How is technology shaping the future of universities? | Helen O'Sullivan | TEDxUoChester

okay so i'm going to speak to you this morning about the future of higher education and how technology is shaping that future and the future of universities i'm going to talk about three main points i'm going to start with a a near vision of what a university education might look like in the near future i'm then going to argue that technology is changing the way that we learn and it's creating a new type of learner and a new type of student the new power student i'm going to talk a little bit about how that's impacting the way universities respond and then i'm going to finish by setting out a way that universities can respond to meeting the challenges and the needs of that new student and that new type of learning and and therefore set the path for how we as a society move into this post-pandemic world where the way that we've used technology through this global emergency has really changed things forever so i want you to come on a trip into the future with me a few years into the future it's spring 2027 and we're going to join a group of our medical students in a virtual reality lab probably a little bit like this space here today what they're doing is they're looking at an augmented reality projection of a child's heart this child's heart has a birth defect in it that's impacting on the health of that child the child is 30 miles away in a specialist children's hospital being looked after by a team of consultants and healthcare workers the students are looking at the difference that that defect is making to the way that that heart operates and they're doing that because they're looking at a projection of a 3d model that was created by a scan of that child's heart they're joined in the class by a group of students from one of our partner universities in india in chennai these group of indian medical students who with their virtual reality headsets are also looking at this child's heart and they're talking to each other about what they think the impact of the changing anatomy is on the physiology and the health of that child the class is being led by one of the consultants in the specialist children's hospital who's caring for that child and he's able to explain to those students how that physiology is changing the health of that child and how it needs to be treated towards the end of the session the students are joined by a specialist in this type of heart defect who's working and practicing in the united states she's conducting a global research project on the best way to repair this birth defect and she's able to describe to this to the students and demonstrate how she would repair that which is also fantastic for the consultants who's going to have to do the repair because it's very rare and he hasn't seen it that often so he's able to just have a chat with this world leading specialist in how he might approach that operation she's then going to write up this case study as part of her research now this project might seem like science fiction but the technology to do all of those things is currently with us and it's with us in practice as well there was a report about three years ago now written for the nhs about how to digitize the future workplace and how to think about how we're going to use technology in the future and that outlined some case studies where very similar things to that where bone scans that complicated fractures were being treated by people remotely who are specialists in those areas so is this just science and technology no you can imagine a situation imagine a history student who's able to converse with a robotic ambulance who may have been programmed using original source materials so that she can speak and think like the original ambolene imagine education students that can take place part in cultural exchanges with students without leaving the classroom and imagine our international law students being able to give legal advice to refugees in a camp halfway across the world that technology is all with us today so if this technology is all with us today why aren't we using it at the moment when fees first came in top-up fees i think there was a lot of concern across the sector that students would change their behavior they'd turn from being students into consumers and this would really change the power dynamics in a university universities were very used to pretty much teaching and researching whatever they liked not constrained by market forces and there was a lot of concern and i think there was a little bit of a change at first in the way that students behaved especially when there was still you know memories of free higher education still in in recent memories but i think that the way that behavior has changed isn't due to consumerism and isn't due to the the fees i think the way that students are changing is down to the fact that this generation of students generation zed have grown up digital the way they are they are used to being able to access and engage with learning and information online and completely independently you want to learn the piano download an app onto your ipad and it will show you how to learn the piano you want to do yoga in the privacy of your own room without leaving the house follow a youtuber and the challenge is that universities are run by people like me who are analog i used to go and buy books in w.h smiths i used to buy records in woolworths with cash i'm a lot older than i look and uh if i ever was able to afford a taxi i used to ring a local company on a landline now this generation of students have amazon spotify and uber and i think the challenge is to not assume that the way that universities are going to go into the future is the way that those industries have gone and become completely digital i don't think that's going to happen however the way that students are able to connect and communicate and live their lives online really will have a big influence on the way that student that universities go now like many people i was quite irritated by the narrative that's been in the press and amongst the commentariat about this kind of online versus in-person teaching that we've all heard so much about in the last few months and it really is to me a false dichotomy it isn't that in-person activity is good and therefore good value for money and online activity is bad and therefore poor value for money and this is based on a premise that learning and teaching is the same as it probably was in most places 20 30 years ago when some of these people were at university and just replacing that type of approach with online versions perhaps isn't that satisfactory but it's much more complicated than that and much less simplistic and one of the great things for me about technology is it allows greater participation think of those medical students that i described and the access that they've got to knowledge to expertise to technology without even leaving a room things that wouldn't have been possible for them to have achieved without traveling and without seeing um you know without a greater impact on that patient so the accessibility the flexibility the ability to study at your own pace is really critical part of this online revolution and for me it's not about as i said replacing a lecture with an online lecture it's about how do we harness the digital power to personalize teaching for students and the learning experience can we use machine learning to give individual feedback on a performance to a student so they can improve can we use data analytics to point students in the direction of a way that might enhance their understanding a different way of explaining a complex area in this way we can have individual pathways for students to follow that will help them achieve their full potential so where does all this leave universities well if we if we don't become complacent about the potential for digital to disrupt universities which i don't think we should become complacent where does that leave us when in the 1850s john henry newman a very influential philosopher and theologian published a series of books and articles about the purpose of university amongst his other massive outputs and his work remains influential and i think the reason is because he talked a lot about the fact that education wasn't just about the transmission of knowledge and the creation of a sort of trading culture he talked about the power the transformative power of education when people work collaboratively and when they learn together he was a big fan of the residential model of higher education which has um stayed with us for the you know for the for the rest of his time since then um and i'm not saying that we have to have that residential model where students move from home and live in a community but for me what's really transformational about about higher education is groups of people coming together sharing their previous experience and their knowledge and working together to collaborate to create new knowledge to work with employers to work with expert lecturers to work with facilities and to create new knowledge as they move forward and that is the true transformational power of education and it fits in really well with the we hear a lot about the leveling up agenda and universities have got a really important part to play in that and in the social justice and social mobility the next way in which i think we can contribute is by leading by example in climate change and in the um in the development of what's known as esg environmental social and governance if you google the case for esg apart from a few scholarly articles you will find pages and pages of articles by financial sector companies by banks and by others investment companies on how to make the case for esg because they know that in the future people are going to be concerned about how their money is invested in pension funds in banks in all sorts of other types of activity and i think we should not be leading it leaving it to the financial sector to lead the way on these things i think universities have got an absolutely critical role to play in all of that i think the um the skills that we will need to really thrive in the digital age are yes technical digital skills but it's not just about the technical skills it's about the behavioral skills the cultural uh skills the ethical understanding of what it means to be human in a digital age and so the whole spectrum of education is really important in developing students who are able to engage with the digital world and i think by creating environment where students can really learn to collaborate and communicate and create and be entrepreneurial in this space this will lead to us finding solutions for some of the grand challenges that we face not least as i say the climate emergency so it's not just about creating work ready graduates although that is of critical importance students want a job at the end of their studies and who can blame them it's about creating students and graduates that can really engage as citizens with uh this digital society that is coming for us so in summary and in conclusion the technology for the future is already here how we use that in universities will really depend on how this power generation of students interacts with that technology and helps us to shape the future going into the future with um co-creating curricula ways of working and importantly to really meet that challenge what we need to do is lead by example in climate change we need to really think about how we behave as an institution as institutions set ourselves challenging targets but ambitious targets in climate carbon reduction and creates graduates that have the social behavioral and technical skills to really make all of that possible and all of that happen thank you very much for listening to me i wish you a very very successful rest of the day thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 9,431

Keywords: Education, English, TEDxTalks, Technology

Id: thFFGkhl8b4

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022