Transforming in three dimensions: challenges of digital innovation in HE

What a difference a year makes. At the Digital Universities UK conference in the spring of 2023, all the talk was of ChatGPT, which had just landed like a meteorite.

At the same event last week, discussions about generative AI were far more measured, while the cataclysmic threat underpinning many discussions was the growing financial crisis.

On one level, this return to something as basic as funding seems somewhat removed from discussions about digital transformation.

But of course funding is fundamental, and digital innovation is certain to be part of the answer as the higher education sector plots a way out of the current financial predicament.

It feels a little as though higher education is lurching from meteorite strike to meteorite strike at present, but at the Digital Universities event at the University of Exeter there was plenty of optimism, too.

Perhaps that is an inherent part of the process of digital innovation, where nothing stays as it is now for long, but it is something that the sector would do well to harness.

In a recent paper for the Higher Education Policy Institute on the funding crisis, former universities minister Lord Johnson of Marylebone took the sector to task for failing to understand what he was trying to do when he established the Teaching Excellence Framework to provide cover for allowing the domestic tuition fee cap in England to grow with inflation.

“Demonstrating its ability to miss the wood for the trees, the sector produced all manner of reasons to object to the TEF. And in a low inflation environment, an extra £250 did not really move the needle much financially either. Vice-chancellors could take it or leave it,” he wrote.

Had his approach been embraced and embedded, a university that had enjoyed inflation-linked fee increases each year since would be able to charge £12,200 today. Crisis averted.

The idea that higher education has been too hasty in its judgements to its own detriment also came up in discussions about digital advances at the DUW event.

A session on how universities responded to the arrival of ChatGPT last year concluded that the knee-jerk focus on misconduct and assessment had “panicked” students, and squandered the opportunity to have an open discussion with them about an emerging technology, its use cases, and how it could enrich rather than derail the learning process.

“We got it wrong,” said Mark Simpson, deputy vice-chancellor of Teesside University. “Our initial reaction was to look at ways to detect it, and we quickly moved to write it into misconduct regulations. So our conversation with students was, ‘Use AI and we will punish you.’”

Another theme at the event was the importance of shared approaches to digital transformation, particularly given funding constraints.

A session led by Mark Thompson, professor in digital economy at Exeter, suggested that despite a tendency for exceptionalism in higher education, lessons could be learned from public sector success stories, notably in the NHS, where major shared digital platforms had been established.

By embracing a single-platform approach, providing common digital foundations in areas where all institutions faced the same challenges, universities could save time and money and deliver better infrastructure to underpin their transformation, he argued.

“Just imagine if we took all that budget that we spend again and again, and instead built a true sector-beating offering. You can do it cheaply and quickly and you can share this stuff, but we have to stop buying salami-sliced versions of the same thing from our suppliers,” he said.

The importance of shared approaches also came up in a session on reducing the bureaucracy associated with digital research infrastructure, which heard that “inequality” between disciplines could be resolved only with a more consistent and less siloed approach.

In other sessions, though, there were warnings that, particularly in straitened financial times, universities could put optimistic forecasts of a collaborative, innovative future at risk.

A discussion about how to measure digital transformation heard that universities were becoming more risk-averse, and that there now was a “lower tolerance of failure”, which could stifle digital innovation by limiting investment to particular types of projects.

That was a reminder that transformation is complex, and that universities – not uniquely, but perhaps more so than might be supposed – can be particularly hard to change.

As Richard Gunn, programme director for digital research infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation, put it, change programmes “require three dimensions: technology, policy and culture – and as we know it’s often the culture that requires the most time”.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com