E-Learnings Tryst with Technology

Juan Villamil, CIO, Innovation and Technology Change Agent, Imperial College London

Online learning has been on the cards for a while, but it’s been massively accelerated as a result of COVID-19. The pandemic has led the way for more traditional institutions, where most teaching is done face-to-face, to embrace the world of online learning and explore the future of education and how students can be involved outside the four walls of the classroom. Online learning is more accepted now as a legitimate pass and recognized as a degree. Previously, the value of a qualification acquired through online classes was probably less, but that is changing. This evolving online learning environment has enabled us to accelerate and work with all different technologies.

Even before the pandemic, in 2018 at Imperial Business School, we had experimented with delivering holographic lectures and were the first university to do so. Recently, we won an award for our innovative way to deliver teaching at the School of Medicine. During the pandemic, we worked with the School of Medicine and Microsoft to use HoloLens to effectively extend the teaching from the classroom to the hospital wards. That has been a massive success for us, and it was only possible by thinking innovatively around the use of technology. These are opportunities that did not previously exist, and we are now expanding on what was essentially an experiment in which we could take the patient to students using HoloLens. During the pandemic, since students could not be taken into the wards, we were able to project that experience back into the classroom and/or to the learner’s home using HoloLens, and that has been a success.

Overcoming the Challenge of Change

Today, students are very much digital natives, and the experience they have from the interaction with technology is very different as opposed to students 20-30 years ago. We really need to start thinking about making technological investments and the experience we want to deliver to our students. This is a massive challenge because of the way the central IT teams are funded. Another challenge is data silos—a lot of siloed data exists because of how universities are organized. We are addressing this challenge by building and creating a unified data platform to remove silos by taking a data-driven view. If we think through the challenge of silos, we will find lots of data types from different applications, tools, and apps that the students need to effectively interact with the university. My approach to solving this was to start with data and then the student journey and how we can reduce the number of apps and focus on giving students a seamless journey.

As someone that is relatively new to the EdTech sector, one of the things that I found challenging is the culture of departments where the centralized function of the IT capabilities is driven by the fact that the reputation of IT departments was not very good. My approach was to professionalize the IT department to build capability and improve communications and how we engage across departments. My ambition is to transform IT and make it function as part of the fabric of the college.

Developing our talent is another pain point. Creating an environment where everyone can reach their maximum potential and recruiting and attracting talent is critical. To this end, we are looking to diversify our talent pool. We are working with organizations like everywoman, to effectively get the message out to diverse sets of the community that will provide them with attractive opportunities to work at Imperial. In addition, we want to bring in a diverse range of talent and provide apprenticeships and as much training as possible through those apprenticeships, as well as identify the skill, pay gaps, and pay equity within the private sector. I want to bring that level of equality and really professionalize the capability we offer across the college.

Adopting a Student-First Approach

To remain at the forefront of the EdTech curve, adopting a customer-centric approach and placing the student at the heart of everything is vital. We have to change the conversation from applications and language to a customer-centric or user-centric approach. We have to consider how we want the student’s journey at Imperial College to be. For me, it’s all about investing in the right talent, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and technology, all of which enable us to provide a safe and secure customer journey well beyond the four walls of our campus. For an institution like Imperial that has a global reach, an additional challenge of data security also exists, so investing in the talent that can help deliver a safe customer journey is crucial.

I believe we need to change the way we work across the organization by introducing more agile, flexible methods of working, creating multidisciplinary teams, and focusing on the student, which allows us to deliver services more iteratively. This is a massive change because the universities listening to this are traditional and have never seen or done it before. So the concept of iterating through products and services and incrementally delivering those services is a challenging message to convey to the college’s leadership. I believe that IT must be involved in the decision-making process regarding technology and the services provided to students. So it’s really about developing a well-coordinated, well-funded plan and ensuring that IT is woven into the fabric of the organization.

Advice to the Next Generation Entrepreneurs

There are many technology trends today that are very relevant for education like personalization and the use of data. We have to take advantage of all of the data and deliver incredible student experiences. We are working to provide adaptive learning as well as personalized learning by leveraging Imperial’s data capabilities. We all learn in different ways; we can present these data learning pathways based on the student’s performance and tailor our learning approach to his learning style with technology. The potential for what we can accomplish with learning analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and massive amounts of data are vast. With emerging technology, we will be able to transform how we provide education and its experience, not only on Imperial’s campuses but also well beyond.

As for the entrepreneurs looking into education technologies and trying to build and innovate in the application of such technologies, my advice is straightforward: just go for it. It is really important to engage and connect with people that are already in the industry and identify the industry leaders. On the same note, it’s also important to find a good mentor that can inspire and support you and your career ambitions. The advice I give everyone who wants to progress their career or business is to advocate for yourself. You have to attend events, promote yourself, present your successes, and genuinely be proud of your achievements.