Universities urged to be agile in age of massive disruption

Universities need to become more flexible, adaptable and agile to ensure that students are prepared for a fast-moving, disruptive world impacted by evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence, sweeping trade disruptions, and significant demographic changes, a meeting of Pacific Rim university leaders heard.

Meeting on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) education ministers meeting in Jeju, South Korea, the APEC University Leaders Forum (AULF) focused on the theme: “Leveraging AI in higher education to address Asia Pacific challenges”.

A panel of experts specifically examined universities’ role in producing graduates with skills relevant to a future disrupted by AI and other dramatic changes.

The AULF is made up of university heads from Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and North and South America representing APEC’s 21 members. The forum, held from 12 to 13 May, was jointly hosted by South Korea’s Pusan National University (PNU) and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) in partnership with the South Korean Ministry of Education.



In welcoming remarks on the opening day, APRU chief executive Thomas Schneider described the world as “hyperconnected through trade, finance, modern communication and a mobility of people unseen in earlier phases of history”. Simultaneously, the globe is politically increasingly fragmented, he said.

“We have witnessed a global diffusion of power to new national and institutional stakeholders. Major demographic shifts, environmental degradation, and socioeconomic inequality, in addition to crises of the past years, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and wars, have fundamentally impacted the world.

“The unprecedented pace of technological development calls into question the very foundations of how life will be lived in the future,” Schneider noted.

Dr Michael Fung, executive director of the Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnológico de Monterrey (Monterrey Tech), Mexico, told the forum that despite increased awareness about AI in education, universities are still at the “beginning stage” of transformation.

He noted that institutions have faced multiple disruptions, including COVID-19, global supply chain shifts – more pronounced in recent times – and demographic changes such as ageing populations in the West.

HE is slow to change

Fung said traditional higher education was very slow to change. “But in recent years, we’ve seen acceleration in the pace of change and the needs of industry and society, so universities have to respond in a much more agile manner,” Fung told University World News.

“In this new paradigm education also needs to be lifelong in nature and much more flexible to be able to respond to these sustained and rapid changes,” he noted.

While COVID-19 showed that rapid changes were possible, Fung said: “When we look across the higher education sector, there is a lot of variation in the level of preparedness, in the level of experimentation and adoption of AI in education in general. I think we're very far from the ideal state.”

Yike Guo, provost and professor of computer science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and director of the Hong Kong Generative AI Research & Development Centre, pointed out that the difference between AI and past technologies was that the latter were passive tools controlled by people. AI, on the other hand, had become “more and more active”.

“We are dealing with a machine and human symbiotic society, but our social order, our legal systems, and our values are not prepared for symbiosis,” he told the panel. “We need to think about social order, legal systems, everything, to accommodate this kind of human-machine coexistence.”

HKUST had transformed from “a teaching institute to a learning community. Now it needed to transform into a “mutual learning community – a community where teachers and students learn together,” he said.

High-demand human skills

Anders Erik Karlsson, vice-president of global strategic networks at academic publishers Elsevier, speaking on the future of work, pointed to the kind of skills employers are looking for.

“First of all, you have to be able to collaborate with other people, often in very large organisations, such as a university or a company … to get things done. So it's those human skills.”

“The second thing is to be able to act fast and pivot. If things are not working well, you pivot fast,” he said.

Dong-il Cho, emeritus professor from Seoul National University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and president of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), which includes the fields of robotics, autonomous driving, smart factories, smart energy, and system technology, pointed to the need for students to have ‘AIQ’, not just IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence) or even AI literacy.

“For our future work, we have to be trained in technical skills and social human skills, and we have to be adaptable,” Cho said, explaining what AIQ entailed.

Fung pointed to past work in 2020 with Korean computer science professors to establish an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard on digital intelligence, or ‘DQ’, which also covered human elements related to digital literacy.

“Digital intelligence doesn’t quite cover all the range of AI-related competencies, but maybe it’s something we should work towards – defining a framework that can be widely adopted to measure literacy maturity in different settings as AI becomes more important.”

He told the panel: “What we are observing is rapid change in the knowledge, the competencies, and the skills needed by our students as they come into the workplace and as we think about the workforce and so on. But we all know as university leaders that our institutions are not well structured for rapid change.”

A new approach to education

Wanjuin Liao, executive vice-president of National Taiwan University (NTU), said AI would impact the job market in two ways: Plus-AI – existing companies utilising AI technologies to improve their existing business; and AI-plus – the automation of new business that may not have existed before.

These include AI-powered content creation, AI-assisted software development and human-machine collaboration.

“AI-plus innovation will dramatically change the way we teach and the content we are to teach our students,” she said.

“Education is no longer a one-way knowledge transfer. Instead, professors are now expected to work to discover knowledge together with students and guide them in how to judge and comment on the information they have acquired,” she added.

NTU Core, the digital learning platform for students, allows faculty members to put their courses into Core so students can learn from the systems. “These micro-credential systems, and this tool, will support continuous learning and career adaptivity in a developing job landscape at NTU,” said Liao.

It enables students to design their own career through their degree pathways under the guidance of proper faculty advisors.

“We believe this student-centred approach, when combined with modular micro-credential systems, will be an advantage for NTU, enabling it to navigate the paradigm shifts brought about by AI, and will get our students prepared for careers that may not even exist yet,” Liao said.

She believes the future of education should be modular, flexible and include lifelong learning.

“I think that the university is going to evolve into a lifetime talent platform, not just one-time education and ongoing education, but ongoing learning that will evolve with personal careers and industry demands,” she said.

She pointed to the university’s current industry-university partnerships, which include partnerships with chip companies TSMC, MediaTek and other Taiwanese companies with global reach, which “create opportunities for our students to engage directly with real-world innovations”.

“We are not just conducting research. We are also building ecosystems that connect academia, industry and also policy through the Taiwan AI College Alliance (Taica) [launched by the Ministry of Education],” she said.

“AI is not just a challenge for the future of work; it's a call for universities to lead with vision, responsibility and collaboration. At NTU, we are committed to building an agile and inclusive learning ecosystem.”

Predicting future skills needs

Mexico’s Tec de Monterrey has 30,000 undergraduate students in engineering alone. Fung believes that despite tariff disruption caused by US President Donald Trump, students will still find jobs in growing industries on the border with the US.

But the university has also developed AI-assisted predictive tools to assess broader future skills demand, a process Fung calls “skills sensing”. Along these lines, a Tec de Monterrey team has launched a multi-year project to build “skills taxonomies”.

The team scrapes and examines job postings in various sectors and constructs a taxonomy and dictionary of skills for jobs needed in these sectors in order to detect trends and growing skills needs.

“With the taxonomy, we publish reports that are then shared with universities to be able to modify their curriculum,” explained Fung, who used similar methods in Singapore, where he was previously deputy chief executive of SkillsFuture Singapore, the Singaporean government’s lifelong learning agency.

He explained how future skills trends could be predicted. “If we are trying to build on IT skills for a growing IT industry, we can look at centres of growth in IT that are leading the way,” he said.

“If we look at the skills profile of jobs in Silicon Valley or in India, we start to get a sense of where the leading skills might go in the context of Mexico and Latin America,” he noted. The same could be applied to Germany in the case of advanced manufacturing.

The ‘agility muscle’

Universities would have to equip themselves with this industry skills-sensing capability, whether directly, internally, or working in collaboration with others, said Fung.

“They would then need the necessary structures to design learning opportunities that cater to the shifting needs of the workforce,” said Fung, adding that the university’s skill sensing approach currently covered Mexico but would be extended to cover Latin America.

He stressed that the most important tool for dealing with a “changing order that's also chaotic” was not prediction but rapid adaptation.

“What is perhaps most important in the DNA of universities is to build that ‘agility muscle’.

This includes ‘rapid sensing’ of what is going on and then having internal structures, culture and governance that allow for rapid adaptation, which sounds easy, but … it's no mean feat from the perspective of higher education.”