Heidi Fraser-Krauss, COO at University of Sheffield: ‘the pandemic’s broken the mould of higher education in the UK’

Has the pandemic broken the mould of higher education in the UK? In the first of our regular series of conversations in which university leaders share their insights on innovation in HE with Nic Newman, Heidi Fraser-Krauss, executive director of corporate services at the University of Sheffield, shares how Sheffield is responding to the need of more innovation in teaching and learning and offers some blunt advice to founders.

Every quarter Emerge and Mary Curnock Cook bring together its network of university leaders to share insights and experiences on a burning issue within the sector — most recently the shift to digital assessment — and meet up-and-coming tech companies tackling that issue. Mixing these forward-thinking HE leaders with founders of fast-growing tech companies solving their problems, leads to a vibrant exchange of ideas, vigorous debate and an unprecedented level of future insight.

Nic: What type of future do you see for your university’s student offer?

Heidi: At Sheffield, we’re aiming to keep the good bits — such as the innovation in terms of learning delivery and assessment — but we also want to emphasise that we are a residential university, and there are experiences that you will only get from a residential university, for example, peer to peer learning, informal educational opportunities, as well as the more social side of things like sports clubs and societies or just meeting somebody for a coffee after a lecture. Building a community of people is really difficult to do if you’re not here.

We’re taking a flipped-classroom approach on a grand scale, across the institution, and small group teaching is the focus.

Nic: Would it be fair to say that, for this to happen, you’re looking to the university to become more innovative?

Heidi: What’s happened is that the mould has been broken, hasn’t it? We’ve had to do things in such a different way, and lots of people didn’t think it was possible. I was one. I didn’t know how we were going to manage to do everything virtually. I really didn’t know how that would work.

We’re going through a period of engagement at the moment to listen to what works, what doesn’t, how should we be. There is much more of an appetite to change things, to really challenge the status quo, particularly in the teaching and learning space. That’s the thing that’s really been given a boot. And yes, there is much more of an appetite to innovate.

Nic: Where does that innovation happen? Do the pockets come up from the faculty? Does it come externally? Is it centrally controlled?

Heidi: While there are good networks in most universities for sharing best practice on teaching and learning, such as learning and teaching conferences, the places that do it really well combine bottom-up innovation with strong leadership from the top.

Somewhere that’s really pushing the envelope on this is Leeds. The new VC of Leeds, Professor Simone Buitendijk, is out there saying we’re about digital education, digital education, digital education, and we’re going to look at everything we do through that lens.

Conversations at Emerge Network events often centre around the difficulties of scaling up that innovation across the institution. You may have the architecture faculty doing amazingly innovative work with VR but what about the history department? It’s how you get those innovative ideas everywhere, to get it to be the norm to pick up a headset and look around a battlefield, if you’re teaching history, for example. That’s not the norm at the moment.

Nic: And it’s a change programme, or a cultural transformation, that’s needed to get those ideas leapfrogging out across the silos, is it?

Heidi: Things can change across the board. In about 2000, VLEs were all coming out. Nobody used a VLE, and then all of a sudden everybody had one. And now they’re becoming passé. But it has to happen across the piece: a strategic driver, a push from the top, programmes of work and support, plus those ideas coming up from the bottom.

Nic: What’s the role of technology in innovation for you, and where do you want to see some of that technology innovation happen? Where are the opportunity pockets?

Heidi: Is it the technology that makes the innovation or does it just enable it? Some things are absolutely technology-led — VR needs the technology. But so much else has to be pedagogy led.

If you think about what happened during the pandemic, all of the technology to do what we’re doing now existed ages ago. All of it. We didn’t use it. Technology is only a part of it. There have to be other things that make that innovation and change happen because having technology isn’t enough. I didn’t need to go to meetings, I could have used video conferencing in 2019. I didn’t need to walk across campus. I could have done everything just as we’re doing now. But I did not do that before. The modus operandi was not there. The cultural norm was to go and see someone face to face. The technology has to be there but that alone is not enough to create the tipping point. It’s also a matter of confidence as well. The first couple times you try something, it’s uncomfortable, and then suddenly you realise it’s ok and, “Oh, I can do this.”

Nic: What advice would you give to founders, in terms of the right way to work with a university? Or maybe there are some common mistakes you see founders make that you wish wouldn’t happen?

Heidi: They don’t understand the business. They don’t understand the constraints. They come in and say, “My product’s marvellous. It’ll solve all your problems.” And they don’t actually understand what the problem is, and they don’t understand the ecosystem that we operate within. Or that we need it to integrate with this or that. I’m not sure they always understand the priorities for the business. And the idea that simply implementing a piece of software will solve all my problems? Don’t make me laugh!. We always underestimate the difficulty of changing things even if it seems relatively insignificant. Ian Dunn, the provost at Coventry University, made the point in one of the Emerge Network sessions that what might seem the most trivial thing to implement — ‘hey, let’s put in software so that we can do reading lists better’ — great, but that involves engagement with 40 academic departments who all do that in a different way, buying content in a different way, integrating with the library system and, and, and, and, and… Founders also need to understand that decision-making in universities can be really slow.

However, if they can break through and get their product in and releasing benefits, then the university will practically sell it for them. Insofar as universities look at what each other has and, if it works, they want one just the same. Universities can be a little bit like sheep in that regard: if it’s good enough for them, it will be good enough for us. We’re back to the VLEs!

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Emerge is a community-powered seed fund home to practical guidance for founders building the future of learning and work. Since 2014, we have invested in over 60 companies in the space, including Engageli, Yoto, Unibuddy and Causaly.

If you are a university leader and you are interested in sector innovation, please do connect with me, Nic Newman.

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