What will future technology-enabled teaching and learning in higher education look like?
Here we explore the changing nature of teaching and learning in higher education, the promise of a blended future and the systems and organisational infrastructure needed to enable flexible, interactive and personalised learning design for the widest possible range of students.
Although the potential for technology to transform teaching and learning in higher education has existed for some time, 2020’s sudden and improvised ‘pivot to online’ has blown away many of the barriers to such change and created a window of opportunity for the university experience to be improved substantially. As we move beyond last year’s initial quick fixes, only ever (mostly) intended to maintain continuity through remote teaching of existing content, we can see how, despite their shortcomings, those fixes became a catalyst for change.
There is now a wide and growing acceptance that technology-enabled teaching and learning is here to stay. It comes alongside realised pedagogical benefits, improved digital skills and confidence among staff and students, and a widespread willingness to embrace such a future and make it work.
In collaboration with Jisc and LearningMate, Ian Dunn and Gideon Shimshon, we’ve produced a report that explores the changing nature of teaching and learning, the promise of a blended future and a view of what’s needed to deliver the best learning design for the widest possible range of students.
It offers deep dives into the challenges for students, staff and institutions, compelling case studies of edtech in action in universities and an analysis of the opportunities for founders and startups, with startup tips throughout and insights on pitching to universities.
Technology-enabled teaching and learning at scale — a roadmap to 2030 is based on research interviews with 50+ university leaders, edtech founders and higher education sector experts. It is the eighth report in the series From fixes to foresight: Jisc and Emerge Education insights for universities and startups.
- University leaders will find guidance on what they must consider when deciding how they can use technology to develop or scale up their blended teaching and learning offers — and how to mitigate common barriers.
- Founders will find advice on how to formulate their offerings and approach universities for the greatest chance of success and to maximise their value for both institutions and learners.
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The turning point
“Universities have learned a lot this year. There has been an enormous shift into the online space and how we use technology, but there has been an intellectual shift as well. People are much more engaged in the conversation about technology — there is collective upskilling and sharing of experience. We are rethinking the whole teaching experience and the role of faculty will be changing, from delivery of content to supporting learning. That’s a big culture change, and it is going to take time, investment and technology.”
Ian Dunn, provost, Coventry University
If the transformation to technology-enabled teaching and learning is here, the challenge now is to implement the right sort of transformation. There is a limited time window in which to ensure that the temporary fixes and workarounds of spring and summer 2020 do not become the new normal: if they endure there is a risk of embedding all sorts of inadequacies and inequities in provision. HE is now at a turning point.
In August 2020, we published Digital Learning Rebooted, which laid out three requirements looking forward to 2030. Digital teaching and learning should be:
- Intentional: delivering a learning experience that is built strategically from the ground up to improve on current practice.
- Seamless: a systemic, ecosystem-based approach will help to break down the silos between different tools, emphasising the importance of an intuitive and consistent experience (alongside reliability and security).
- Supportive: designed to help every student make the most of their learning regardless of location or background.
So what needs to happen to embed these requirements? What organisational changes and infrastructure investments need to be implemented to scale up the existing best practice? Universities face a decisive moment, to reflect on their experience of the past year and think through its implications for long-term digital teaching and learning strategy.
Towards a blended future
Building technology solutions that change and improve teaching and learning at scale will require huge strategic shifts for universities. The current norm is to retrofit online provision to on-campus frameworks to deliver pre-existing learning, teaching and assessment remotely. Where used, online programme managers (OPMs) act as effective but costly wraparound service providers that create online degrees, while massive open online courses (MOOCs) help digitise and market existing resources for wider consumption. Both improve digital provision, but they essentially help move existing education online for new audiences.
And, to date, spending on technology has focused on core infrastructure: to attract students, process applications, store student information and educational materials, manage business intelligence and manage operations.
None of this offers the radical reimagination of teaching and learning at scale that is required to captivate core student audiences: the critical move from translating content to transforming pedagogy.
What would be different if we imagine starting again?
• What would an institution-wide flipped classroom look like, where knowledge acquisition is asynchronous and in-person encounters offer real pedagogic and social value?
• What would a fully integrated digital and physical campus look like?
• Do universities still need a VLE?
• What might replace the lecture?
• What does a virtual or hybrid classroom look like, and how would it operate?
• How might a data-driven model for student co-creation of the education experience change the tools and techniques universities adopt?
Key challenges
There are challenges to achieving transformation at scale that need to be addressed across stakeholders:
• For students, they include access (because of digital poverty), accessibility and inclusivity, skills (digital fluency plus skills around independent learning) and community (can technology recreate the serendipity and sociability found when mixing on campus?).
• For staff, it’s digital capability, confidence and motivation, plus the need for evidence-based knowledge of what works in blended formats when it comes to pedagogy and learning design.
• For institutions, there are clear financial pressures coinciding with the need to invest in a high standard, fully integrated physical and digital campus. There is the cost of providing fully accessible and inclusive online provision, and the cost of data infrastructure, ethics, privacy and security, together with managing staff workload and the need to collaborate, as a sector, to establish benchmarks for effective practice.
Scaling up
HE has extensive clusters of expertise and many examples of experimentation in online learning but, so far, they rarely reach mainstream deployment levels. The question for universities now is how to scale this trailblazing work and spread it through the whole institution, rather than in isolated pockets of practice in departments. Based on our research interviews, we have identified several factors in successful scaling up:
• Delivery needs to be flexible, blended and fluid to meet the demands of face-to-face, hybrid, blended and online classes.
• Design of courses should be intentional, pedagogy-informed, personalised and outcomes-focused. Academics often lack time and incentives to develop up-to-date pedagogical expertise in course design, especially when it comes to designing for digital. Universities will need to review existing course development processes and consider the roles that learning designers and learning technologists might play alongside academics.
• Data infrastructure should be interconnected, insight-rich and collaborative, looking beyond the counting of logins, downloads and page view as evidence of student engagement, to digital learning’s stronger points of reference with more meaningful data.
• Differentiation between and within universities means great disparities in digital readiness, coupled with differences in how disciplines are translatable to online teaching and learning. Solutions should be student-centric, subject-specific and values-led.
Three areas of opportunity
In the report, we highlight three broad areas where technological innovation can play a major role in enhancing teaching and learning at scale: resources (the core materials for enabling teaching and learning), delivery (the infrastructure) and support (services and tools for aiding and enhancing learning).
Resources are dominated by publishers who have transitioned textbooks into digital and interactive formats, joined by the rise in online video-centred courses. The trend for textbooks is towards digital, with improvements to interactivity. There is a rise in MOOCS as courseware and in the quality of digital curricula. There are opportunities in this area for improving access to textbooks and the development of courseware authoring platforms, readymade video content and the creation of core instructional courses.
Delivery of engaging, high-quality and impactful education and assessment, as learning becomes increasingly blended, is a significant challenge. There are opportunities in video lecture engagement and live interactive instruction, learning platforms and feedback infrastructure and analytics, and particularly in the design of authentic assessment.
Support is needed by the overwhelming majority of students at some point, creating opportunities for large resource pools and repositories as well as homework aids and on-demand micro tutoring.
Market map
We have identified leading and emerging players that are set to transform each of the three areas of opportunity in technology-enabled teaching and learning, and provide a flexible, personalised, supportive and engaging blended experience.
The next steps
The time is now for a holistic edtech investment approach. Taking the 2020/21 experiences and scaling up blended learning offers so that they pervade higher education’s ‘business as usual’ is the clear next step. This does not demand technology-led or technology-centric design, but rather making the most of technology’s ability to enhance existing provision, sharpening student engagement, and widening accessibility. Each institution will need to find its own way forwards based on its own characteristics and strategy yet sector-wide collaboration will remain vital to effectively scale up blended learning. Industry-wide initiatives and investments can avoid significant duplication of time, effort and money. While each university may take its own path, we are all facing the same challenges as we move through this terrain.
To explore key areas of enabling teaching at scale in the higher education market in more detail and see the recommendations for learning and development practitioners, organisations, policymakers and founders, download the full report here.
Emerge Education welcomes inquiries from new investors and startup founders. For more information, visit emerge.education or email hello@emerge.education.
Thank-you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!
Nic
Nic Newman
