The university has a digital strategy which is based around providing flexibility, access and effective connections to information, individuals and content for its stakeholders. This includes connections not only to what is available on campus, but across regional, national and international networks of institutions, organisations and people.
The three AUT campuses, AUT South, Central and North are all wireless enabled and the digital capability not only supports research and approaches to delivery, included blended learning, flipped classrooms and on line delivery, but also provides an effective platform for engagement with current and prospective students as well as community, industry and the professions.
Is there a risk that digital disruption could commoditise your sector and mass learning could eventually make you redundant?
There is much discussion and analysis of the potential impact of digital disruption on the university sector. While much of this in the last couple of years has been based around the impact of MOOCs (massive online open courses), the potential impact is broader than those alone. As knowledge becomes ubiquitous, created and distributed by a wide range of people and organisations, universities are losing or have already lost part of their role as a "repository of knowledge".
This has led to some commentators suggesting that learning will become commoditised and universities redundant. These actual and potential disruptions are causing universities to reflect and consider carefully their role in the learning space. However, what the disruptions are doing is in fact creating a commodity of knowledge, not learning.
While the nature of learning and delivery will need to change to match the learning styles of students which are being impacted by digital technology, there remains a critical role for the university and lecturers, or facilitators, to create relevant and useful learning experiences that engage students effectively with knowledge to add value for them.
The expertise is in creating learning experiences that match the needs of individuals and groups of individuals, rather than simply disseminating knowledge. At the postgraduate level where research is undertaken, the learning experience is so individual that access to a supervisor/mentor with the requisite capability remains key. Though digital disruption will change the way universities engage with students and will make universities think more deeply about how to do that, it will not commoditise the learning experience.
Do your have the right people on board to take advantage of the new digital opportunities in your business?
There are several aspects to this; notably leadership, academic staff who create or facilitate learning experiences and professional staff who provide technical and other expertise.
The challenge is ensuring in all those areas that individuals and teams are remaining current, are assessing what is happening in the digital space, reflecting on what it means and may mean and integrating this into strategy, planning and actions. In other words this is a dynamic situation and the key is ensuring that the right mindsets and developments ate occurring.
