The Future Of Higher Education

 

Question: What does oversight of every instructional design (ID) department on the planet give you?

Answer: Vision.

This vision of the future of higher education is summarized in this video (3:18).

 

Prior
to 2017, instructional designers (IDs) at their institutions were often
a department of one. As such, instructional designers work in an
isolated position. Tasked with working with an entire university’s
faculty & staff, instructional designers often find it rare to find a
sympathetic ear for their common concerns. 

Peter Shea created a Facebook group, Instructional Designers in Education,
in April 2017 with the hopes that instructional designers working in
educational institutions could gather and use each other for support. In
joining, instructional designers in education are part of a virtual department and
can discuss the sociology of being an instructional designer. In this
way, this group leverages the power of connections to add a human touch.
At this writing, the group has doubled in size since 2020. 

The most common post themes include:

• Challenges
  with working with faculty, who while being subject matter experts,
  rarely have even a basic foundation in educational theory.  
• The recurrence and tamping down of myths such as learning styles and using highlighters.
• Learning Management System (LMS) tech fixes and recommendations
• Job postings (huge uptick here with MANY classroom teachers converting to ID)
• Explorations of the impact of new technology on teaching pedagogy.

As
soon as the black swan event of COVID-19 struck, we knew that
instructional designers were going to get hit hard: hit up for advice,
course building tasks, anything and everything related to creating
instructional content for online. 

True
story: As soon as a residential campus shut down and sent students
home, administration sent out one email with three items: 

• A link to the campus web conferencing provider,
• a link to the campus course management system, and 
• a link to the campus IT help desk.

The campus administration was confident that they could handle this situation. 

I
was personally approached to give advice for an in-person class that
was converting to online. I asked, “What experience do you want to
create for your learners?” The answer I received was “Exactly the same
as in class.” I said quietly to myself “No, you don’t.” 

With
decades of research in online learning successfully pushed into
instructional design programs (because online or not, the IDs are the
assumed experts in the campus LMS–an online resource), we knew that
instructional designers were about to get hit VERY hard.

At first,
some of the comments were cute and I’ll admit I had to stop myself from
reaching out to pet these instructors on the head and say “oh, you are
so cute!” when I heard things like “I find it much easier to work online
when the music I listen to has no lyrics” (cough multimedia principle)
or “I find it is much more important to reach out to and show care to
each of my students as compared to when I was in the
classroom.” (<-OK, that instructor gets points! Good job!) This
article, COVID-19 Lessons To Take Forward for Higher Education, has some positive conclusions about the push to online teaching in the pandemic.

Futurists
kept whispering that COVID-19 pandemic was not a black swan event. We
paid attention to that. We immediately started thinking 6 months to 1
year down the road. Higher education administrators were going to want
to move as quickly as they could to pandemic-proof their campuses. So I looked at the future and said “what’s next?”

Here’s my version:

1. Web conferencing software captures all lectures.

 

 

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56247489

In
the frantic move to online, instructors did not want to leave any
students behind and records all of their classes. Within one year, the
world has the entire existing knowledge base of every class recorded.

Effect: Those videos can be analyzed for teaching style.

Really, who has time for that? Most higher education campuses barely have capacity to observe each instructor once per semester.

Artificial Intelligence: Hi.

2. Artificial Intelligence evaluates all instructors.

Artificial
intelligence has the time. Sorting through this data would not be hard
to program. The characteristics of a great teacher that separates them
from a good teacher are quantifiable. It’s not in the content  (Congratulations, your YouTube video covered the content in 55 minutes, perfect! Err. No.)

Great teaching is in how the teacher interacts with the students. After
all, if you just want content covered in 55 minutes with audio overlay
and visuals, that’s a Discovery channel video or even ditch the audio
track and hand out a PDF. Content does not need to be a
lecture. Teachers are about interaction and engagement. A great teacher can teach a good lesson even on a bad day. That’s a needle NOT hard to find in this haystack.

This will be called Quality Control.

In the process, universities discover that…some teachers are just bad teachers.

No going back from online education though.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-020-00534-0

Look at that last phrase: could permanently change how education is delivered.

3. Consultants advise higher education that there are too many instructors.

(The following is my recollection
of events, not written here as factual.) Around 20 years ago, a couple
state university systems had the epiphany that they were no longer
serving students within their state geographically as land-grant
institutions were originally designed to do.  For example, if you live
in PoeDunk Town, you would naturally choose to go to PoeDunk University
where they offered a version of an academic major you *might*
want.  You didn’t go anywhere else (and certainly not out of state!)
because your needs were being served locally. About 20 years ago, state
universities realized that students were willing to get in their cars
and drive hours to a different in-state university to get the program
they really wanted.  That meant that each university had to stop
competing against every other university in the state for the same
students in the same program. Instead of geographical dominance, the
universities decided to divvy up academic programs and let each
university specialize in around 10 program areas and not compete outside
of those areas. That meant that if you were in PoeDunk town and you
really wanted to go to medical school, you would go to Medical School
University and not the local university. Problem solved. Temporarily.
We are far past keeping students within state borders now.

Earth
is facing this problem world-wide.  Really want to learn Alaskan
Wildlife Resource Management but live far away? No problem. Within 5
years, every school will have a retinue of online programs that you can
take from anywhere.

Harvard not in your home country? No problem.
Take their online program. Want that unique program out of New South
Wales? You got it, online!

Suddenly, we have too many courses online teaching exactly the same content (albeit different instructors/styles).

Wait, what if Subject X has always been the bane of your existence and that is the problem. You just can’t pass that course.

Oh, here is where this entire vision gets VERY interesting. 

Enter blockchain.

Enter global enterprise.

They have been getting ready.

Blockchain is already coming into higher education in several places: Woolf University and transcripts (Aamir, Qureshi, Khan, and Huzaifa, (2020).

Blockchain
eliminates the need for the university to be the arbiter of reputation.
It allows for reputation-based “coinage” (I only use coinage to convey using a term associated with value–this actually has no connection to cryptocurrency.)

In my video, I show the current model. I’ll skip that here and go into the future model.

Student A shops for a class on Subject X.  She comparison shops at Amazon Education, Walmart.edstore, and Google.edu (these are mockups!)

Mockup of future imagined Amazon-based education platform

Mockup of future imagined Walmart-based education platform

Mockup of future imagined Google-based education platform

She
considers her price-point, preferred instructional approaches, time
available, compatibility of format and purchases a course from
Instructor B.

Mockup of a web store page selling student seats in a course on Subject X.

 

Student A earns a blockchain coin for “Subject X” issued by Instructor B.

Both of their reputations are now connected.

Student A goes on to work for Boss C where Subject X is part of her daily job.

Boss
C evaluates how competent Student A is with Subject X. He awards her a
coin that indicates that she is competent working with Subject X.

Student A gets most of the positive reputation coin.

But,
because part of the awarding of a coin from Boss C is reputation and
Boss C is, in part, telling Instructor B that she did a good job instructing Student A– part of the positive bump in reputation goes back to Instructor B and it is reflected in her
ratings. She can now charge a little more for her course teaching
because she can prove that her students go on to work with Subject X
successfully.

Notice in all of this, an institution of higher education was not needed. 

Up
to now, universities have been arbiters of transcripts.  If they kept
the transcript sacred (and they really do) then all of the reputation in
a student’s transcript is bound up and captured by the university. The
university charges for it and doesn’t release those transcripts easily
at all!  But in this blockchain model, you do not need a university.

You
do not need a university for physical hosting of the course.  The
instructor can run it all with one Zoom and Dropbox license.

You
do not need a university to collect tuition or pay the instructor. The
money passes directly between them and instructor can charge a
market-supported rate for their courses. Cheaper courses with less
instructor inaction and poorer instructors are available. Better
teachers are literally raised up due to blockchain coinage.

Look at the positives:

• The relationship between what Student A is competent in and her Instructor and Boss is fluid.
• At any point, reputation could be modified or retracted.
• There is a direct feedback loop between employers and instructors.

I
can hear you from here. You are asking…but if we don’t have
universities, what about research? We depend on universities to be the
bastion of unbiased research.  If we simply don’t need them anymore,
won’t research disappear?

OK, once I stop laughing about putting the word “unbiased” and
“universities” together in the same sentence (as I hold these truths to
be self-evident, they never were unbiased), I’ll tell you that
research won’t stop. There is such a thing as a research center– where
courses do not play second fiddle to research and
academics-as-researchers can do their great and necessary work.

I’m actually ALL FOR research. My disdain for the rat race known as
tenure has leaked out in social media before and I’m really sorry for
those that have worked so hard but it is slavish institution that
protects professors that give high grades to women with short skirts. 
And about a million other problems.

What about the fact that a
degree is a purposeful gathering of subjects that outside industry
advisory boards have authorized that are intended to create a
well-rounded citizen and competent first-day-on-the-job ability?  (I am a
Liberal Studies major myself!) The disconnect between what industry
wants and what industry gets from employees is already a strong flowing
objection out there. I do respect that getting certifications to solve
problems doesn’t solve every employment skill problem. For example, some
workers have years of technical experience. But they are unpleasant to
work with, to say the least, and they will not rise up the career ladder
without a “degree”.  Here is the key: I find that employers often
shuttle these workers off for a degree NOT to prove technical skills–
the candidates already have them and find school work monotonous and
pointless. The employers want the workers to pick up those finer skills that would be covered in the “required” courses outside of a major (aka
learn to embrace diversity by taking a course that forces a learner to
embrace diversity.  Learn an appreciation of alternative ways of thought
by taking a humanities course.  Learn other world viewpoints by taking a
course about another culture. And so on.)  I find that this could be
solved.  Just make humanities, art, and writing required certification
courses in jobs! What about the overall idea of a program or
degree; the concept that a program is a well though out gathering of
courses balancing requirements against electives.  What if the
student-become-employee doesn’t check every traditional program box?  

It
is current bane of higher education that students graduate after X
years with a degree that is already out of date. So I kick pre-formed
degrees to the curb too. More ebb and flow. More consumer choice.
Employers should just look for what they need and by-pass the rubber
stamp of the degree.

I’d like to see what education looks like with less medieval serfdom
and more market demand. Some places have been getting away with
educating us for years and it seems to have worked (cough, military,
church, media, cough).

So, what do you think is coming next?

#blockchain
#HigherEducation #Future #Vision #Research #OnlineEducation
#InstructionalDesigners #ArtificialIntelligence
#WhereWeAreGoingWeDoNotNeedUniversities

 

This article originally posted to LinkedIn on  July 14, 2021. Updated with images (because Google might eat old images) and one slight edit deleting a comment about Amazon Education overlords on February 18, 2026.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-higher-education-heather-elizabeth-dodds-ph-d-