Changing Realities
An EDUCAUSE Review article late last year considered the impact that changing economic realities were having on universities, and more specifically the IT operations. In reading this article I was struck by the relevance of the advice when reformulated to address learning and teaching, not just technology.
The environment that is imagined is defined by five assumptions, all of which seem plausible, although we may encounter a few hiccups here in New Zealand:
Programs will increasingly transcend the traditional academic calendar
At one level this seems like good customer service, moving from a rigid academic year and providing access to courses at a time of day that suits the students. Unfortunately flexibility comes with a price. Inherent in this assumption is the sense that learning is done by individuals in isolation, when experience suggests that learning is more often a social activity where students benefit from being part of a cohort. In the short term I suspect flexibility in New Zealand tertiary institutions will decline as a result of Government caps on student numbers. Most institutions will have no trouble hitting their cap while teaching according to the traditional timetables - possibly even stopping teaching over the third trimester.
Interest in hybrid and distance learning will accelerate
Hybrid or blended education is certainly popular, both for students and institutions, but I suspect many institutions are choosing to adopt these approaches as a means of having a 'bob each way' in their learning and teaching strategy. Blending the best of traditional and modern approaches is a good idea obviously, but the temptation is to retain all of the old systems and infrastructure as well. This makes blended education an expensive proposition if institutions are not brave enough to stop doing some aspects of their traditional processes.
Collaborations will become more frequent and varied
Governments regularly look for collaborative activities in the tertiary sector, both in New Zealand and internationally. Unfortunately, as the UK found with the UKeU, collaboration is easy to talk about and extremely hard to deliver on. Genuine collaboration between institutions requires significant ongoing commitment from the leadership of both institutions, something that will really only happen if both institutions are secure and don't see each other as competition. Setting aside competition, a significant problem that needs to be addressed is the institutional definition of a qualification and the curriculum needed to support its achievement.
The need for data and analytics will intensify
Sadly, I agree with this one, although I think it has less to do with evidence based decision making and more to do with the ever present fascination Governments have with performance indicators. The reality is that New Zealand universities produce internationally well-regarded graduates at a fraction of the cost of Australian and other country's universities. No amount of reporting is going to change that fact, all it will do is increase the cost of administration, not the quality of the education.
Service delivery strategies will need to align with financial realities
There is no more money. This is an assumption that New Zealand universities are well aware of, and have been operating under for a long time. It will be interesting to see if a greater awareness of costs internationally leads to new low-cost strategies to improve learning and teaching, but I suspect that the pre-existing investement in a modern infrastructure will see many institutions shielded from the worst ravages of the current recession.
Even if most of these assumptions are somewhat problematic, the suggested priorities are reasonable, even if they turn out to have a common core:
Focus on costs, not budgets
The essence of this advice is understanding where your costs actually lie. I've never seen a costing for university education in New Zealand that was anything more than an educated guess. The one analysis I've seen that had credibility came out of the US and ran to something like 70 pages - anmd it only covered one course. Many of the costs of a university degree are distributed around the organisation, as learning and teaching change the real challenge lies in identifying whether the outcome has raised or lowered those hidden costs.
Revise processes to leverage technology (and other investments)
Most universities have spent millions on networks, servers, LMSs, Portals, and Content Management Systems. Sadly, the evidence from the eMM assessments is that few institutions change business as usual to reflect these systems and the investment. At least for universities, its long past the time when we needed to retain old systems because some students couldn't access a computer and the Internet.
Take more risk, or try the same thing in a new way
The nice thing about this idea is that its so clean and shiny because no university uses it. If there is a unifying characteristic that defines the approach used for learning and teaching at universities, then risk aversion is a strong candidate. Clark Kerr's wry observation on universities remains very popular in the literature because of the sense many have that it may take another 500 years for change to happen:
"About 85 institutions in the Western World established by 1520 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and with unbroken histories, including the Catholic Church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, andÉ70 universities."
Realign learning and teaching and the core
The last decade has seen a remarkable focus in New Zealand on research in the universities. The PBRF has focused the minds and hearts of university leaders by making something less than 10% of the revenue at risk - learning and teaching accounts for over half of the revenue of most universities. It looks like the Government has noticed and is going to use the performance indicators to help sharpen the focus on learning and teaching. The real problem is that research is rather easier to measure than learning - the peer review and publishing systems are international in scope and well developed (if not entirely loved by all). Universities wer created in a world where we could let students take most of the responsibility for their learning, today that's not enough, we need to be actively promoting ways for them to succeed. Recently, I found the following quote from 1995 (Wagner, L. (1995). A Thirty-Year Perspective: From the Sixties to the Nineties. 15-24. in Schuller, T. (1995). The Changing University. Milton Keynes, UK: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press):
"I do not wish to be a teacher, I am employed as a lecturer and in my naivetŽ I thought my job was to 'know' my field, contribute to it by research and to lecture on my specialism! Students attend my lectures but the onus to learn is on them. It is not my job to teach them."
This feels like a voice from a bygone age, learning and teaching is core to the modern university and we need to be reflecting that responsibility in our actions, not taking it for granted.
Leverage the opportunities that present themselves
Performance indicators are merely the latest opportunity for university leaders to affect change. The Educause Review article notes that "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." I don't want us to be reacting to crises in New Zealand higher education, I want us to be actively controlling our destinies and setting the agenda for change, not having it thrust on us by those seeking a short term solution to an economic crisis. We need to use every opportunity to demonstrate our ability to be responsive to the range of needs of our societies, not just those that are pushing the buttons of the current crop of politicians.
Conclusion
Changing realities are necessary, without change you get stagnation, well-adapted, complacent, happy institutions stuck in 500 years of academic splendour failing to notice that the world has changed left with the inevitability of evolution or extinction:
"History grants no essential or eternal role to the modern research University, and it is necessary to contemplate the horizon of the disappearance of that University. Not to embrace the prospect of its vanishing, but to take seriously the possibility that the University, as presently constituted, holds no lien on the future". Readings, B. (1996). The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA. p129