I was reading through an article entitled 10 Hottest Technologies in Higher Education
and was impressed by the changes higher education will experience this year.
Changes ranged from campus wide Wi-Fi to Small and Private Online Courses
(SPOCS) that are likely to put pressure on higher education institutions, in
the same way as online education has done over the past decade.
Strategically I view
the Data Measurements and Campus Wi-Fi as some of the more interesting and
influential topics this year. Data measurements gauge university performance
will be debated as universities and government consider the overall benefits
and detractors. Likewise, Campus Wi-Fi appears as an attempt to modernize aging
campuses while providing case examples for city-wide Wi-Fi implementation.
Data Measurements offer a promise to improve transparency of
universities to government, administrators, and students. It may actually
improve transparency but generally only in the realm of data it plans to
collect. In science, the type of
information and data points chosen will impact the ranking of universities on
this score card; it will also leave many important educational factors out of
the mix.
The difficulty in using rankings that provide broad enough
measures that can fairly be applied across multiple types of universities is
important. If such measurements are based in ensuring the status quo is
maintained then there can be little complaint if the entire educational system
becomes so expensive it collapses. We, as a society, justified our beliefs
through selective data input but we ignored the necessity of higher education
change.
We can put this in a proper perspective. If the goal is to
get students employed after graduation, than any old minimum wage job at your
local fast food chain will be fine for fulfilling that goal. If the goal is to
find employment that is sustainable and offers a living wage, then the data a
researcher would select would inherently be different. Numbers are only
representations that tell part of the story. Even though they seem concrete
they can socially negotiated.
The other important idea is campus wide WI-FI. As more
courses, resources, and lives of individuals take a virtual turn it is important
to feed the need to stay connected. Offering campus wide WI-FI encourages this
interconnected nature and speeds up information transference. It also forces
universities to see themselves in both the physical and virtual realms.
It is more than the physical implementation of Wi-Fi that
counts. It’s a mental shift that traditional education is tied to the future of
technology. People may attend a campus but may be encouraged to take more
online courses, access the library online, and spend a portion of their
education in the virtual world. Why
build an expensive new building when you can build an online course?
Whether we agree or disagree with the changes they are here
to stay. That doesn’t mean that new technology won’t someday come to replace
what is considered disruptive today but that higher education will be shifting
to a new model from those used by our forefathers. Technology has always
created shifts in society and will do so in government in much the same way as
it is doing in higher education. Technology can only be delayed but not
stopped.
The SlideShare presentation offered is worth viewing:
Ten Hottest Disruptive Technologies in Higher Education from Vala Afshar
