Students Using VR Headsets
EDUCAUSE recently released its top 10 strategic technologies for higher education. In an excellent report co-authored by Mark McCormack and Christopher Brooks, EDUCAUSE (based on a member survey) identified the following (broadly defined) technologies:
1. Uses of APIs
2. Institutional support for accessibility technologies
3. Blended data center (on premises and cloud based)
4. Incorporation of mobile devices in teaching and learning
5. Open educational resources
6. Technologies for improving analysis of student data
7. Security analytics
8. Integrated student success planning and advising systems
9. Mobile apps for enterprise applications
10. Predictive analytics for student success (institutional level)
Technology Influencers
The most defining parts of the report are the technology influencers, which appear below. Influencers are described as “already incorporated into IT strategy or exerting a major influence over emerging IT strategy.” There are four categories of influencers:
- Most influential
- Taking hold
- Worth understanding
- Limited impact
Here’s the list of influencers:
“Most Influential” Trends
- Growing complexity of security threats
- Student success focus/imperatives
- Data-informed decision-making
- Privacy
- Enterprise risk management
- Institution-wide data management and integrations
Trends “Taking Hold”
- Compliance environment
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
- Simplifying administrative services and technologies
- Changing enterprise system architectures, integrations, and workflows
- IT accessibility
- Campus safety
- IT as an agent of institutional transformation and innovation
- Online and blended degree or certificate programs
- Digital transformation
- Declining enrollments
- Higher education’s reputation and relevance
- Changing demographics’ influence on enrollments
- Institutional innovation strategy
- Shared services
- Blending of roles and blurring of boundaries between IT and academic/administrative/research areas
- Financial uncertainty for the institution
“Worth Understanding” Trends
- User-centered design
- Cross-institutional partnerships and consortia
- Agile approaches to change
- External partnerships with employers, corporations, and communities
- Moving from transactional to strategic vendor-institution relationship
- Lifelong learning and adult learners
- New business models for higher education
- Evaluation of technology-based instructional innovations
- Solution providers bypassing IT to work directly with business-area leaders
- Investing in research
- Changing faculty roles (focus on advising and student success, growth in adjuncts, new methods of research and publication, etc.)
- IT frameworks
- Digital transformation of research and scholarship
- Internet of Things
- Cross-institutional and international scholarly and research collaborations
- Incorporating open standards into enterprise IT architecture
- Bimodal IT (managing two separate IT delivery modes, one focused on stability and the other on agility)
“Limited Impact” Trends
- Alternative credentialing models
- Freedom of speech
- Declining international enrollments
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Use of algorithms to influence institutional and individual choices
- Mergers and acquisitions
- National and global political uncertainty
- Climate change
- Deregulation of higher education
Connections & Disconnections
But how do these influencers explain what’s on the top 10 technology list? Many of the influencers are infrastructure-related. Many are strategic and many are administrative. Only a few are focused on applications. Hardly any of the technologies speak to existential issues – like faculty roles, new business models, mergers, acquisitions and freedom of speech – which are listed as “worth understanding” and “limited impact” influencers.
The list of influencers and the top ten technology list are weakly correlated. If you look at the influencers, most of them have little to do with technology, and if you look at the top ten list of technologies, they only slightly represent the influencers. Even more interesting are the administrative and strategic influencers considered of limited or low impact. How is it possible that partnerships, lifelong learning, adult learners, new business models and changing faculty roles are only “worth understanding”? Or freedom of speech, declining international enrollments, mergers and acquisitions, national and global political uncertainty, climate change and the deregulation of higher education “low impact”? The data is the data, and maybe the “worth understanding” and “low impact” results say more about the survey’s respondents than they do about anything technological. Again: how could new business models, changing faculty roles, freedom of speech, declining enrollments, mergers, acquisitions and the deregulation of higher education score so low as influencers? The top ten list of technologies barely reflects this scoring.
Revisionist Survey Results
Some of the influencer technology clusters might include:
- Data-informed decision-making
- Online and blended degree or certificate programs
- Digital transformation
- Digital transformation of research and scholarship
- Internet of Things
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Use of algorithms to influence institutional and individual choices
But way beyond the lists, universities should build global technology infrastructures that securely scale to support multiple business models, including new (lifelong) customers, new pedagogy and new mixed content delivery. Mobility is assumed, as are blended data centers (in clouds). The emphases on APIs, security, mobile devices and even analytics are short-term almost obvious tools to keep the current trains running on time. But if we inspect the influencers, we see a whole new set of requirements, business processes and business models that require a completely new transportation system. While the EDUCAUSE report is really interesting and useful, it highlights a set of longer-term existential requirements that the top 10 technology list barely addresses.
The next report might directly link the influencers with a technology agenda that speaks directly to the macro changes occurring in higher education. The survey data presents an opportunity to describe a technology architecture (comprised of the business, data, applications and delivery architectures) likely to enable 21stcentury educational processes and whole business models.
