IV. “Anticipating when, where and how technology will alter economic, social, political, and security dynamics is a hard game.”
The National Intelligence Council wrote in its latest “Global Trends” estimate, “Technology — from the wheel to the silicon chip — has greatly bent the arc of history, yet anticipating when, where and how technology will alter economic, social, political, and security dynamics is a hard game.” Among the major trends in technology discussed in the NIC report are advanced information communications technologies (ICT) including artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and robotics; biotechnologies; advances in energy technology; climate intervention via geo- engineering; developments in advanced materials and manufacturing; and space-based technologies.
In summarizing possible impacts, the NIC wrote: “As one expert wryly observes: ‘technology is the greatest cause for my optimism about the future…and my greatest cause for pessimism.’… Each technological advance bears a cost — sometimes in natural resources, sometimes in social cohesion, and sometimes in hard-to-predict ways.” For emerging information technologies, for example, increased data reliance will require “establishing clear limits and standards on data ownership, data privacy and protection, cross-border data flows, and cyber security that could become increasingly important points of domestic and international policy conflict.”
Each of the major trends noted above has clear implications for higher education, both in the development of new academic programs and in the mapping of new research agendas. Universities around the world will be seeking to engage their students, faculty, and stakeholders at the frontiers of technological discovery. For the present discussion, the focus will be on a particular set of technological advances — ICT, AI, and big data — that have already brought about major changes in both instruction and student support systems.
Distance learning represents an area of enormous potential for higher education systems around the world struggling to meet the needs of growing and changing student populations. Information and communications technologies (ICT), types of providers, curriculum developers, modes of delivery, and pedagogical innovations, have transformed the distance learning landscape. It is extremely difficult to calculate the numbers of students engaged in distance learning worldwide, but the existence of dozens of mega-universities, a half dozen of which boast over one million students each, speaks to a quantitatively significant phenomenon. But as international education expert Philip Altbach has noted, there has been a “profound and pervasive disconnect between employing new technologies and leveraging them to enhance quality.” xxvii
The internet has truly revolutionized how knowledge is communicated. In the world’s most developed economies, the presence of ICT has expanded exponentially and touched virtually all dimensions of the higher education enterprise. Email and online social networking spaces provide avenues for academic collaboration and joint research. Electronic journals have become widespread and, in some fields, quite substantive. Traditional publishers of books and journals have increasingly turned to the internet to distribute their publications. The open educational resources movement (OER) has picked up significant momentum, providing free access to courses, curricula, and pedagogical resources not available locally.
Though they had begun to emerge a few years earlier, 2012 became known as the “year of the MOOC” — the Massive Open Online Course. Originally seen as the harbingers of the demise of the place-based university, the enthusiasm for MOOCs faded after a few well-funded consortia with impressive pedigrees failed to deliver on their original promises. Typically, even though many thousands of learners enrolled, only a very small portion usually completed the course. However, in terms of initial enrollments, the numbers are still very impressive: Class Central estimated that there were 900 universities offering courses to over 110 million registered learners (excluding China) in 2019. xxviii
Nevertheless, offerings of courses in a more restricted environment (fee-based for-credit offerings with less ambitious enrollment goals) have continued to expand. Offering the promise of access regardless of where students live or when they can participate, and augmented by artificial intelligence to provide pacing and content fitted to the individual student’s needs, online courses are now offered by thousands of higher education institutions at almost every level and in almost every imaginable field of study. Public university systems such as those in Louisiana and Minnesota have invested heavily in online offerings, though most seem to be targeted toward their own students. One-third of college students take at least one such course during their college career, and the number of students who opt for curricula that are taken exclusively online is growing rapidly. (For the UH system as a whole, 13.8% of students are fully online, compared to a national average in public institutions of 12.4%. At UH West Oʻahu, 39% of students are fully online and 81% have at least some online courses.)
Line graph showing "Exclusively online" enrollment grew by nearly 1.4 times from 2012 to 2017, and "partially online" enrollment by more than 1.3 times, while "in-person" enrollment dropped to .9 times.
NOTE: Scale uses 1 to represent all students in each category in 2012, and then shows by how many times each enrollment figure increased or decreasing over the years. Figures include public, private, nonprofit, and for-profit institutions.
Source: Moody's Investors Services, 2019 Sector in-depth report, analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data.
Initially enticed by the early successes of (and competition from) for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and heavily marketed online divisions of universities such as public Arizona State and Western Governors and private Southern New Hampshire, hundreds of institutions that face challenges of declining enrollments have added online divisions. Often these are entirely homegrown curricula, but many have outsourced the marketing and enrollment functions to commercial firms.
Latecomers to the online marketplace are finding it difficult to compete with longstanding programs with ample funds available for development and marketing. Smaller primarily liberal arts colleges have had dreams of significant new revenues dashed by these realities. Even some of the for-profit chains — which have been criticized for overselling the worth of their degrees to students whose Pell grants constitute the largest share of their revenues — have seen profits drop or have had to close their doors. Although distance learning courses in existing programs are essential, especially in attracting adult students, the goal of capturing a wider market is difficult to attain. Unless late entrants can offer distinctive programs on a wider scale that target the work force needs of their particular region, they are not likely to prosper from their online divisions. Examples of targeted online programs (described in greater detail in Appendix A-1) include the University of Tulsa’s online Master of Energy Business program, UCLA’s online Professional Program in Screenwriting, Stanford’s Graduate Certificate in Artificial Intelligence, and Case Western Reserve’s online Master’s in Biomedical Engineering.
Examples of workforce partnerships can be found in the growing number of cases in which industry is increasing its investments in human resources and professional development through contracts to pay employees’ tuition at the online divisions of universities (e.g., Disney’s contracts with the University of Florida and the Starbucks College Achievement Plan with Arizona State). The University of Hawaiʻi could seek similar strategic partnerships with major employers in the state, including the military.
| Completely online | Mostly online | About half and half | Some online components | No online component | No preference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6% | 4% | 18% | 30% | 35% | 8% |
| Priority | Percent |
|---|---|
| IT Data Security | 83% |
| Hiring/Retainling IT Talent | 77% |
| Leveraging IT to Support Student Success | 73% |
| Providing Adequate User Support | 71% |
| Data analysis/learning and managerial analytics | 60% |
| Digital accessibility/ADA compliance | 57% |
| Supporting online/distance education | 53% |
| Assisting faculty with the instructional integration of IT | 52% |
| IT business continuity/IT disaster recovery | 50% |
| Professional development for IT personnel | 49% |
Source: Kenneth C. Green, 2019 Campus Computing. The 30th National Survey of Computing and Information Technology in American Higher Education, at https://www.campuscomputing.net/content/2019/10/15/the-2019-campus- computing-survey
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