The Future of Higher Education - 10

Part 3: Technology and Education
Higher education is deeply invested in the digital
world. While campuses and some academics
might struggle to keep up with each new online
innovation, they have long committed significant
resources to computing. Some academics create
new tools and take them out to the broader
world, most famously the founders of Google.
Others develop new applications for academic
use, from courseware to interinstitutional
enterprises like Project MUSE and the HathiTrust
Digital Library.
Perhaps the most intensive aspect of academic
computing is online teaching: not just teaching
with technology in classrooms, but classes which
occur entirely online. The number of such classes
has been rising gradually over the past several
decades, and leapt up drastically in spring 2020.
These occur in a variety of forms, from mostly
synchronous ( " live " classes, such as those over
Zoom) to mostly asynchronous (taking place
over time, when students can do the work, such
as through email and discussion boards) to very
large massively open, online classes, or MOOCs.
Teaching online courses requires faculty and
support staff to be prepared for that different
format, much as teaching a large lecture class
differs from teaching a small lab. Technology
support can be extensive, making sure course
materials appear as needed on various platforms,
and helping off-campus students access and
make the best use of them. Interest in online
learning seems to be steadily growing, and we
should expect to see campuses devote more
resources in that direction.
In this section we will address four subfields of
campus technology: enterprise support, open
education and access, extended reality (XR), and
artificial intelligence (AI).
ENTERPRISE SUPPORT
First, campuses maintain a very wide range of
hardware and software, in addition to supporting
Wi-Fi and Ethernet networks. At the enterprise
(full-campus) level, academic information
technology (IT) units enable access to learning
management systems (LMSes), web content
management systems, student financial records,
class registration, and many more. IT supports
a swarm of technologies within classrooms,
such as smart boards, projectors, document
readers, and, of course, Wi-Fi. IT also maintains
technology for specific departments and faculty,
from research computing to certain software
packages. IT does all of this with an intense focus
on security, given the many, many cybersecurity
threats facing any entity online.
Campus IT departments face significant
challenges in doing so. To begin with, the digital
world innovates at a blistering speed, which
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Part 3: Technology and Education
Part 1: The Global Context
The Future of Higher Education

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Future of Higher Education
