A presentation given as part of the MA in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

“A look at the changing landscape of highereducation in a post information revolution society,reviewing literature and thinking, with implicationsfor policy and practice”

Paper Abstract

A review of some of the literature as well as current thinking within the context of higher education in a postinformation revolution, commercially orientated marketplace. USA and UK experience, the implications forfuture business models, teaching, learning and assessment methods, success evaluation criteria andeconomic sustainability are discussed.Looking at higher education in the UK (England and Wales), we see a currently difficult and possibly bleakfuture. Some are arguing that we are in ‘the Perfect Storm’ (Popenici, 2012) of the university industry and itspossible complete demise (Harden, 2013). In a digital society where the role of the mediator – be it bank,high street store or educational institution is becoming irrelevant even as the role of the consumer grows evermore empowered, universities are not perhaps best positioned to react to such fast moving market drivenchanges, “senior academics warn that universities which suffer a substantial decline in student demand fortwo or three years could collapse” (Fazackerley, 2013). After all, their principal way of doing things is, like TheEnts in Lord of the Rings, very very slow, “…the historic challenges facing universities and colleges are lessrelated to technological disruption or market evolution and more causally related to self-induced bruising,glacial cycles of adaptation, and torturous processes that pass for decision-making” (Gonick, 2013). Thecurrent rush toward the MOOC to save the day is beginning to be seen by some as the emperors newclothes, or worse, another excuse to ‘monetize’ and de-personalise higher education, creating acommodified mechanistic “dystopian… educational space”, where “student support is non existent” and“lecturers are left merely to facilitate … student experiential learning”, (Cost et al, 2013).This paper looks at these issues, and tries to find some way forward through the maze. Some of the focus isfrom a ‘Web Technologies’ discipline point of view, which may in some way represent a variety of newdisciplines in the 21st century employment economy

This was originally a Prezi presentation