Higher Education Design

Big Deal Partnerships, Technologies and Capabilities

Hamish Coates

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789811592157
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811592164
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Business General

This book advances new views on higher education design, steps beyond prevailing problems and perspectives, and stimulates broader contributions. The 2020 pandemic has shocked already fragile business and academic models, and the time is ripe for innovating global online education, shifting towards Asia and lifelong learning, and investing in 21st century institutions and partnerships. Rather than dwell on dystopian discontents, the book charts narratives for developing the industry and the field. It is written for commercial, governmental and collegial communities to inject major research-driven insights into contemporary transformations and research.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020

H. CoatesHigher Education Designhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9216-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Higher Education Design

Hamish Coates¹

(1)

Institute of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Hamish Coates

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter outlines the urgent need to design future higher education institutions, resources, and services. It charts this emerging and constructive field of inquiry and activity, locates it among system and institution practices, positions it as a field of research and innovation, articulates rationales for design-infused inquiry and innovation, and maps the book’s structure and narratives. It is argued that now is the time for informed, critical, and constructive discourse about cultivating future higher education.

Keywords

Higher educationDesign methodsSystem transformationInstitutional changeEducation innovation

End Abstract

Emerging Field

This book advances new views on higher education design, stepping beyond prevailing problems and perspectives and stimulating broader contributions. The 2020 pandemic has shocked already fragile business and academic models, and the time is ripe for innovating global online learning, shifting towards Asia and lifelong learning, and investing in twenty-first-century institutions and partnerships. Rather than dwell on dystopian discontents, the book charts narratives for developing the industry and the field. It is written for commercial, governmental, and collegial communities to inject major research-driven insights into contemporary transformations and research.

Overall, the book makes three main points. First, universities are creating substantial educational and commercial innovation, forging novel partnerships, generating broader contributions, and serving broader missions. Second, the distribution and flow of talent development is changing, flowing across the lifespan, rebalancing globally, and embracing larger populations. Third, now is a critical time for higher education leaders to invest in inventing productive narratives to create future higher education.

Broadly, this book creates ideas to engage people who can benefit from investing in higher education. This includes hundreds of millions of people who seek to study, research, lead, or reform higher education. It also includes the billions who may be yet to think about devoting time and effort to achieve a worthwhile return. It includes grandmothers who have nurtured generations, billionaires who fund infrastructure, and millions of teachers. At a minimum, it seeks to inspire a clutch of experts to energise the next phase of higher education’s transformation.

Not all investments play out with the same rhythm. Higher education grows in lumpy and uneven ways, almost inevitably given the complex and entwined mechanisms at play. Bringing online learning technology to reliable scale has taken around 25 years of plug-and-play solutions. Building a mature doctoral education system seems to take at least 40 years. Building transnational student flows and pathways happen more swiftly. Global university reputation can be generated in two decades, though deeper prestige takes 50–60 years. A professoriate can be purchased, but in any genuine sense takes 30 years to mature. Cultivating one person from school leaver to tenured professor takes 20 years. Campus building programmes reach out two decades but often stick for 50 years. Faculty can fly-in and fly-out of any global teaching location in around 72 hours. In the last few generations people have spent four years at university then sallied forth into 40-year professional careers.

How then to approach the productive advance of higher education? Normative prescription rarely translates into worthwhile advance, often even despite regulatory power and financial lubrication. Institutions and systems implement incremental advance, but such progression is almost intrinsically muffled by the negotiation of interests, contextual particularity, and the relativism of resistant discourse. Big thinkers and reformers like to nourish history-sized narratives with decadal patience. A useful approach, advanced in this book, is to bundle together principles, perspectives, research, and momentum into the fresh field of higher education design.

Higher education design is about creating systems, institutions and resources. It builds on contemporary design science research and practice which has grown way beyond graphics, software, and objects to enrich a host of diverse industries, stakeholders, and systems (Buchanan, 1999; Kelley & Kelley, 2013; McKinsey, 2020; Plattner, Meinel, & Leifer, 2016). Springing from ‘design thinking’ (IDEO, 2020), ventures begin by building understanding through research, observation, consultation, and reflection. Having these foundations in hand makes it possible to delineate ideas, systems, roles, constraints, and experiences. This analytical work underpins the creation of options, solutions, and scenarios. Prototypes can constructed and tested. Finally, storylines and business and implementation models can be curated and launched. This design perspective focuses on solutions rather than problems. It is theoretically and methodologically eclectic rather than formulaic. It embraces insights residing within the scholarly discipline, but also and importantly in surrounding research and practice ecosystems.

In certain respects, higher education design may be seen as a successor to university evaluation. Evaluation, in theory though rarely in practice, tries to determine how well an implementation conforms with a plan to prescribe remedies for remediation and improvement. Typically, fuelled by verve for organisational learning, this pushes evaluators to snatch glimpses of experience and attempt to retrofit or attribute these glimpses to removed, distanced, superseded, or even buried forecasts. In 2020 a global expert may gather data for a 2021 review of education practice in 2016 which was shaped by a 2014 agenda. This is a fraught venture in higher education, given so many complex and difficult and moving parts. Often, it reduces to evaluators conducting Rorschach-like analyses of spurious decimal-inflected evaluation reports with hopes of distilling patches for fissures in already dated forms. In essence, the evaluator tries to grab onto long wobbly tails with hopes of ‘closing the loop’ by linking these back to re-imagined heads.

Higher education design is much more dynamic, nimble, and engaged. An array of recursive sizing up and solving is located much nearer to problems being identified, created, or solved, resulting in more direct action plans and improvements. Rather than segregate planning, action, evaluation, and improvement, the same people are engaged in checking and tinkering experiences. The experiences themselves are modified through ongoing checking and tinkering. Planning is taken much closer to practice, often being blended into it. Indeed, as the above methods reveal, design often happens by co-creating plans with experiences. As such, design focuses on constructive and intellectually infused progression. It targets energy on organisational remaking. It is positive. Higher education design resonates with the way institutions, people and ideas behave as thy ingeniously negotiate stress and innovation.

These are not whacky ideas from the edges of any field, but rather informed insights which build on research and expertise. A significant amount of higher education design is already underway, and this book is an early effort to capture and extend this work. United States researchers, for instance, are advocating the sixty-year curriculum (60YC) to ‘develop new educational models that enable each person to reskill as their occupational and personal context shifts’ (Dede, 2018). Related innovation puts emphasis on the design-based engineering of learning (Dede, Richards, & Saxberg, 2019). Stanford2025, the effort to build an ‘open loop university’, is a fascinating effort to explore the ‘future undergraduate experience’ (Stanford, 2020). Arizona State University has the ‘University Design Institute’ (ASU, 2020). The Georgetown Futures venture aims to ‘accelerate educational innovation that allows higher education to more effectively and equitably benefit society’ (Georgetown, 2020). SkillsFuture Singapore focuses on reconfiguring education to help people ‘develop their fullest potential throughout life, regardless of their starting points’ (SkillsFuture, 2020). Georgia Tech has committed to ‘Lifetime Education’ as the ‘next’ in education (Georgia Tech, 2018). Spanning diverse contexts, the Minerva Project works from the science of learning to ‘partner with leading institutions and organizations to design and deliver customized learning and talent development programs that are more agile and effective than traditional approaches’ (Minerva Project, 2020).

As these introductory examples convey, designing higher education charts a fresh frontier in sector-specific research and development. The field of higher education studies flourished from the 1990s as Anglospheric and European universities grew large. Education and research programmes, centres and communities formalised around topics such as student affairs, policy and leadership, teaching and learning, and internationalisation. Many warning lights have been flashing, however, that this work has been dissipating and failing to deliver. Research centres have scrambled for scholarly grants as university presidents have turned to commercial consultants for reconnaissance and advice. Brilliant 1970s theories have been depleted from anxious and unproductive overmilking. The field struggles to distinguish a corpus of theories which give foundation and genuine ‘discipline’. Major research centres have been closed, major projects defunded, and substantial evidence-bases unnourished. The workforce has aged (Coates & Goedegebuure, 2012) and many experts have retired while doctoral students and global networks have withered. Talented graduates have turned to commercial firms. Anglocentric researchers have become increasingly separated from the overwhelming and growing majority of higher education practice, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A range of meta-analyses has tried to make sense of the ‘scattered field’ (Daenekindt & Huisman, 2020: 571). These ominous indications of distress must be taken seriously as inducements for reform and rejuvenation.

Who should care about creating and investing in the next few decades of higher education? More and more people who care about higher education year by year (Coates, 2019). As tagged in the opening paragraph, obvious participants include university leaders, faculty, students, and industry partners. There are also new and growing communities of financiers, service providers, regulators, and co-owners. To address these diverse interests the book’s storylines stem not just from research, but grab onto conversations with participants and commentators, media reports, ethnographic observation, and imaginary formulations. Overall, the book seeks to articulate principles, perspectives and proposals for future higher education design.

Why Design Now

Intersecting forces are fuelling the need for higher education design. These are worth unpacking as they position the book’s narrative and perspectives. They reveal the compounding urgency driving the following analysis.

There is of course an ongoing need for informed and accessible dialogues about higher education. Many people who work in higher education, even experts, lack basic knowledge of key areas and major issues. This is partly due to the lack of systematic training and the complexity and breadth of the field. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Higher Education Design
• 2. EdTech Establishes
• 3. Campus Options
• 4. International Connections
• 5. Education Economy
• 6. Articulating Success
• 7. Reforming Assessment
• 8. Redesigning Institutions
• 9. Curating Public Value
• 10. Constructing Cultivation