This week, the Open University (OU) recorded about two million downloads from its presence on iTunes U, a source of higher education podcasts and videos freely available on the web. About 87% of these downloads were from outside the UK. "I'm betting most of them have been downloaded by US students studying at American universities," says Peter Scott, director of the OU's Knowledge Media Institute. He predicts that students will soon be mixing their higher education experiences from resources all over the world, choosing to study at Harvard, say, while listening to lectures from Oxford, taking part in discussion groups at the University of Mumbai, and sitting exams somewhere entirely different.
Thanks to ever more rapid advances in technology, the university experience of undergraduates and academics in 2020 will be radically different from that of their 2008 predecessors. But it will be an experience these predecessors have helped shape, no matter what country they come from.
A recent report looking into international use of web 2.0 technologies, produced for Lifelong Learning UK chairman David Melville's committee of inquiry into the changing learner experience, found that all the countries it examined were beginning to exploit the potential in these technologies. Levels of technical infrastructure made it easier for some countries than others — for example broadband-width was comparatively limited in South Africa and Australia — but in all countries it was individual academics, administrators and students that were driving developments, rather than national or institutional policy.
The fact students often have more experience of using new technologies than many university managers — even if they need guidance in using them effectively — is one reason they are influencing the way learning is delivered. But it is also to do with the collaborative nature of web 2.0.
This is likely to be another very different feature of higher education in future.
Malcolm Read, executive secretary of the universities' Joint Information Systems Committee, says one big change is students' increased openness and willingness to share. "What students do now if faced with a problem is essentially talk to a couple of strangers on the internet saying, 'This is my problem, can you help?' And then they will talk to another couple of strangers about what they have found out and what they are doing," he says. "This is a fundamentally different approach."
It is an approach that has knock-on effects for universities' teaching, research and administrative roles.
A generation on
When today's students become tomorrow's researchers, the research process is likely to become much more open, Read predicts. Research findings will become more quickly accessible to students and other researchers across the world through websites, blogs and online discussion, while commercial exploitation of some ideas may become trickier. "It's hard to patent an idea if you have discussed it with the whole world first," says Read.
In teaching terms, calls for universities to provide open source material, such as lectures, teaching notes and even seminars will become louder. Use of wikis, peer-to-peer and collaborative learning will also become more important, predicts Judith Hardy, who has been managing the Lead project at Edinburgh University looking at learner experience across the disciplines, although she stresses that students still value face-to-face interactions. "People look for a balance that suits them, which may lead to more varying degrees of face-to-face and online contact," she says.
Gaynor Backhouse, director of TechWatch, which predicts future technological developments, says virtual worlds will have an increasing impact. Sophisticated visuals and the development of "touch technology" will make it more and more difficult to tell the difference between imaginary and real worlds, she says, raising new teaching opportunities for universities — but also new challenges. Where academics are now anxious about their students' digital literacy, in terms of their ability to judge the provenance of information on the web, future concerns may be more to do with "reality literacy". To make things more complicated, she predicts that a new generation of "smart drugs" will raise other ethical issues over what is and isn't real.
According to Scott, the success of technologies such as virtual worlds will depend not simply on translating existing models of higher education, but on developing entirely new ways of learning.
"If you are in Second Life listening to a lecture, your ability to fly through a bush isn't that relevant," says Scott. Instead, the challenge is to come up with new experiences for students that make the most of what technology now makes possible. You can still lecture online, he says, but you have to do it differently.
At the same time, he says, universities will need to develop entirely new business models, with flexibility becoming paramount. Institutions will need to disaggregate every aspect of the university experience — from the chance to mix with peer groups to attending an online lecture or taking an exam — and work out how to assemble them in different ways. This could lead to separate charges for each element. They will also need to learn to work with each other, across countries and even continents, while developing their own strong brands to maintain their position in an increasingly competitive market.
Meanwhile, he predicts an increasingly pick-and-mix approach from students, who are likely to slip between full- and part-time study, take different courses at different institutions, and learn in different ways — be it online, face-to-face or virtual world — depending on mood and preference.
All this will put added pressure on university staff, with increasing demands to respond to students 24/7. Read suggests one answer could be for universities in different parts of the world to share the load so that, as often happens already in industry "the work moves around with the sun".
He predicts huge opportunities for providers of online learning, which is relatively cheap and is likely to prove essential in meeting as-yet-untapped demands from India and China. While the more collaborative approach of web 2.0 technologies poses particular challenges for many Asian countries, which have a more top-down learning culture, it also gives institutions in these countries a chance to compete with those in wealthier parts of the world. So, for the UK, the pressure is on.
"Our HE system is unlikely to stay world class without taking advantage of current and developing technologies," says David Lammy, minister of state for higher education. "That is why, as part of a wider debate we are having on the future of higher education, we are discussing how we can become a world leader in e-learning over the next 10 to 15 years."
Open University on iTunes U: www.open.ac.uk/itunes
The Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience: clex.org.uk
Learner Experiences across the Disciplines: www2.epcc.ed.ac.uk/~lead/
TechWatch: jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/techwatch.aspx
We didn't have anything to scare off this beast [...] We weren't going to attack it with our penknives
