Learning Ecosystems

Higher education has a particularly large exposure because so much of its technology grew through local initiative: someone built a useful tool, installed an open-source application, or kept a departmental website running. That approach delivered considerable value and fit the education ethos, but it also distributed responsibility for maintaining and defending software across multiple teams and individuals with very different capabilities.

I believe we are entering a period that will significantly accelerate the move toward managed services, shared infrastructure, and restrictions on locally operated applications exposed to the public internet, particularly for under-resourced institutions. This reaches into budgets, institutional autonomy, and the ways educational technology gets built and delivered—well beyond the immediate work of a CIO responding to a security alert.