Challenger Universities pt. 4a: How to Build a Differentiated Challenger University — Creating a Unique Student Experience

This Emerge article series, researched in collaboration with our extensive network of education leaders, offers insights and practical advice for founders and university leaders bold enough to create new universities.

This is part 4a of our Challenger University series, where I write about the challenges with existing universities and the potential for new challenger universities to arise (first piece here: pt. 1). In previous pieces, I laid out the Market landscape of challenger universities (pt. 3) and The strategic framework for building a differentiated university (pt. 4).

There are 4 pillars of innovation that challenger universities can innovate against to create attractive student propositions. In this piece, we focus on Experience, which has during Covid become both a huge headache for existing universities and a major opportunity for new universities and existing institutions brave enough to innovate.

Experience: What type of experience am I going to offer my students?

The status quo: This is today’s (meaning pre-Covid) norm when it comes to the student experience:

You leave your student accommodation. Walk over to the lecture hall. Listen to your history professor’s lecture on WWII, which hasn’t changed since WWII. Take notes. Check Facebook 50 times in between nuggets of information that you capture, that you think you will not be able to find in the textbook. You go to your next lecture or perhaps skip it since you know it will be recorded. Repeat. Maybe do some sports or an extracurricular activity. Hang out with friends. Go back to your room and study from your history textbook which also hasn’t significantly changed since WWII. Perhaps you download some pdf assignments from your university’s Learning Management System.

In the evening you go to have dinner. Afterwards, if you are lucky, you go to your university’s new flashy study area and try and find a free desk. You prepare for your assignments and exams. You take the same exams as everyone else did, at the same time as everyone else. You hope for the best.

You finally finish your semester or year. You fill out a year-end survey answering 20 questions on how your university could be better next year. You come back next year and go through the exact same experience.

The potential: How do challenger universities break free from this existing traditional university experience monotony? There are 6 key dimensions of innovation that we define, a combination of which those challenger universities that are optimising for experience should embrace. It is key that the chosen dimensions are embedded within the core vision, ethos, strategy and tech stack of the organisation. The implementation of the strategy, however, could be aided by various existing third party technologies which we reference throughout the section.

Student inspired: Ensure students play an active role in (re)shaping their university experience

The status quo: Asking your students to fill out a survey a couple of times a year, does not make you student- informed or inspired. Outside of HE, you would never build a successful business by telling your customers what they want, but somehow most universities still make big decisions, driven primarily top-down and then try to fit the students around those decisions.

The potential: Actively working with students to shape and reshape the day to day experience is needed (e.g. leveraging student voice platforms like Unitu), from deciding:

• How long lectures are (who can focus for 2 hours straight?) and when they happen during the day (why does no one ever take those 8.30am classes?)
• How the lectures are taught and how the curriculum is structured
• What the physical environments are and what they look like (why another new library when perhaps a safe space for parties would be better?)
• What the virtual environments are and what they look like (why do we have the newest computers, but still don’t have a way to directly communicate with staff outside of e-mails; and why do large lectures still happen in physical versus online form?)

Personalised and flexible: Make the experience more personal and flexible, giving students the attention and space that they need

The status quo: Most education today is still a one-size-fits-all model. The same lectures, the same assessments, and the same timelines and required learning pace for everyone. In parallel, classrooms suffer from growing ratios of students to lecturer and / or teaching assistant.

The potential: Personalising the learning experience makes each student feel that the university is there to shape around them, helping them fulfil their potential, not the other way around. This does not have to involve huge costs and have buzzwords like artificial intelligence and machine learning (which as history has shown so far, have often failed), to improve the status quo. Universities can personalise the student experience, by:

• Leveraging senior peers, alumni and members of the community through tutoring (e.g. with the support of companies like Vygo), feedback sharing (e.g. Eduflow) and mentoring (e.g. Mentor Collective)
• Using various technologies that help facilitate the above and support more tailored, self-paced learning, identify key strengths and areas of needed support for each student

Pedagogy informed: Implement what we have learned about learning into the day to day

The status quo: Over the last few decades, we have learned so much about how to be better and more effective learners, yet there is barely a single principle of modern pedagogy embedded in the traditional university.

The potential: Universities that want to differentiate against this dimension of the experience can choose from a myriad of techniques, based on a wealth of research, including some of the following:

• Peer to peer learning — your older peers are often better at teaching you new concepts than professors that learned those concepts decades ago
• Flipped classrooms — you can watch the lectures online and use live events and / or face to face time to discuss and go through questions
• Experiential and hands-on learning — we learn better by doing things and actively participating, rather than reading and listening to others

Case studies: EDU Medical College is showing that even the toughest disciplines like medicine can be successfully taught in an online environment with exceptional pedagogical underpinnings. Foundry College and Minerva Schools at KGI leverage decades of pedagogical experience and research from some of the main thought leaders in the space.

Practical and relevant: Explain how everything you teach and offer connects to the real world

The status quo: A top curriculum should deblur the line between the academic environment and the real world. Most students will not become academics, however, most universities prepare students to become academics and pursue further education.

The potential: It is easy to agree today that memorising many facts, figures, names and dates is useless given we have Google. Top challenger universities will move away from facts, theory and research for the sake of research and make the experience more:

• Practical: In the engineering and architecture world, formulas do not build successful projects. Knowing how and when to apply those formulas through trials, errors, simulations and feedback does.
• Relevant: Writing an essay on a historical event is much more engaging when it is connected and applied to answer a question on the current environment and potential actions one can take given historical lessons

Case studies: TEDI London, NMITE and Dyson Institute in the UK, are each piloting new ways of hands-on practical engineering learning, with an emphasis on applied learning.

Holistic experience: Acknowledge that university is so much more than just lectures and learning

The status quo: The best memories and lasting relics of one’s student university days, especially at the UG / BA level, are often the social connections that were built, not the books or the homework. Many attempts at online first education have failed to inspire students given how much is lost in the lack of social experience. In addition, while the lecture hall has been considered the centre of learning, this is increasingly less so the case. Students learn from one another, dinner discussions and group work, which is well captured in this piece from the University of Bristol. Most universities leave this non-academic element to run itself without providing much support and resources.

The potential: In addition to often the social element, what separates the university experience from the more pragmatic vocational experience is that university students can both acquire knowledge about their chosen fields, but also develop soft skills to become better-rounded individuals and progress up career ladders.

Challenger universities that innovate against this dimension will proactively ensure they are tapping into this social and soft-skill potential, by creating on or out of campus (e.g. campus management platform Raftr) and online opportunities (e.g. Learning Experience platform Aula), so that students are:

• Actively exposed to numerous opportunities to connect with others and feel a sense of belonging, in and outside of the lecture hall
• Building life and soft skills that can help bulletproof their future careers
• Developing strong networks and social capital through peers, mentors and alumni

Case study: Quantic School of Business and Technology offers students a fully online MBA while creating strong opportunities for students to build their network, knowledge and social capital through group-based online and at times offline learning and social events and activities.

Adaptive curriculum: Make sure that what you teach is up to date and adequate for your students

The status quo: Sure, the laws of physics have not changed much lately. But that does not mean that textbooks written in the 1950s are fit for purpose for today. Version 23 of that same 1950s textbook, with minor edits for the purposes of maintaining high textbook prices by giving the knowledge a ‘fresh’ new image, is not a solution. The audience we are teaching has changed and the implications and potential of those formulas have as well.

The potential: Traditional universities are slow in adapting their curricula. Challenger universities, unencumbered by bureaucracy, can:

• Approach curricula as living documents that change year on year, even month on month, and adapt to the students and industries, making them highly relevant to the context of today and the future

In this piece, we have covered our views on how challenger universities could provide a unique, differentiated student experience by focusing on a combination of 6 key pillars. Next week we will focus on the topic of outcomes and the 6 pillars challenger universities could embrace to help students better navigate and take advantage of university and employment.

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While starting a new university is probably one of the most difficult and likely to fail ideas that you can have, it is such crazy ideas that excite us at Emerge. If you are a daring founder in this space or a university leader on the path to improving or reinventing the core student experience, we would love to talk and see how we can help. Send me an e-mail on mario.barosevcic@emerge.education, or feel free to follow me on LinkedIn or Medium and sign up to our newsletter here.