Gartner on Higher Education: a Conversation at Georgetown University — a guest post by Paul Heald on Michael Feldstein’s blog
Quotes include:
The major higher education trend he identified was the conflict between IT’s role in promoting organizational efficiency versus its role in promoting personal productivity. Organizational efficiencies often come at the expense of the administrative freedom of students and professors. As a result, these groups, whose buy-in is essential to the realization of organizational efficiencies, have a cultural bias against such organizational efficiency when it affects their personal productivity tool choices.
In addition, the presentation included the identification of several ‘megaforces’ critical to higher education. These included (emphasis DSC):
- The death of distance – in an increasingly connected world, physical distance becomes ever less relevant to the choices we make.
- The removal of time constraints – with 24/7 access to learning, administrative systems, etc., the time constraints once associated with working are no longer as pressing. Conversely, this suggests that students now expect university services to be available 24/7.
- Web 2.0 and the use of social software – the role of collaboration and the web being a two-way medium.
- Segregation through world communities – while old forms of segregation collapse under the force of the networked world, newer forms of separation evolve among world communities.
- Organization-centric versus people-centric consumerism and the proliferation of free services have changed the balance of power.