This week the output from the DIUS review of UK HE (Debate on the Future of Higher Education) was published, and what a lot of output there is! Far too much for one single blog posting, so I’ll be blogging selected reports over the next two weeks or so (as I manage to wade through them, basically). Maybe colleagues of mine will chip in if a particular report deals with one of their areas of interest / expertise. The review is essentially consultative, so no doubt various Talisians will be contributing to the JISC-hosted blog as appropriate.

So first up is Online Innovation in Higher Education by Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chair of the JISC Board. My first thought, on reading this, went along the lines of “better late than never”. Earlier this year, I carried out a landscape review of UK Higher Education policy, managing to read 28 policy documents over 2 tedious weeks in June. Many Talis employees have seen the internal presentation of my findings, and developers in particular were struck by the near-absence of references to technology. The failure of the e-University initiative had maybe traumatised the sector into silence on this issue. Still, it looks now as if the patient is now recovering from this rather lengthy bout of post-traumatic syndrome and is sat up in bed ready to resume the critical discussion concerning the future shape of technological innovation in UK universities.

Better late than never, as I said, but hopefully not too late, I can’t help thinking, as the report flags a number of important areas – such as “high quality modern learning and teaching resources” in which the UK is lagging behind.

The nub of this report, in my opinion, is the pressing need for what Cooke calls a “visionary thrust” to guide the education and research sectors to the technological framework they desperately need. This is the most important point in the report, I think, but I part company with the report when envisaging what should be the next step once that vision has been formulated and agreed. For my money, central organisations such as the JISC should be creating that vision, then doing what needs to be done in terms of legislation, funding etc. to help make that vision a reality. And at that point, the centre should really bow out of the picture, and leave it to the educational institutions (this report is nicely cross-sectoral) to make it happen.

So my heart sank when, soon into the report, I started reading about Centres of Expertise to be set up as intermediaries, and I share the unease expressed in an early blog posting on this. Surely, we stand more chance of success if, instead, we have a number of lighthouse institutions adopting key technologies, showing the way for other institutions who are far more likely to follow than if cajoled by an intermediary “Centre of Expertise” with which they have no organic relationship? Let’s enable the community to do what they’re already doing anyway, in other words.

The report doesn’t fall into the trap of attempting to predict the shape of ICT innovation over the next few years, but does try to set out the longer-term future of UK Higher Education. It chimes usefully with predictions made elsewhere in and around the sector, but couldn’t there have been at least a passing reference to macroeconomic conditions? Maybe it all went to press before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but hey, we had experienced a protracted credit crunch prior to the current phase of the crisis.

Back to the technology (who likes thinking about the economy these days anyway?), my final observation is that I think the current crop of learning technology (or what passes for it) gets away scot-free in this report. Only last week, whilst running a focus group at a nearby Russell Group university, I was taken aback by the derision expressed by lecturers, and not particularly technologically-aware ones, about their institution’s virtual learning environment (which wasn’t actually the topic under discussion).

Rather than acknowledge the shortcomings of incumbent technologies, then, the report prefers to place all the burden of responsibility on staff, as paragraph 3.14 of the report states:

“It is also the case that many staff are not well skilled in using the Internet, are pushed beyond their comfort zones and do not fully exploit the potential of Virtual Learning Environments; and they are often not able to impart new skills to students.”

To what extent are staff responsible for this state of affairs? If VLEs were better designed to facilitate intuitive use, then we might find that staff were better equipped to exploit fully today’s technologies to optimise the educational experience.

By and large though, the report pulls in the key themes and articulates viewpoints that ministers and other sectoral decision-makers need to be aware of. If the DIUS review is to be a catalyst for the transformation of UK HE, then we have to re-admit technology into the debating salon, as it’s simply too important at this juncture to be left out.