Breaking Report: The 3 Major Scenarios and 15 Key Issues of Higher-Education IT in 2021

In 2020, COVID-19—the biggest "black swan" the world has seen—struck and severely disrupted every industry, and higher education was no exception. What adjustments do universities face, and how can they return to their pre-pandemic operations? And what role does information technology play throughout this process? In response to this unprecedented shock, EDUCAUSE unveiled its key higher-education IT issues for 2021 at its annual conference in late October, spanning three phased scenarios and fifteen key issues. The WisdomGarden Institute of Education is pleased to offer you a first-hand analysis and interpretation.

Three Phases: Restore, Evolve, Transform

The pandemic has not only disrupted our lives but also accelerated our reflection on—and implementation of—educational IT. Recognizing the differences and progression across distinct scenarios, this year's release no longer offers a single-dimension ranking of issues. Instead, working from the assumption that the pandemic will be brought under control at some point in 2021, it proposes three phased scenarios—Restore, Evolve, and Transform—and identifies five priority issues for each. These three phases follow one another in sequence and reinforce one another, and the fifteen key issues are likewise highly interrelated (Figure 1).

Phase One: Restore

Restore is about an institution's survival—that is, how to bring the institution back to its pre-pandemic state. As the pandemic raged, many schools, faculty, and students were caught off guard. What must be considered in order to return to normal, pre-pandemic operations? The following five areas warrant particular attention.

1.1Cost Management: Rethink and redesign processes, increase the degree of automation, and gather data on members of the institution in order to understand pain points and use technology to solve problems—thereby lowering costs and improving efficiency.

1.2Online Learning: Deliver courses that meet the needs of faculty and students, along with corresponding policies, to strengthen and put into practice online and blended teaching.

1.3Financial Health: Revise the institution's budget model and apply technology-driven management to address financial challenges.

1.4Affordability & Digital Equity: Take into account students' varying circumstances and conditions, and help them obtain the resources and channels they need so they can participate in learning from anywhere—especially off campus.

1.5Information Security: Provide information-security leadership to support faculty, students, and staff as they return to campus, while managing budgets prudently to ensure that IT environments and tools can resume normal operation.

Phase Two: Evolve

In the Evolve phase, beyond keeping student learning at the core, we need to focus more on how to absorb the impact and lessons of the pandemic and weave them into an institution's existing culture and vision. How should institutions adjust to the new normal that follows the pandemic? This phase encompasses the following five issues.

2.1Student Success: Help students achieve their academic and career goals by integrating data systems, user interfaces, policies, and guided pathways—a core principle at the heart of talent-development reform.

2.2Equitable Access to Education: Provide technology, support, and policies for a diverse student body to close the digital divide, so that more students can obtain the learning resources and support they need.

2.3Online Learning: Through technology support and the exploration of new models, evolve emergency remote teaching into effective online learning over time.

2.4Information Security: Establish cybersecurity operations strategies that effectively detect, respond to, and mitigate security threats—no matter where students, faculty, or staff are located.

2.5Financial Health: Collaborate with more advanced, research-focused, and other institutions to develop new funding sources and partnerships.

Phase Three: Transform

Every individual and every institution is part of the world. The pandemic is gradually reshaping our world, and change is likewise gradually taking hold within institutions. In the Transform phase, institutions need to redefine themselves amid this ongoing change and actively realize the value of their role in higher-education IT. This phase encompasses the following five important issues, which merit our continued reflection and early action.

3.1.Institutional Culture: When designing and implementing all teaching-related initiatives and services, give priority and careful consideration to the expectations and needs of faculty and students, thereby cultivating an organizational culture that adapts dynamically.

3.2Technology Alignment: Identify and apply sustainable, long-term digital strategies and innovations driven by the institution's ambitions and transformation goals.

3.3Technology Strategy: Develop an enterprise-grade technology architecture to achieve educational and instructional outcomes and manage data, while effectively formulating technology policies and sustaining future development. Streamline technology processes so that digital resources stay in step with strategic reform.

3.4Enrollment and Recruitment: Explore and implement new approaches to enrollment—for example, making students' future career development the primary consideration when recruiting the right learners, offering systematically structured courses and service support, and leveraging technology collaborations or other partnerships to build student communities on social media. This creates a new model of talent development that carries learners from on-campus cultivation through to real-world application.

3.5Cost Management: Digital transformation and technology services should focus on maximizing the institution's educational value while reducing unnecessary consumption of resources across the organization.

Summary Analysis

Looking across the priority IT issues EDUCAUSE released this year, our Institute offers some further analysis of the implications behind them. First, the pandemic has upended the familiar operating rhythms of universities and, in doing so, reshuffled the ranking of priority IT issues. In the past, Information Security was consistently seen as the top issue; this year, likely because of the sudden onset of the pandemic, attention to it has dipped somewhat. In addition, while Student Success—a focus of attention over the past five years—remains near the top, Analytics and Privacy appear for the first time to be absent from the key issues. This suggests that, in responding to the pandemic, the top priority for institutions may have been preparing the teaching environment and rolling out emergency remote teaching.

Some issues were overlooked because of the pandemic, yet others gained widespread attention as a result. COVID-19 has forced us to keep our distance from one another and made it impossible to gather as we once did; with students unable to come to campus for face-to-face learning, Online Learning has drawn its greatest attention since 2012, the inaugural year of the MOOC.

The fact that Online Learning appears in both the Restore and Evolve phases also signals that, even as the pandemic passes and faculty and students return to campus with in-person teaching gradually resuming, online instruction will not disappear—and may in fact accelerate the maturation of blended teaching models. Learning should not be a binary of online or offline; rather, more Flexibility can be introduced into the mix—namely, developing HyFlex Learning—to give faculty and students greater flexibility in teaching and learning, allowing them to freely choose when and where to teach and when and where to learn.

Finally, IT was in the past often viewed merely as a technology, product, or service. In the post-pandemic era, however, IT has come to be seen as a vital force for weathering the pandemic and opening new horizons—woven into every link of improving processes, creating value, maintaining security, and raising efficiency. In the great test of 2020, every institution—whether proactively or reactively, and whether moving quickly or slowly—has worked to put the integration of technology and education into practice. True to its founding aspiration of being the best partner on schools' educational-IT journey, WisdomGarden will continue to invest in collaboration with institutions, joining hands to meet the challenges of the next phase and contributing to the evolution of future teaching and learning.

[Copyright and Disclaimer] This article is copyrighted by the WisdomGarden Institute of Education. If you wish to cite its content, please credit the source: WisdomGarden Institute of Education.

Author:

Liu Haolong (Louis) is a researcher at the WisdomGarden Institute of Education. He holds a master's degree in Information Education, previously taught information technology, and has helped guide student training in information literacy. His main research interests include the application of augmented reality (AR) in education, information education, adaptive learning, and learning analytics.

Read the original article