Who is in the driving seat?
A very accessible, simple overview by Mike Boxall in the most recent edition of the Times Higher on what the drivers and options might be for the future development of universities and how future provision might be delivered:
- the Government will not support Higher Education as an end in itself, but expects funding to be tied to delivery of public policy objectives
- student/user-designed higher education supported by open source content and accreditation of DIY learning may develop, but will not in itself offer the other elements of HE experience, e.g. interaction with peers, academic scholars etc
- employer-led provision – the idea of education as a preparation for professional employment is strong, but employers themselves tend not to see themselves as co-providers or leaders but as customers of output
In essence, Government, students and employers are looking for different things, and universities are not seen as the only option. Universities ‘must be willing to discard the anachronistic shibboleths that constrain innovation and modernisation’.
Some interesting examples of what Boxall calls ‘creative iconoclasm’ are highlighted:
- ‘learning hotels’ where a group of academics and practitioners across disciplines are invited to come together as a group within a university to tackle a particular problem
- ‘on-demand’ learning models giving students to design their own learning pathways
- the growth of private sector specialist providers who might be brought into new types of public-private partnerships
Boxall ends by saying that no one route will define the future. The key thing will be to let go of outmoded assumptions.
I’m not conscious of learning anything fundamentally new here, but I did find it helpful to have such a neatly encapsulated and clear summary in the space of a couple of pages.
