Technology is transforming higher education in many ways and colleges and universities need to keep pace in order meet the evolving needs of students.
Specifically, there are four areas higher education institutions needs to focus on, according to Alberto Cardelle, President, SUNY Oneonta. Cardelle delivered the keynote address, Technology Transformation: Hybrid Education is the Future of Higher Education, for Fierce Education’s online event, Higher Education: Technology Profiles in Success, The opening keynote session addressed how the business of higher education is quickly changing, along with how decisions are made and how institutions are quickly adopting technology to meet the needs of stakeholders.
Cardelle delved into the concept of rapid change, how decisions are being made and implemented quickly and the need for all stakeholders to have a voice. He also offered examples of successful deployments of technology in the higher education sector.
Technology is rapidly changing. Said Cardelle, pre-2020, technology changes had been slow and subtle but constant. The urgency was driven by administration in higher education, who looked opportunities to use online learning and high touch technology to explore new markets and increased access to students that were becoming harder and harder to reach and convince to come to college. Also, the focus was for fully online, but there was no big focus on a hybrid approach, he added.
“The big change post-2020 has been the pedagogical improvements that have occurred across the board because faculty needed to switch to online within two to three weeks at the beginning of the pandemic” Cardelle pointed out. “An opportunity now exists for instructional continuity over time, so snow days and faculty having to be away are less of an issue with a hybrid model.”
Decisions are being made and implemented fast. Even pre-2020, institution-wide and program-specific decisions were being made fast, Cardelle said. “Decisions tended to be more tactical and less strategic years ago, and frequently involved a comparison of what other campuses and institutions were doing. The reality was that many investments were being invested in infrastructure for online learning. Nonetheless, even though some of these decisions were not being done very strategically, they were leading to greater and greater infrastructure investments,” Cardelle explained.
All stakeholders have a voice. Cardelle noted that there’s a danger in pending too much time worrying about and focusing on issues such as discussions on campuses around shared governance to get things approved instead of showing basic empathy for students. “And then what you have is students voting with their feet and going to institutions that potentially were more nimble and able to incorporate the perspective of students and other stakeholders,” Cardelle pointed out. “The gradual change is that today, all students are receiving more services in some sort of online format, whether learning, admissions, retention or health and mental health services, for instance,” Cardelle said.
Successful deployment. There have been successful deployments in many technologies that have benefitted staff, faculty and students in the areas of pedagogical improvements and retention. “Among our most impactful opportunities have been around generating new markets and increased access to our students,” Cardelle noted. “Online education has allowed us to expand our access considerably. We had discussion around increased access by using OPMs and helping us expand professional graduate education significantly. The advances around open educational resources would not have happened without the advancements in technology, the ability to share and provide access to those opportunities through different technology-based portals and modalities that we have.”
Across the board, technology has helped us engage with students in multiple areas that we had not necessarily foreseen. For instance, the high-touch admissions experiences students get online through the power of CRMs such as Slate has become critical to engaging students even before they come to campus,” Cardelle pointed out.