NEWS campusreview. com. au
Be nimble, be quick!
Unis will need flexibility to handle an upcoming challenge from smaller entities providing tailored services.
Universities will be forced to compete with a growing number of smaller niche education services as they seek to keep up with the expectations and desires of students and employers, a key industry conference has been told.
Discussing the likely impact of disruption on the higher education sector at the Futureproof Now conference – which Campus Review hosted recently in Sydney – Deakin Digital chief executive Allyn Radford warned that the emergence of smaller players in the market would inevitably result in larger incumbents being“ marginalised toward the top of the market”. Such a trend, he said, made long-term sustainability less secure for organisations that may once have dominated marketplaces.
Open Universities Australia chief executive Paul Wappett, speaking as part of a discussion panel on the topic of disruption following Radford’ s talk, cited the example of retail giant Harvey Norman’ s relative failure to transition its business online as evidence of the challenges facing large organisations in their quest to compete with smaller, more nimble, competition.
Those“ digital disruptors” enjoying the most success, Wappett noted, were the ones offering greater access to their service or product at a lower cost and with a more satisfying experience. He added that the greatest source of disruption was likely to be external, and that without changes to approach and philosophy, universities would struggle to act as true leaders in the innovative delivery of education.
Meanwhile, Australian Medical Students’ Association president James Lawler told the conference that a regular complaint of many students was the continued reliance of universities on didactic, lecture-based learning models. Universities, Lawler argued, needed to rethink the way they delivered much of the content of courses, given the wealth of alternate sources of knowledge available to students.
Innovative Research Universities executive director Conor King said discussion highlighted the need for universities to be more competitive, with regard to the flexibility they offered students. Wappett agreed, adding that universities too often failed to sufficiently consider students consumers. ■
Uncertainty rules
Federal government making the future of reform in higher education even less clear.
The possibility of a change of government at the next federal election is compounding uncertainty over the future of higher education, an expert has warned.
Speaking at the Futureproof Now conference, Grattan Institute higher education program director Andrew Norton said it was possible that parts of the Coalition’ s planned reform package for the sector could be passed in the current term of government. However, he added that with the Senate showing little sign of yielding, it was more likely that the government would look to non-legislative solutions in its quest to bring education spending back under control.
He said options available to the government that would not require Senate approval included possible cuts to research funding as well as a potential freeze on existing levels of university funding.
While he described such moves as a“ brutal and blunt way of controlling spending”, Norton also said that with a weakened economy and the government seemingly determined to find budgetary savings, such measures could re-emerge in the likely event that the Coalition is not able to gain the Senate cross-bench support it needs to achieve its aims for university deregulation.
Speaking ahead of the Coalition’ s ousting of Tony Abbott in favour of Malcolm Turnbull as the nation’ s new prime minister, Norton said that the return of a Labor government next year, and reinstatement of Kim Carr as education minister, could mean alternative reforms. These included measures such as reducing the enrolment of lower-ATAR students at universities or changes to the demand-driven system, he said. ■
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