You don’t need me to tell you that Higher Education is approaching a new digital age – an age where the effective implementation of digital technologies is imperative to attracting students and staff, promoting growth, delivering learning remotely, and to be frank, surviving in a world where digital strategies are the drivers of sustainable businesses.

You also don’t need me to tell you that Higher Education is rapidly falling behind the times.

The times of Generation Z, where pretty much every single thing is done online, or via some kind of digital device, whether that’s a smartphone, a tablet, or even wearables. And if it’s not, you can sure as hell bet that technology is involved somewhere along the line.

We as a society are so immersed in digital that I would go as far as to say we rely on it. I mean, take Covid for example. Just imagine how the world would have fallen apart if people couldn’t work from home; if they couldn’t access the data, documents and systems they would usually access; if they couldn’t call or collaborate with colleagues as and when they needed.

For me, it doesn’t bear thinking about. My business would probably would have gone down the pan…

Higher Education has a huge technology debt of legacy systems which aren’t integrated, and business processes that are siloed and inefficiently run. When unprecedented times take hold, like Covid 19, this adds increasing amounts of pressure for HE institutes. Staff members are grappling at shoddy resources trying to pull together some kind of action plan on how remote and online working needs to be rolled out.

Yet, on top of all this, what about the admin tasks? What about all the student enquiries that have come in asking what to do now their physical buildings are shut?

A 14, 15, 16-hour day is probably the answer. But it’s certainly not the right answer, and it’s certainly not sustainable.

The impact?

A poor experience. A poor experience from staff to students across the board. And as mentioned, this has been especially prevalent over the last year, where the traditional physical classroom moved online. And it moved online overnight.

I guess one benefit of having to rapidly change the ways of working could mean that HE institutes have to change the way they think. They have to change the way they deliver their curriculum. They have to change the way they deliver the student experience as a whole.

From my perspective, they need to provide a 24/7 digital service that creates an immersive experience for staff and students alike. And for a service to be 24/7, it needs to be an organisation-wide approach so the institute can reach those innovation goals. To reach these goals there needs to be cultural change and a change in leadership to see innovation drive forward competitiveness.

But, of course, this doesn’t come without a challenge.

With complex legacy infrastructure, such system changes require large scale transformation projects which often there is no budget, timescale or skill set to do this, and when results are needed now, this seems completely out of reach.

But it doesn’t have to be out of reach. Forget ‘digital transformation’, forget all the buzz words around bleeding edge technology, forget it all.