Future of IT in Higher Education

Anand Padmanabhan, VP & Chief Information Officer, Fordham University

As I thought about the future of IT in higher education, I realized I could not talk about it without first talking about the many seismic shifts happening in both the world and technology. Some of these shifts just happened, and some are right on our horizon. All these will impact higher education significantly, and IT will play an essential role in delivering post-secondary education effectively.

The first is what just happened, the pandemic. Two major things happened; we moved all teaching online for the first time ever. I saw every single faculty teach online; there were no excuses. This got all faculties globally to use technology to teach. A significant feat, which would not have been possible, if not for the pandemic. Coincidentally, it happened when the right technologies were there. Rapid innovation was happening on how to teach in this new world, some good, and some blah. Equity of access to tech was a big problem.

The second was working shifted to home. Many things happened here; age-old processes got an opportunity to be dusted and rethought. People became more productive. Everything that needed to be done to make a university run happened. However, there are a couple of key differentiators while changes on the work side continued. Many universities now have hybrid work policies, and the momentum that started in this area is ongoing, although not at the pace I would like it to go. However, on the academic side of the house, they are regressing to pre-pandemic ways. This will bite us back, as I will soon show you.

The second shift is the demographic dip that will soon happen in the U.S., especially in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and southeast, except Florida. There was a decline in the birth rate during the recession of 2008 by almost 15 percent. Why is this important? These kids would turn 17 years old in 2025 and will be entering a university. But, with a drop in the number of college-entering kids, universities have to find other ways to plug this hole. It does not stop there; another birth rate drop in the U.S. happened in 2020 during the pandemic, which will hit universities in 2037. What does population density got to do with technology? All these universities have to find students to plug this deficit or fold. We can look for students in other parts of the country, but that will be challenging. The places to look for are where there is an increase in this age population; this would be in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. I come back to the last statement in the previous para; if the academics continued to work and make the pedagogy for remote or hybrid or hyflex learning from the pandemic days better, we would be in a great position to plug this hole by recruiting students globally and providing an effective and impactful education.

The third is the changes in technology itself. Rapid growth is happening in this arena, like 5G, ML to AI, Web3, RPAs, IoT, Robots, and quantum computing. These technologies significantly impact learning, research, and working at any university. I could have made this section the whole article, but it would be the same as many others out there.

We must look at the future of technology in higher education based on the various forces at play. I have mentioned a couple above and one right after this. All the technologies that I have mentioned, if implemented without considering these forces, will go the way of how technology got adopted in higher education pre-COVID.

“As vital as buildings were to the success of a university in the past, IT will be the new ‘buildings’ needed to reach, create, deliver, and shape future citizens”

Very slowly! 5G is rapidly getting to the point where it makes sense to push data faster for heavy data apps and also in the area of IoT, where drips of data get sent. Smartcampus will become a reality with sensors (IoT) placed all around the campus. ML has matured, and we see it in many applications today, but AI is maturing faster, and this will bring about the next level of services we can provide to students.

In Gartner’s 2022 hypecycle for higher education, we see that the adaptive learning platform is making its way up the slope of enlightenment toward the plateau of productivity. This is one of the places you will start seeing AI play a major role in bringing effective personalized learning to each student. Not what we see today as personalized learning, where one must manually enter information or code every combination of paths a student can take.

Web3 is also going to play a dominant role in education; you see some early entrances with credentialing and NFTs. However, the three major components of web3, Metaverse, distributed autonomous organizations (DAO), and distributed finance (DiFi), will play a significant part. Some schools have already gone ahead and put programs up on the Metaverse. I see concerns and history repeating itself. Think of when we all moved to online learning. I recently did a talk on web3 and hit on this point. We should do this the right way. In addition, this medium, if done right, will help us address the demographic dip, among other needs. DiFi will start playing an important role in education in the near future. Quantum computing will become more accessible; however, it will not be each university having one but a consortium of universities having one that powers their research needs. In addition, there will be an equal number of shifts in how we work in the future.

Security and compliance will be another major force the education industry needs to focus on. Especially when universities scale globally, adhering to the compliances of each nation-state will be at the forefront. As the boundaries of work shift from the nice, contained university area to people’s homes either locally near the university or across state or national boundaries, security becomes a critical component to be on top off.

Bringing it all together, the future of IT in higher education will be like what buildings (classrooms, dorms, research facilities) were to a university in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. IT will be the most essential and critical component at any university. IT will either make or break a university. Let us dig into this a bit. As vital as buildings were to the success of a university in the past, IT will be the new “buildings” needed to reach, create, deliver, and shape future citizens. A significant way learning happens will be on the backbone of IT, whether it be a hybrid call, online, or even in a metaverse. There will be a shift in the traditional degree structure as well tech will play a major role. The way we work is going to be revolutionized by not being in one place, 9-5 every day. Tech again plays a major part here.

The learnings from covid to the dip in college-age going students to the new technologies that are coming up, when pictured correctly, could make a university successful. Even though the demographic dip is a slice in time, the innovations we make to fill that dip are sustaining. The technologies we have today and how we manage them will not cut it for the future. There are significant investments that are being made in edtech companies. A HolonIQ report indicates a $17B investment in edtech companies in 2022. In 2021, it was about $20B. They predict the total investment in edtech companies for the next eight years will be close to $87B.

What does this mean for us?

As in the past, an IT organization does not have to build, patch, or “figure something out” for a faculty or administrator. There will be applications for things we haven’t even thought about to help learning and doing our work effectively and efficiently. Finally, and most important, is the role of a CIO in the university. CIOs should no longer be looked at as pure technologists, and pure technologists should not be hired for that position. A CIO should be a strategist, innovator, and part of all strategic conversations. They should understand the technology and what it can and cannot do, but they should not be the ones rolling up their sleeves and tinkering. A very small set of forward-thinking university presidents (Seattle University) have moved their CIO to chief innovation officer. That was a smart move. Presidents of universities who are progressive thinkers, like where I work, bring the CIO into strategic conversations. Not the proverbial seat at the table but meetings discussing the university’s strategic imperatives. Alarmingly, many universities still consider their CIOs as their “nut and bolts” persons.

All the technologies that are here today (not something that is three years old) and the ones coming in the near future taken in association with some of the environmental forces we discussed and the leadership can make a higher education institution rise above the rest.

IoT

EdTech

Quantum Computing