Is the university education model forever changed?

If you were to think back to before the pandemic, how would you describe the mode of teaching and study most reflective of what happens in our universities? At the risk of adding to the terminology around modality - I’d describe it as digitally-facilitated - in that the experience was not one in which digital technologies were omitted, but one in which they played a largely supplementary role.

Now though, we’re led to believe that the new model for universities going forward will entail digital technologies playing a much bigger role in the experience.

This, in fact, has long been the aspiration of many UK universities. You just have to read strategy documents published prior to the pandemic to see that clearly stated in print. But it would be hard to argue that those aspirations were met prior to the pandemic.

The model that prevailed was one in which the educational experience was strongly weighted towards the campus rather than equally shared with digital technologies. So this begs the question - has the pandemic really fast-forwarded universities to a long-desired state?

Do universities have the digital toolkit to support change?

One of the first questions you could pose by way of seeking to answer this - is do universities have the digital technology necessary to support such a change of model?

A question to which I think the answer is yes, because the necessary or base-level technology was in place and relatively well established pre-pandemic. The LMS was a fixture and digital hub of all courses, and alongside that, most if not all had adopted the recording of lectures which also enabled personal video-recording capabilities.

In terms of assignments, almost all were being submitted digitally with feedback & marking provided in that way too. Then if you add to that the availability of virtual classrooms, e-learning authoring software, e-portfolio tools, audience response tools you have a core toolset from which you can offer something beyond a digitally-facilitated experience.

The pandemic hasn’t significantly changed the digital technology that’s available for use in teaching and study. Now that’s not to say there’s been no change. Zoom has rapidly increased its numbers of university customers and Microsoft Teams, which was already gaining traction as an educational rather than workplace tool, is now widely used. Add to that the often controversial addition of proctoring software and things like virtual labs then there has been some change.

In fact the technology available within the digitally-facilitated university model is largely sufficient for an online university model in terms of teaching and study. This is one of the reasons why universities were able to provide continuity of teaching in spite of the restrictions in place.

Why haven’t universities met their digital aspirations?

So if the digital technologies were in place and the aspiration of universities was clear, why was there no great change of model before the pandemic?

Well, a lot of the discourse at the time wasn’t that the requisite digital technologies were lacking but that they weren't being used or incorporated into the teaching and study experience. There were so many aspirations of a fully-fledged technology-enhanced or blended learning future that were going frustratingly unfulfilled.

Educational support staff were sometimes playing pseudo-sales roles to get staff to use technologies in their teaching that were gathering metaphorical dust.

Academics who used digital technology in any way shape or form or were doing anything out of the ordinary with digital technology were pushed forward to present, to evangelise at any opportunity. In some cases, the efficacy of what was being done was secondary to how it was being done, if you were in the technology-enhanced ballpark then you’d “got it” and you were needed to help get others on board.

This example actually gets to the heart of something before the pandemic. Universities wanted to get somewhere, but they didn’t always know what it looked like and in some cases they didn’t really know why or how it was going to be better.

As well as that they didn’t realise that changing the mode of teaching and study needs a change of the way you operate. It’s not simply a case of providing the technologies, some workshops, some inspirational “innovative” teachers...it requires something much more fundamental than that.

Beyond technology: Organisational change for a new model

The university model is what it is because of the many parameters that make it and define it as a model. If you want to change the model then it’s not simply a case of imploring staff to do something different within the confines of the old model, but rather orchestrating the organisational change necessary to move to a new model.

The case of Zoom lectures is a good example of this - this wasn’t simply a case of people unthinkingly transposing how they might teach on campus to the web - it was also a means of continuing the rhythm of set time and set place teaching. Something that is part and parcel of the university model - if you want to move to a model that has a more equal weighting between synchronous and asynchronous teaching and study then for starters you might have to re-envisage timetabling, but you also need to build up a shared sense of broadly what that looks like and some clear parameters.

In organisations like universities it would be wonderful to think that things might happen organically and freely, but they’re large, complex entities so if you want to move to a model whereby digital technologies play a much bigger role in the experience - then you need to work to define that and create a model from it or around it.

There are doubtless many lessons to learn as a result of the pandemic but we would do well to cast our gaze further back and ask why universities failed to move beyond a digitally facilitated model before the pandemic.

We may find richer lessons there, because whilst change certainly has occurred as the result of the pandemic, it can also deceive us too. People had no choice but to change due to the pandemic, they were compelled not necessarily convinced.

They did so within conditions that didn’t provide a strong platform for success. This is understandable given they were caused by an unprecedented global pandemic, but I think we could make the case that the conditions weren’t in place pre-pandemic to support changing to a different model either.

This should be a huge overarching area of focus - what conditions are needed for a university to offer an education experience where the campus and digital technologies are equal players? You can’t simply give people tools and encourage them to fundamentally change what they do without changing the conditions and operating conditions around them to help enable that.

This will involve seriously tackling many questions, such as how should the allocated workload change? What might need to change in terms of teacher to student ratios? What does this mean for the university timetable? What should the balance be between campus based and web-based teaching and study? How can that be clearly conveyed, understood and applied? What does it mean for the type and nature of education support you have in order to consistently meet accessible requirements and standards? What does it mean for design and planning in terms of time and allocated support and overall approach? These are just some questions about creating conditions to enable a change of model, and there are many, many more.

If you want to change the teaching and study model then you have to change the organisational model that buttresses it. This is hard, and the pandemic hasn’t necessarily helped as it has led to a conceited sense of organisational agility. When thinking about where universities are at due to the pandemic and gauging this against where they might like to be, we would all do well to heed the words of Irene Peter: