It’s time to go beyond last century’s information frontiers

Current metrics were designed decades ago with elitist and dated assumptions, but they are growing less relevant and universities are not even grasping easily reachable possibilities. Many countries which once innovated, now lag.

Now is the time to embrace broader forms of education value. This means moving well beyond student satisfaction and engagement information. New metrics make new language, new stories and new differences. This is what universities are about.

A revamped and reconfigured information architecture will equip policy-makers and university leaders to make informed decisions, develop improvement roadmaps and drive social value.

Time to be adventurous

Imagine working with instructive, meaningful insights into opportunities, partnerships, co-creation and education returns. Students, universities, policy-makers and communities all win with such information. Their connections will be more informed, productive and engaged. It is time to be adventurous. It is time to advance value for the decades to come.

As universities change, so too must the information on which their leadership relies. Higher education needs to renovate its data and evidence architecture. Information yields diminishing marginal returns unless it keeps evolving, unless it helps explain and respond to change.

Results cease to razzle-dazzle and have an impact. In the inevitable dialectic of system governance, institutions learn how to game the data rather than quiz and action the data.

Indeed, once thriving and world-leading, current education statistics in many established higher education systems have wilted and drifted. The data is far less relevant to government and institutions. This is dangerous. It means plans and programmes are forged on the anvil of spurious targets, that quality practice is ignored, that we reward people and institutions in distorted ways and that changes are made which waste resources and diminish value.

More than 30 years ago, universities grew beyond an era when most people might have known each other by name, and it became necessary to produce more meaningful and objective information about education. Student satisfaction statistics garnished with scholarly rhetoric were spread entrepreneurially throughout the English-speaking world.

Powerful new information on student engagement was advocated by United States experts and grew into one of the sector’s largest information regimes. Countries leveraged these developments to implement then-innovative information on students’ engagement with effective education experiences. In many instances, this data became sector-wide, institutionalised then nationalised.

What kind of information is needed?

What kind of information would help universities to flourish? There are good options, beyond incremental advances in existing collections. International research has revealed the need for more timely information on how universities, and the people within them, engage and work with communities.

Much current data is largely transactional and inward-looking. It does not reflect how universities are contributing to communities and adding social value. Institutional analyses have charted how digital and other transformations have blurred traditional boundaries between universities and communities.

As higher education blurs into online and physical experiences for many more global participants, it is both a timely and necessary project to ascertain how to capture people’s engagement.

Imagine working with instructive, meaningful insights into:

• Learning opportunities, revealing whether faculties, institutions and systems deploy learner- or learning-centric systems for opening opportunities;

• Academic partnerships, especially digital partnerships and hybrid learning spaces;

• Resource use in education services, as opposed to research, works or operations;

• Resilience, and to what extent universities have the capacity and capability to understand and help each student;

• Situated resources – whether institutions are furnishing curricula that are accessible to non-traditional students and to those who most need them;

• Teachers and teaching, and in particular how well academic integrity is sustained, and how well it is protected in teaching innovations;

• Social co-creation – whether an institution is reaching beyond its walls into the lives of a much broader, potentially global, population and its abundant, diverse communities;

• Education returns, including solid data on financial and knowledge returns for individuals and communities; and

• Academic value, including articulating and validating learning success.

Shift in emphasis

Such an information move involves shifting institutional emphasis on the traditional ‘student experience’ to a much broader, more socially deliberative concept of ‘education value’. This view involves looking at how much larger and more integrated education institutions engage many more communities and learning arrangements.

This is very different from looking at the engagement of admitted students within institutions and only minor interactions with ‘outside’ communities. This shift envisages both studying how students participate within prescribed frames and how students and institutions engage in hybrid ways to co-create learning opportunities and credentials.

Novel analytical techniques and methods are available. Researchers and institutions keep evolving, innovating and discovering important phenomena to measure. Platforms for collecting and using education information have evolved while much system-level data has stagnated. The evolved platforms open new prospects for garnering relevant insights.

Metrics lose their distinctiveness and edge when absorbed into large systems of academic review and governance. They wane as they age. Their power is hobbled.

Much education information swirling around higher education today was designed 20-25 years ago in response to very different educational and institutional arrangements. It was based on elite-era and colonial assumptions, snail-mail logic and forms of university leadership that are very different to what we see today. It is time to go beyond last century’s frontiers.

It is time to promulgate information that is relevant to understanding and leading future university education. Learners would be really satisfied and engaged if academics and university leaders acted on such information to forge opportunities that are relevant to them.

Tip-toeing ahead

These ideas offer the basis for promulgating a shift in conceptualising and actualising work on education value, moving to something broad in reach, something that touches on matters of sociology, governance and the contexts shaping higher education.

This goes beyond work that is primarily rooted in learning and development. It embraces the politics and sociology of a future in which universities are no longer the ‘biggest kid on the block’. The broader reach of ideas needs to be expanded conceptually, debated, operationalised and validated.

At scale, this takes three to five years, so it is time to start now. Care is required to ensure the resulting information will help regulators, policy-makers, institutions, teachers, students and the broader public. Luckily, lots of data are lying in wait and ready to flesh out the nine articulated dimensions.

Creative approaches

Monitoring all universities with the same indicators promotes a beige sameness, contrary to institutional individuation. Universities, like academics, must be encouraged to pursue disciplined and creative approaches to teaching and research.

Core business must be delivered, and common data threads are important, but innovation is essential to rejuvenation and progress. This approach certainly does not involve throwing away the excellent foundations set by data designed in the 1980s and 2000s. Its influence is in adding to these foundations in useful and impactful ways.

Universities and higher education around the world have been hit by volatile and disruptive forces in recent years, testing their resilience and endurance. Credible information on education and learning will play a major role in building knowledge, transforming skills and designing the shape of things to come. Generating new information on education is essential for the sustainability of universities and their contribution to local and global communities.

Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab and a global tertiary education expert. Angel Calderon is director of strategic insights at RMIT University, Australia. Full and summary briefing: www.hefl.net.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the authors only and not their employer and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.