Digital revolution could leave universities behind

ACROSS the world, higher education has become big business and a major contributor to the economic prosperity of many nations. For example, it has been estimated that in the UK alone, universities generate £95bn for the country’s economy and support more than 940,000 jobs.

However, an increasing number of experts believe that rather than expanding further, the university sector in many countries will actually contract due to the changing environment for learning. Indeed, one of the world’s leading experts on innovation has suggested that a significant number of universities in the USA will fail over the next decade.

In examining how the education sector may be disrupted over the next few years, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School believes that due to innovations such as online learning, 50% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the USA could be closed within the next fifteen years.

Whether this will turn to be the case (and whether UK universities will follow this decline) remains to be seen but it is clear there are now a number of challenges that higher education institutions face as innovation becomes more prevalent across the sector, especially given the opportunities and threats from the digital revolution and new technologies such as smart mobile devices and sensors, cloud-based IT and advanced analytics.

For example, as Professor Christensen has pointed out, the digital revolution means that students no longer have to go to their local university to be taught and can choose, if they wish, to learn online from colleges on the other side of the globe.

More relevantly, online learning can complement the traditional lecture for those who do choose to study at their home universities especially if there is investment in creating a digital learning environment that can give students the flexibility of a virtual campus.

And those institutions which fail to embrace online learning to complement the classroom may lose out in the long run to those that do.

But it is not online learning that is important to those who have grown up in the digital age. Students will expect that educational experience – including courses, support and services - can be managed through their phones, tablets and personal computers.

Yet, research suggests that many student information systems have been around for over a decade at a time when the digital environment has changed dramatically through innovations such as cloud computing.