The Education Ecology of Universities

Integrating Learning, Strategy and the Academy

Robert A. Ellis, Peter Goodyear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351135849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many universities around the world are finding that the structures and processes they have put in place to further their educational missions are being tested by rapidly changing circumstances. These changes involve new pedagogies, new course designs, new technologies and updating of the physical campus; reflecting diversifying student needs, growing student numbers, increasing competition and more demanding stakeholder expectations.

The Education Ecology of Universities examines these issues, starting with the challenges identified by university leaders who have responsibility for education, digital and campus planning. Sharing an analysis of in-depth interviews with more than 50 leaders, it identifies a range of conceptual and procedural gaps that undermine the full development and alignment of education, digital and campus strategies. The second half of the book provides practical ideas for taking a more holistic – indeed ecological – approach to understanding and improving university learning environments.

Setting out a case for a new applied science of educational ecology, this book offers foundational concepts and theoretical perspectives, introducing methods for analysing and evaluating teaching and learning ecosystems. It will be of interest to anyone who wants better ways of understanding how local systems function and can be improved. It is a must-read text for all leaders and researchers in education, and indeed for anyone concerned with the future of higher education.

Part I

1

Universities in a changing environment

Situating our research

There are dangers in generalising about ‘the university’. Around the world, some 200 million students are involved in tertiary education. This number has more than doubled since the start of the century and is likely to double again by 2030. Over 6 million people teach in tertiary education – a number which is also rising (Altbach, 2016). Estimates vary, but there are somewhere between 18,500 and 26,500 universities in the world (Barnett, 2018, 59; IAU, 2018).

Within these large and growing numbers, there are, of course, some patterns – universities take on ‘family resemblances’, especially within national borders. Some of these universities share characteristics that are common in the richer countries of the world and in systems that reflect British, German and/or American models. But very many do not (Mihut et al., 2017). Anglophone scholarship in higher education is still quite restricted in its knowledge and gaze. Recent developments in, and fascination with, global and national ranking systems, for all their ills, have opened the space of interest somewhat. But apart from an important seam of work in comparative higher education, much of what is visible in the Anglophone literature of higher education is still restricted to the characteristics and functioning of an elite grouping of 500 or so universities. Moreover, much of the Anglophone literature on teaching and learning, educational technology and learning spaces is from and about experiences in relatively well-resourced universities in North America, Northern Europe, Australasia and East Asia. To speak of ‘the university’ obscures these facts and distracts attention from the variety of arrangements and experiences.

We have spent most of our professional lives working in universities in the UK and Australia. These are the systems we know best, and they share a number of common characteristics. Universities in these countries, and the staff working in them, have been dealing with multiple concurrent changes and challenges: massification, with its attendant diversification of students needs and expectations; volatile funding regimes; neo-liberal governments experimenting with regulated quasi-markets; increasingly complicated and costly accountability requirements; intensification and fragmentation of academic work; growing competition from private-sector tertiary providers, including fully online providers; a growing need to partner with, and purchase from, third-party companies in areas of core business (e.g. with learning management systems); changes in course, curriculum and credential design and shifts in conceptions of good pedagogy and ‘good learning’. Moreover, all of this is taking place in a wider world where new technological developments are enabling the disruption of whole economic sectors, jobs are disappearing or being redistributed across skillsets and global spaces, certainties about workforce needs are evaporating, economic crises and austerity measures have impoverished public services and deep concerns about social justice and discrimination are rightly regaining traction in national and university affairs. Of course, these circumstances are not unique to Australia and the UK, though they combine and manifest themselves somewhat differently in other countries.

The research that we share in Chapters 3 to 5 of this book was undertaken in 2016 and 2017 in Australian universities. We believe it paints a reasonably representative picture of issues being raised by education, technology and facilities leaders in the Australian system. We were able to interview about half of the most senior leaders in each of these three groups, and our interviews come from 39 of the 42 Australian universities. Our interviews did not dwell on the forces at work in the broader environment. The dynamics of the leaders’ work are closely connected to the shaping forces of the external environment, as registered in the internal characteristics of their universities: existing structures and processes, expectations and practices and capacities for resistance and change. So we focused on how these senior leaders conceive of their work and of the main challenges confronting them in relation to new course, curriculum and credential designs, and in relation to better integration of IT and physical spaces and learning. Ecological metaphors sprang up almost unbidden in trying to make sense of what the leaders told us. It may be that the Australian university system, and some of the universities, are at a tipping point: that major irreversible transformations are taking place, because incremental adjustments are no longer effective. It may be that they are moving to a new kind of balance. It may be that counter-currents will grow in strength and effects: that the predictions of technological and free-market determinists will prove erroneous. We will see. We hope.

Although our research is located in Australia, we want the broader arguments that we present in this book, especially in its second part, to be of interest to scholars and leaders of higher education wherever they are situated. Many universities, perhaps all, are subjected to pressures that can seriously distort their mission and sap their vitality. Perhaps ‘pressure’ is the wrong metaphor. Our main concerns are about forces of fragmentation, rather than those that might compress, shrink or collapse a university. Responding to competing demands, visions and interpretations threatens to pull some universities apart, and those forces are sometimes felt very badly by junior members of university staff who are least able to modify the system. When research, teaching and service obligations are in competition for time, energy and attention, leaving junior staff to resolve the tensions is morally wrong. Part of our argument arises from a desire to find better ways to reconnect these areas of academic work.

The disruptive ambitions of Silicon Valley start-up culture have caused many commentators to speak about how universities might be ‘unbundled’: whether to widen access or create opportunities for profit. We do not think universities should be protected from such scrutiny. Nor do we think of them as incapable of reform or improvement. Far from it. But this book is motivated by two deeply held beliefs: that society, indeed the planet, needs a healthy population of universities and that intellectual work needs to be done to assist universities in explaining and strengthening the coherence of what they do (Macfarlane, 2017; Barnett, 2018). We want to test the proposition that an applied ecological science of higher education can help with that.

The next part of this chapter provides some basic information about the Australian higher-education system. Among other things, it may help readers from outside Australia better understand the context. In the three sections after that, we provide brief reviews of some developments that are shaping the fields in which education, technology and facilities leaders operate. Some of the topics on which we touch – like quality assurance, innovation, employability and student retention – straddle two or more of these fields. An understanding of the direction and strength of some of these developments is, we believe, helpful in understanding current priorities and sources of tension. Finding new ways of resolving some of those tensions, by redesigning structures and functions, is – we argue – part of the way forward. The penultimate section of the chapter considers some staffing issues, for the massification of higher education in Australia, under conditions of volatile and uncertain public expenditure, has also put enormous pressures on staff and has created a casualised academic and professional ‘precariat’.

In each of these brief sections on education, technology, spaces and staffing, we draw on a mix of literature and data sources; mostly from Australia, but with some supplementary material from the US and UK. We are not aiming to provide a proper comparative analysis; rather, we are using recently published data and research from each of these sources to anchor, extend and illustrate the core account.

There is much to be celebrated in higher education – extraordinary achievements in difficult circumstances – but there is also a growing sense that universities, in particular, are squaring up to take on bigger challenges, of global significance. So the final section of this chapter summarises a number of the issues and how they are presenting to university leaders, especially in the spaces where education and technology converge.

Higher education in Australia

Australia’s size conceals some important facts that are relevant to understanding its higher education system. The land mass is 7.7 million square kilometres (about 20 times the size of Germany) or 3 million square miles (about four-fifths the size of the USA). Its most northerly and southerly state capitals – Darwin and Hobart – are 3,700 kilometres apart, as are its most easterly and westerly (Brisbane and Perth). These are bigger distances than Madrid to Moscow, or Washington, DC to Los Angeles.

But the population of this enormous country is small and highly urbanised: two-thirds of the 23.4 million people recorded in the 2016 national census live in one of the state/territory capitals. Indeed, 9.3 million (40% of the total population) live in either Greater Sydney (4.8M) or Greater Melbourne (4.5M). Moreover, 90% of the population live in urban areas: similar to the Netherlands (91%), higher than the UK (83%), the USA (82%), Canada (82%), France (80%) and Germany (76%) (World Bank, 2018).

There are currently 42 universities, of which one is a specialist university of divinity and another is internationally owned. There are also approximately 127 ‘non-university higher-education providers’ of which 105 (mostly very small and specialised) are in the private sector. In this book, we are primarily concerned with the 40 ‘mainstream’ universities, which dominate enrolments. There are around 1.5 million students, of whom nearly 400,000 are from overseas. While some universities operate branch campuses, the majority have their main campus in one of the eight capital cities. The vast majority of domestic students study at a university in their home city. For financial reasons, many domestic students continue to live with their parents and work part-time. The experience of university for many Australian students is more ‘commuter’ than ‘campus resident’. It is rare for students to relocate between states to study. Some universities make an excellent job of catering for the needs of Australian students in rural areas. Australia’s prominence as an innovator in distance education is partly rooted in this mission. But the overall picture is of a highly urbanised system, reflecting Australia’s highly urbanised demography.

Australia’s oldest universities date back to the 1850s. However, the system has taken its current shape over the last 30 years. Many of its features reflect the ‘Dawkins Reforms’ of the late 1980s. ‘Dawkins … turned colleges into universities, free education into HECS, elite education into mass education, local focuses into international outlooks, vice-chancellors into corporate leaders, teachers into teachers and researchers …He remodelled higher education and how it was funded’ (Croucher et al., 2013). Actions by another Labor government, following the Bradley Review in 2008 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008), uncapped student places and released a surge in demand. In 2014, domestic student enrolments reached 1 million for the first time (Norton & Cakitaki, 2016). Higher-education policy and funding have been subject to some uncertainties since then (James et al., 2017) and, at the time of writing, changes to the funding of places and demographic factors are likely to pause the growth of domestic undergraduate enrolments (Norton et al., 2018).

On many counts, Australia has a very successful system of higher education: some things are working very well. In crude economic terms, the system has grown healthily at 5% per annum over the last 15 years. Recent estimates show that the ‘Group of Eight’ research intensive universities contribute $66B AUD annually to the Australian economy (London Economics, 2018). Success in attracting overseas students partly reflects the quality of the system and makes the education of international students Australia’s third largest export earner, contributing $31B AUD to the economy (Universities Australia, 2018) and strengthening other aspects of Australia’s overseas trade (Min & Falvey, 2018). There are understandable concerns about over-dependence on too few source countries (China, South-East Asia, India) and subject areas (Business Studies). Moreover, many universities are now very financially dependent on overseas student fees and it is far from clear that any of the universities is making a good job of integrating overseas and domestic students (Arkoudis et al., 2018).

Domestic student numbers have expanded much faster than population growth. Over 40% of 19-year-olds are enrolled in higher education, compared with 27% in 2000 and 18% in 1989 (Norton et al., 2018). The proportion of people aged 25–34 with at least a bachelor degree has risen steadily from 27% to 39% since 2004 (Universities Australia, 2018). Today, 58% of domestic students are female – and they have formed the majority since the late 1980s (Norton et al., 2018). Enrolments of domestic students with a disability increased by more than 100% between 2008 and 2016. In the same period, enrolments of indigenous students increased 89%, students from low SES (socio-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editors’ introduction
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Appendix 1: Review questions to explore educational strategic readiness
• Appendix 2: Researcher ratings
• Index