Personalising Higher Education in the Digital Age

Co-written by Dr Jonathan Duquette and Dr Joshua Broggi.

This is part of a series of engagements with academics. Find out more about Woolf and the academics who are driving research forward at woolf.university.

Higher education and digital technologies are now inextricably linked. Most universities offer online courses and online degrees to accommodate growing student demand for these services. New learning platforms and software services have also made their way into universities. Universities now use these tools to share content and course material, supplement their administrative processes, and organise course enrolment. As we write, a number of projects explore ways in which artificial intelligence software can be used to monitor and improve online teaching. As the technology evolves, it is expected that intelligent software could play a more active role in teaching alongside human instructors [1]. How will institutions of higher learning evolve in this new digital landscape?

Universities are not only centres for learning but also hubs for the development of new ideas. If they are to stay relevant in the digital age, they must face head-on the new technological challenges and opportunities. Members of universities must ask about the extent to which new technologies will demand innovations in the organisation of the university itself; they must also defend the essential role that universities should continue to play in society over the centuries to come.

One of the challenges faced by many online courses is that they cannot provide students with the personal support that has traditionally been offered in a classroom setting. In a recent survey, 5000 students listed availability and responsiveness of the instructor as their top priority [2]. Online universities may well solve some problems inherent to a crowded classroom, but just as often, they violate an essential tenet of human education, namely personal interaction. Online learning often involves pre-filmed lectures, multiple-choice tests and box-ticking exercises, which neither encourage creativity nor offer feedback on open-ended questions. Personal attention is vital to a student’s intellectual development, but many students — whether online or not — have limited access to their teachers and often fail to receive the intellectual support they need to flourish in their studies.

Woolf: A Borderless Educational Network

Can we envisage an educational format that meets the challenges of the digital world while prioritising a high-quality, personal education? This has been one of the driving questions for us at Woolf. Woolf is building a platform aiming to reconnect students and academics in a borderless, secure and regulated educational network. The platform will be digital in its organisation, and it will facilitate personal teaching through digital channels like Skype and Zoom. But it will equally support traditional, face-to-face teaching, whether in a physical tutorial room or at a cultural site decided beforehand by the students and teachers. Tuition will be delivered through lectures and one-to-one tutorials that prioritise teacher accessibility and detailed feedback on the students’ work.

Woolf has sometimes been compared to Uber (see, for instance, the piece in the Times Higher Education) because we are providing access to the platform through an app that directly connects students and academics. However, one significant difference between Woolf and Uber is that there will be no corporation that owns Woolf and extracts the profits. The savings will be passed on to students and academics.

The Woolf platform will allow any student in the world to search for and select courses that suit best their interests, as well as the tutor they wish to study with. However, only students who are admitted to a college will be able to study for a degree course. Likewise, the platform will allow academics to advertise their expertise, and offer them the possibility to form their own college, providing they meet the minimum criteria.

Woolf has already worked closely with regulators on the structure and timing of Woolf’s accreditation. Members of Woolf’s leadership team have acted as expert advisors to government regulators on the accreditation of programmes, and members of Woolf’s Advisory Board have been responsible for overseeing the establishment of several universities. Accreditation is, of course, a minimum standard and a Woolf education is designed to go beyond mere regulatory requirements to ensure a globally-recognised standard of academic excellence.

As Woolf grows, the network will become saturated; more teachers and more students will give all participants greater choice. Our hope is that a decentralised, democratic, and non-profit university can provide both students and academics with new opportunities.

Learn more about the Woolf project and the people involved on the Woolf website.

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/26/could-online-tutors-and-artificial-intelligence-be-the-future-of-teaching (December 2016).

[2] Watson, F.F., Castano Bishop, M. & Ferdinand-James, D. “Instructional strategies to help online students learn: Feedback from online students.” TechTrends 61 (2017), 420–7.

[3] http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/Pages/higher-education-data.aspx