The Role Of Technology In The Great Higher Education Transformation

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I have been tremendously impacted by the writing and lectures of Clayton Christensen from the Harvard Business School (HBX). If you haven't heard of Dr. Christensen, it is likely you are using one of his theories in your everyday vernacular. Disruption and disruptive innovation were terms first coined in Christensen's groundbreaking book, The Innovator's Dilemma. If you are responsible for thought leadership, management of people or innovation within your organization, do yourself a favor and read or watch anything by Christensen. He is that good.

Recently, when an article from Christensen come out on higher education, I quickly got my hands on it. However, instead of being inspired, the article left me gravely concerned. In the article, Christensen states within the next 10 years, up to 50% of all higher education institutions will either merge or close. If his prediction is correct, we would see a key thread of the fabric of American society not just frayed, but cut from the cloth. Education, when done well, is the great equalizer. It takes a person of potential and through the educational process equips them to succeed. The education of the students at my school focuses on their intellectual, emotional, professional and spiritual development. Given the challenges the world faces, I find my work not only interesting and professionally fulfilling, but vital for a future desperate for good ideas and effective leaders.

So, is Christensen correct? Will online education become so good that face-to-face education will disappear from the educational landscape? While online education is an important tool, I don't think it will become the primary tool for educating future generations of students. Online education is getting much better and will continue to improve. In fact, I just finished a course offered by HBX and Dr. Christensen. It was excellent and I learned a significant amount of new material that I am already working into my leadership responsibilities, but I am a person with numerous degrees who is always looking for ways to improve and grow. Without that initial foundation of education and mentorship from some key faculty, I remain unconvinced regarding an exclusively online approach to education.

I recognize that many will disagree with my hypothesis regarding the central and critical role of faculty in the educational process. Education is certainly about professional success, but it is also about developing a passion for learning, nurturing creative thinking and developing problem-solving skills. Education is about becoming a truly educated person. Could this happen exclusively online with millions of students using only electronic content and some professional support staff? Perhaps, but I have my doubts. This development best happens with a skilled faculty member who is both an expert in his/her discipline and is able to assist students in their learning as well as their multifaceted responsibilities to society. This is truly the type of education and good life we hope our students can have. The question is how to build a financial model that keeps this type of education affordable for students.

Christensen and I agree that technology will be an innovative disruptor in higher education. Where we disagree is the best way to focus this disruption. At the top of my list are cost increases, which have been widely criticized and seen as unnecessary. It is easy to understand how many see academics as the big driver of these costs. However, serving as a higher education administrator, I can state categorically that cost increases are not the result of bloated budgets or skyrocketing faculty salaries. The primary culprits are inefficient business processes and legacy technology platforms that are extremely expensive to maintain and difficult to change. Instead of talking about minimizing or even eliminating the role of faculty to find cost savings, I suggest we apply our best thought leadership to reinventing and modernizing the business of higher education.

So what is the business of higher education? It is all the areas of a college or university not related to academics. This would include admissions, record keeping, billing, housing, report generation, compliance, food service, athletic administration, human resources, business office, payroll, information technology (IT), fundraising, facilities management and many others. Effective use of technology in these areas holds untold potential to transform higher education by introducing significant efficiencies and dramatic cost reductions in serving students. Why do I think this is possible?

Early in my career, doing anything innovative with technology required significant resources. It was nearly impossible to do anything at an enterprise level because costs were so prohibitive. As a result, we took less expensive but non-enterprise approaches. Fast-forward 25 years and you have an expensive mess that is nearly impossible to leverage to solve new problems. However, with the advent of free or inexpensive cloud computing, the limit is no longer primarily financial and this is a really big deal. Cloud computing platforms such as Google, Salesforce, Meraki, Egnyte, Domo and Drupal level the playing field and provide the best-in-class enterprise tools we desperately need. A vast frontier of cost reductions awaits higher education if we can introduce elegant self-service capabilities to students. These experiences must be built on modern and dependable platforms in order to truly disrupt the current service models and dramatically reduce costs. Cloud computing provides the tools needed to create these transformational solutions without the overhead of more staff and equipment for the first time.

Running an educational institution, some of which are more than 150 years old, is an incredibly complex endeavor. Through the introduction of new business processes and innovative uses of cloud-based technologies which deliver actionable information to the smartphone, schools would see dramatic reductions in business costs for higher education. These cost savings would reset the value proposition and perception of education in America and protect the elements most critical to its purposes. This can only happen if thought leadership in higher education is willing to bring new approaches to solve lingering business problems. For schools courageous enough to take this journey, significant cost reductions and higher levels of student success will follow.

Source: forbes.com