cheaply– widening access by letting institutions scale what they offer without needing to expand their infrastructure. It is quite literally the oppositive of “If you build it, they will come”.
It also allows institutions to monetize their offering – selling slivers of a whole course to students who only want to access that one part, and students to pick and mix to suit their immediate needs, or longer-term interests.
Perhaps this allows us to rethink what a degree or higher education per se means – as we move towards more and more institutions teaching even traditional subjects in modules, and allowing students to personalise their learning for their interests and/or the career they want to pursue.
And of course, collaborative tools integrated into these platforms let students and educators interact, work on projects, and share knowledge in real time, regardless of their physical location – which means that students are less limited in their experience. They can be affiliated with one institution but benefit from partnerships and collaborations with others – like a hotel chain where you stay at one, but can dine at all on the island.
As we find ourselves facing increasingly complex and conflicting problems in our communities and economies, we must harness the potential of technology to transform the way we learn as well. From AI freeing up substantial resources, to creating adaptive learning environments, to democratising access to education per se – these advances ensure that higher education can do what it does best- teach us to innovate, encourage us to collaborate, prompt us to invent.
These are challenging times for Higher Education. Decreasing student enrolment, increasingly squeezed finances, a cost-of-living crisis, maintaining the quality of educational provision, and the transition to a digital learning environment to list just a few.
A lot has been said about AI and trust. When it first burst onto the scene much was made of its ability to eliminate human bias. Decisions made by AI – we were told – would be fairer.
What skills and capabilities does HE need to make the most of the promise of emerging technology?
Higher education is neither immune to (nor excluded from) the way emerging technology is transforming the way we work and live.
The Higher Education sector has found itself the focus of some very unwanted attention. With a unique combination of critical personal information and highly valuable research data, more and more cyber criminals are focusing their efforts on compromising university infrastructure.
