Students and labour market needs have changed, and the mode of operation in the business world has changed. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) need to change accordingly. Technology offers unprecedented opportunities to reimagine purpose, operational models and service quality.
It is time for a transformation in higher education.
A new mindset for higher education
Student expectations have changed. Digitally savvy, more connected than ever before – they seek personalisation, digital channels, customisation, and relevant learning outcomes to career prospects.
COVID-19 has accelerated the switch to digital, in line with student preferences. But outdated lecturing styles have been implemented in the digital space. Delivering 20th century content and methodology within a 21st century digital space won’t lead to 21st century learning outcomes.
The skills needed in the labour market are also shifting. Students need to be prepared to fill the skills gaps throughout their careers. Employees’ skill sets are the key to organisational growth, and our CEO survey shows that upskilling staff and attracting skilled future employees is a constant challenge for CEOs. This is further impacted by the rise of automation and AI.
The higher education market has changed, and a new mindset is needed.
Education Transformation Framework
HEIs need to transform to adapt to these changes. This Education Transformation Framework is a suggested structure to help HEIs design their digital transformation in a holistic way.
What are the benefits?
In the short term, taking these steps will protect and expand revenues and help optimise costs. In the long term, it is important for HEIs to build smart, safe and agile operations that address student needs and allow them to succeed in the labour market.
The framework provides practical suggestions based on the four key pillars of higher education: Student success, teaching & learning, academic research and secure & connected campus.
Focus on students
Students are at the heart of higher education. The primary responsibility of HEIs is to support students in reaching their potential and becoming lifelong learners in a volatile, uncertain and complex world. They should therefore be the primary consideration in the transformation process.
Put yourself in your students’ shoes. What does your university look and feel like from their perspective?
To reimagine the student journey and create a personalised digital journey, you need to understand what your students want and need, and what the factors to their success are. By redesigning and aligning your services in a personalised way and thus creating a digital student journey, you could see:
Increased student engagement
Higher student satisfaction
Improved learning outcomes
New insights for further development
Attract, retain and support excellent academic staff
The teaching and research excellence of the academic staff “make or break” a higher education institution.
It’s important for higher education institutions to provide an integrated, personalised and supportive digital academic journey for their academic staff. Academics who feel supported through professional development opportunities and institutional services are more often better motivated to build a culture that empowers students to reach their full potential. Therefore, a digitally supported academic journey should be set up.
By fostering an attractive career for your academic staff, you could see:
More engaged academic staff
Increased staff satisfaction
Academic staff more motivated to support students
Increased interest in academic careers
Reimagine the way universities support student learning
The transformation of teaching methodology is crucial for higher education institutions to keep up with today’s rapidly changing environment.
Reimagined teaching and learning should be relevant for real life, experience based, personalised and collaborative. It should prepare students with the skills that employers are seeking: problem-solving, critical thinking, cooperation, innovation, social-emotional intelligence and digital literacy.
Cooperative project based programmes supported by “molecular” adaptive online learning can help improve student learning outcomes especially in the fields that employers seek.
Lead and foster research, innovation and development in your institution
Research leads to discoveries, and innovation leads to new solutions.
New discoveries for teaching and learning can foster academic excellence in higher education institutions. Today, exponential technological development forces institutions to digitally upskill researchers, to use and invent digital research methodologies in all fields, and to proactively steer and monitor research, development and innovation activities in strategic areas.
To boost research development and innovation, institutions can:
Provide digital upskilling to researchers
Incentivise and motivate research in areas corresponding with a strategy to use resources efficiently
Provide secure, adequate, flexible and scalable cloud-based IT infrastructure to research projects
Set clear research, development and innovation evaluation criteria, and monitor activity
Communicate research results in a targeted and customised way to different stakeholders
Provide a collaborative platform for researchers and partners
Incentivise interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research projects
Be service oriented and agile in operations
Institutions don’t need digital strategies. They need a strategy that contains continuous digital transformation.
To meet the needs of students and academic staff, HEIs need to provide quality services in flexible environments. This requires engaging the whole institution to understand their operational and infrastructure needs and create a vision that fits the future.
Some ways to create the roadmap:
Simplify, standardise and automate administrative processes and provide them as a service for students and staff
Set clear and understandable expectations
Plan data needs for efficient and effective institutional management
Provide insights to further increase efficiency, effectiveness, agility and quality based on data and analysis
Create a flexible and secure IT infrastructure that meets the needs of your institutional strategy
Rethink the possibilities of physical spaces; make them sustainable, yet more adapted to collaborative ways of working
Higher education needs to become more digital and agile to meet student and academic staff needs. It also needs to be robust enough to handle the challenges of the future.
This framework is one approach that HEIs can take. No two institutions are the same, and any approach should be tailored to your community. What all successful approaches will have in common, though, is that they will all be proactive, collaborative, service oriented, digital and agile.
