How are digital technologies changing higher education?

Discourse about the impact of digital technologies on the higher education sector so often focuses on teaching, learning and the student experience. But the potential impact and opportunities extend far beyond virtual learning environments (VLEs) and smart classrooms.

Here we consider just six areas in which digital technologies have the potential to revolutionise, enhance or even disrupt higher education.

Research

Digital technologies already have significant impact on research around the world. Specifically,

Our ability to access big data sources, offering the opportunity to understand our world in new ways and through a new lens
The opportunity to use machine intelligence to process data, freeing up the time of researchers to focus on the synthesis of that data, interpretation and application instead of time spent processing it
The potential for computer modelling and simulations to replace expensive and space-hungry machines and systems
The ability for us to connect and collaborate with other researchers around the world in new ways, making communications and collaborative working easier and more instant, reducing the reliance on face-to-face meetings and the associated travel time and costs
The ability for us to store, share, search and access research papers and datasets in new ways with greater accuracy in search functionality and immediate access
The way in which we manage and maintain research and researcher information for regulatory and other purposes such as funding, recruitment, consultancy and league tables.

Teaching and learning

From virtual learning environments to distance learning, digital technologies impact on the teaching and learning experience in a great many ways:

Altering or evolving our concepts of the traditional classroom, making them more collaborative and enabling the learning experience to become more interactive
Transcending the traditional classroom or learning structures to offer new modes of delivery such as online learning, and MOOCs
Opening access to learning materials for students
Empowering students with mechanisms for working more collaboratively, including working with others around the world in interactive online spaces
Empowering non-traditional education and learning providers to deliver experiences that complement or compete with universities. This includes social networks (such as LinkedIn), media companies, and businesses
Using machine intelligence to identify learning trends, facilitate interventions for struggling students, and increase retention and completion rates
With interoperability of systems and developments in areas such as blockchain technologies, how transient might the learning experience become?

Campus and infrastructure

With advances in digital technologies comes the evolution of the classroom, digitisation of learning materials and publications, collaborative approaches to connecting researchers around the world, and the potential to replace laboratories with simulated experiments. In this world, will the concept of a physical university campus still hold relevance?

Furthermore, as more and more data is stored in the cloud, as wifi access becomes ubiquitous, and as workers increasingly move to more remote and home-based forms of working, how will our physical buildings and campuses also need to adjust and adapt?

For now, higher education embraces digital technologies as a means of enhancing and extending a campus or campus-like experience. But is there a future in which they hold the potential to replace the campus and need for physical infrastructure altogether?

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People

As digital technologies impact on the lives of individuals in so many ways, how might this carry through into how it impacts on their expectations of higher education?

As digital technologies usher an on-demand culture, will this be equally expected of higher education? Will the concept of terms or semesters disappear, and annual intakes become a thing of the past?
With a move towards a piecemeal app-culture where we use different systems and technologies to serve different needs in our lives, will this personally curated approach extend to the learning experience? Will students expect to be able to curate their own learning experience by pulling together their preferred modules from different sources: multiple universities, businesses, media companies, and live experiences.
In turn, will staff move to a more transient portfolio and project-based approach to work? How will the concept of the academic department or faculty evolve? Instead of clustering institutions around a specific campus location, might our employment clusters instead focus on specific disciplines or societal problems?
How will our interactions and engagements with different individuals and audiences evolve, as our interactions become more digitised, personalised and automated? What are the implications for how we resource such connections with the institutions?

Partnerships

Digital technologies have empowered us to become more connected with others around the world than ever before. Advances in social technologies make it possible to easily identify, connect and work with partners from within and outside of higher education, no matter where they are located. They can and may:

Offer us opportunities for identifying and building relationships of relevance with individuals online
Provide unprecedented data for us to explore and model the potential of partnerships before they are developed, or provide information and insight to help us mobilise such partnerships
Develop global networks
Mobilise partnerships with a range of different types of people around communities of interest in fluid and flexible ways
Offer ways for us to manage and maintain relationships, and report on the impact of such partnerships.

Operations

We are under ever-increasing pressure to deliver efficiencies in how we work. We are also equally held more and more to account. The impact on higher education's operational processes can be enhanced by digital technologies. This includes:

Using advances in big data and machine intelligence to process information to inform large strategic decisions, and identify opportunities for operational improvement
Adopt interoperable and cloud-based systems to streamline administrative processes such as human resources, finance, estates management, marketing, timetabling, resource allocations, and research information management
Automate early warning systems for potential operational issues or performance concerns
Gather and store data and information in ways that can be manipulated and repurposed to serve differing needs relating to reporting and audience engagement
Improve communications and engagement within our own communities.

Whether digital technologies will act as a catalyst for significant disruption to the higher education sector or merely serve as an opportunity for incremental development is yet to be seen. What is guaranteed though, is that universities must work with technological revolution and embrace opportunity instead of swimming against the tide. And so, the University of Nottingham is taking steps to ensure that complacency and stagnation is not an option.