‘More victims than winners’ in AI’s upheaval of universities

There will be “more victims than winners” as artificial intelligence disrupts universities, but institutions that use it properly will find new technology can help make learning more human, according to an online education pioneer.

Paul LeBlanc, the departing president of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), told a University of London event that institutions should learn from other industries that have faced existential threats that they are going to have to be “brave” and “play by different rules” to survive.

Referencing Harvard University professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation – in which the emergence of new entrants fundamentally changes established industries – Dr LeBlanc said universities would never evolve sufficiently through their own “internal change mechanisms”.

“Disruptive innovation is about changing the rules of the game and incumbent systems do not change themselves,” he said during a debate about online versus in-person education. “You are destroying yourself in some ways; there are too many business interests.”

“There will be universities that go out of business because this is disruptive innovation on a massive scale; it will change everything, in my view,” he added.

“There will be those who continue because they are not really about education. So Harvard, for example, is as much about the value of its network, of being a Harvard graduate and who you know, being in the club. That is still important, and AI is not going to impact that.”

Universities that have hope, according to Dr LeBlanc – who, during more than two decades in charge, transformed SNHU from a small regional institution into one that teaches 225,000 people around the world online – are those that gradually phase out the old ways of doing things and replace them with innovations, in a way similar to how telephone companies switched from providing landlines to broadband.

“If you are lucky, and a lot of things have to go right, you will start to transition,” he said. “That is hard to do. In the disruptive innovation world, there are more victims than winners – but it is possible.

“University leaders are going to have to be brave about this because they are going to have to save that space and create resources – when resources are tight – to reinvent education.

“Most of us will not be disrupted by a known competitor. We will be disrupted by the thing that comes out of the blue that we didn’t see coming, and we have to be really thoughtful about learning from other industries as well.”

Appearing on the same panel, Amanda Spielman, the former chief inspector of English schools regulator Ofsted, cautioned that there were “very big slices of human and social development” that could not be provided for by technology.

She said that studies had shown “very strong links” between the amount of time people spent alone not interacting and loneliness and wider mental health problems, with evidence that the switch to online learning during the pandemic had hampered the Covid generation’s social development.

But Dr LeBlanc said SNHU used a system of advisers to support its learners, who were mostly mature students juggling other commitments and included groups such as refugees and homeless people.

The university had been able to harness data stored in its systems to track students and know when, for example, they hadn’t logged on or performed as well as expected in an exam, which would trigger a follow-up phone call, he said.

“That conversation can be a thing that saves the student and gets them across the finish line,” Dr LeBlanc said, which showed how technology could be deployed to support human relationships in “powerful ways”.

Dr LeBlanc, who is stepping down from SNHU to create a new AI education company, said this venture would build on these ideas and use devices that track heart rates to gain further insights into students’ contexts and embed them in the teaching. For example, it would be able to know if someone had been sleeping badly and could therefore advise that they prioritise going to bed over doing a lesson, he said. 

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com