Director of education for SEEK Investments Joshua Nester joins Martin Betts in conversation at the March HEDx conference in Melbourne. As an industry leader in ed-tech, Mr Nester gives a global overview of investments currently being made in private universities, ed-tech companies, management systems and content aggregators. He outlines how this is changing the competitive landscape of global higher education.

The conversation is followed by a panel led by Sue Kokonis, chief academic officer at SEEK's parent company, Online Education Services. She is joined by CEO of Edugrowth David Linke, pedagogical evangelist at Adobe Manuela Franceschini, deputy vice-chancellor (education) at RMIT Sherman Young, and dean of Macquarie Business School Eric Knight. Together, they answer the question: how will technology change higher education for good?

Ernst and Young (EY) Oceania education leader Alison Cairns told Campus Review their student surveys have shown digital transformation – using new technology to improve learning and teaching experiences – needs to be led by vice-chancellors and boards. (You can read a summary of EY's survey results here.)

"It is absolutely about leadership. The difference between transformations that are successful and transformations that fail is around leadership and bringing people on that journey," she said.

"The ones that don't do so well are the ones that are purely technology transformations, and then they follow up with change management and it's a little bit challenging."

"[Then staff] say, 'Well actually I'm not sure I signed up for this'. Or 'I don't like the way this works'. Or, 'this doesn't really suit my faculty, doesn't really suit how I want to do it,'" she said.

EY recommends university leaders put humans at the centre of any tech or digital learning upgrade, instead of placing new online resources to 'tick a box'. Their approach is to ask different questions of the different humans who will be benefiting from the tech transformation.

Ms Cairns said universities that have used this style of digital learning innovation have seen an uptick in student enrolments and engagement, along with higher staff and researcher satisfaction.

She explained one of the most important aspects of university study for students is quality of teaching. If students can pick which format best suits them, they are likely to think the quality of teaching is much higher.

Students also care about career outcomes – what is going to get me the qualification I need, for the least amount of money, in the shortest amount of time?

What are the tech innovation limitations?

Layers of leadership in bigger universities might be a reason for slow change, some education thought leaders say, but EY says it hasn't found a difference in the ability to adapt between small and large unis.

"I think our universities are very positive about change. They're very positive about what the education sector does for our country," she said.

"Some of these businesses and universities have been around for 500 years, so they do something right."

She said universities have already shown what they're capable of, through the rapid switch to online learning in 2020.

"Universities did a fantastic job of moving from classroom teaching to emergency response teaching [during the Covid-19 pandemic]," she said.

"I just want to be really clear, that's not digital learning. It was emergency response teaching. And they did that so swiftly with just the resources that they had just so that students could keep learning.

"But that took leadership from the top, right? Obviously there was technology involved in that, but we had staff leaning in, we had academics leaning in, we had research leaning in and the students had to lean in as well."

For example, posting recorded lectures and tutorial slides fits into 'emergency response' online learning, but doesn't represent learning operations that reflect digital competency.

Asynchronous education, where students access course material on their own time, is the required next step.

"I might be an under-served learner, you might be a particularly bright student. I might need my learning slightly different," she said.

"So I might be someone who does well in case studies, gamification or video as opposed to text. And you might be someone who actually prefers text.

"[Asynchronous education] means that we can have all of that information and we can actually consume it as students in a manner that suits us best."

This approach is a real asset to universities, Ms Cairns said, because it promotes lifelong learning and attracts different cohorts, something all education sectors are looking to achieve.

"[Students] need to have the option of being able to consume in the manner that maximises their learning because a lot of them have either got care responsibilities or they have to work," she said.

"Or if you look at people who are career changes or job upgraders or lifelong learners, they might have family commitments.

"They cannot commit to being onsite on campus all of the time, even if that's their preferred method.

"If you think to the Universities Accord report and the under-served learner, and making sure there are plenty of opportunities for everyone to go through higher education, this is actually having a significant change."

How can universities put people at the centre?

The ones who are doing it well "are consulting, bringing people in from the faculties, bringing people in from executive, bringing people in from their council and actually saying, what is our 10-year vision? Where are we going to focus first?" she said.

"We've actually seen great acceleration in learning, and we've been able to see the fantastic content that the universities have being able to be shared to a much wider audience."

However, some university staff say they don't want to teach to half empty classrooms, and if students choose a more digital learning method where they don't have to show up to class, that might become the reality.

But, Ms Cairns said, a drop in class numbers could actually result in more engaged students, and called on universities to track that engagement.

"If you are replacing [face-to-face classes] with engaging learning and personalised learning and things that you like to learn in a manner that you like to consume, you're actually going to get increased engagement," she explained.

"It's not one or the other, right? It is not classroom or online, it is now hybrid," she said.

"Some things will still be in classroom, some things will be online, some will be asynchronous, some will be deep engagement.

"And if you think in Australia [there's] remote and rural; it's not practical, particularly with cost of living for some students to have to come to the city or come to a big regional campus in order to learn.

"They need that flexibility."

Even if universities are large and established institutions, the education leader said, they should be looking to set themselves apart through tech learning.

"We don't want any university to be homogenous. We actually want them to have their uniqueness and differentiation," she said.

"We're at the end of the industrial revolution, which was about mechanising labour. We're at the beginning of the information revolution. Where does information live? It lives in universities.

"How do we take the best of that into transformation and use the best and brightest minds to take education forward into the next century?"

Ernst & Young has recently released a report detailing research conducted with Times Higher Education. Here is the overview of their findings.

Why human-centred transformation design is critical for universities

Purposefully putting human needs and expectations at the centre of higher education digital transformation will improve university success.

Three questions to ask

• Convince me, teach me, support me – how can university leaders meet student expectations and support their success?
• Empower me, free me, enlighten me – how can digital technology help staff to create better content and seamless processes that improve student experience?
• Equip me, connect me – how can researchers be better supported to conduct leading-edge research?

When embarking on digital transformation, universities often deploy strategies that serve the needs of the institution and its existing structures and processes.

For many of the students and staff on the receiving end of such changes, the experience has been less than ideal.

“Digital learning” is still often old content on a new platform, rather than being designed to enable optimal learning through personalized, digital self-access.

On many campuses, staff and students still struggle daily with multiple systems to get simple administrative tasks done.

We contend that institutions would get a far better return on their digital investment by putting the needs of the people they serve at the centre of technology efforts.

In a bid to understand what the people at the centre of universities want from digital transformation, we undertook research with the people who experience it every day. Our latest study, conducted in collaboration with Times Higher Education (THE), includes more than 3,000 students and hundreds of teaching faculty and professional staff in eight geographies, and explores their wants and needs. 

The research clearly shows critical areas where digital transformation needs to deliver a better experience for students and staff. This article surfaces a few of the ideas from the study. Read the report to learn what each cohort had to say and see the full body of our research and recommendations for university leaders.

Chapter 1: What do students expect from their universities?

Exceptional teaching, real-world career advantages, convenience and flexibility

Universities are underestimating student expectations

The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed what students want from universities. Their educational norms and situations have shifted. In our survey, 60% of students are managing work or caring commitments alongside their studies. Partly for this reason, campus-based students expect to access content and administrative processes online, in their own time.

Concerningly, one-third of students told us they feel neutral about or unhappy with their choice of university. This should raise alarm bells for university leaders who are tasked with delivering a positive experience for all their students. Not meeting expectations around improving career prospects or preparing students for the workplace are key drivers of overall unhappiness. 

In order of priority, our research shows us that students are looking for their higher education institutions to deliver:

1. High-quality teaching, including using digital technology
2. Improved career prospects and workplace preparation
3. Better support to achieve their learning goals

To meet these expectations, there are a number of actions that university leaders can take. We have looked at these through the eyes of the students that universities serve.

Teach me effectively and in a way that suits me

Quality of teaching is the most-cited reason for both happiness and unhappiness with a student’s choice of university, indicating that some universities are offering better teaching experiences than others. Students also give low satisfaction ratings to the “quality of online learning” - putting it at the bottom of all surveyed aspects of university life.  Although, the amount of online versus in-person teaching is of little concern.

What’s missing from the digital learning experience is engagement. Although students rate the availability, quality of production and accessibility of digital learning materials reasonably well, they give low ratings to its ability to engage, enable collaboration or check understanding.

This reflects the fact that many universities are still simply recording lectures and posting lecture notes and reading lists online.

Students asserted that if funds were available for technology-related investments, they would prefer this to be invested in training teachers to deliver digital learning more effectively (45%) and in better digital learning materials (41%), rather than in upgrading the technology.

Convince me your university can improve my career prospects

Not meeting expectations around improved career prospects and preparing students for the workplace are key drivers of overall unhappiness with university choice. To win student choice, universities must better understand what students expect from higher education (HE) and offer programs that directly support their career goals.

Just under half (48 per cent) of students indicated that the main reason they chose their program was to qualify for a chosen career or improve their career prospects but a concerning 21 per cent of final year undergraduates say their university experience does not meet their expectations regarding preparation for the workplace. 

Creating programs that provide students with the skills they need for the future workplace will require critical thinking.

Support me to succeed academically and find connection

Our survey found that almost three-quarters (74 per cent) of students rate support to achieve academic goals as very or extremely important. Lack of support was also a key reason for students’ unhappiness with their choice of university, especially among mid-level and final-year students. 

Students also need to find connections with each other. Campus location remains students’ third reason for choosing a university, suggesting the campus experience is not over. But its role may need to be reimagined.  Nearly two-thirds of students say the campus is where they prefer to access social events and networking. This is key to students’ wellbeing, sense of belonging and developing social skills in addition to reducing feelings of isolation in an increasingly online learning environment. 

Chapter 2: What do university staff expect from digital transformation?

More time, better tools and quality data to help them deliver more value.

Universities misjudge the importance of the employee experience

While the student experience is fundamental to a successful digital transformation, university leaders must also pay attention to the staff (teaching faculty, researchers and administration) experience. The human experience includes all of the people involved in making a university work. To be successful, digital transformation needs to meet their needs and expectations, too.

Teaching faculty

Empower me to create quality digital content

Teaching faculty must be supported in carving out time to design and oversee the development of new curricula and learning materials that incorporate the best of digital and in-person learning modes. From our focus groups, we learned that many university teachers urgently need further training in blended teaching best practice. They need to understand how to both develop curricula and content for effective digital or blended learning and deliver teaching and learning support using the chosen modes.

Free me to focus on the important tasks

For teaching faculty, time is their most precious resource. Digital transformation should enable them to devote more time to their core missions of teaching and supporting students or leading research. Providing more asynchronous content will free them from needing to deliver in-person lectures, while using virtual meetings and online scheduling tools can help them provide one-on-one student support more efficiently.

"We are trying to give back time to pedagogy and teaching by making things quicker. It is now easier to design timetables and organise assessments."

UK/Ireland faculty focus group

However, simply implementing new tools and processes will not automatically lead to meaningful time savings. Faculty in our focus groups said they were faced with a myriad of new systems and tools, which were unintuitive, difficult to use or duplicative.

Enlighten me so I can better support learning outcomes

The higher education sector is currently grappling with improving learning outcomes. With the move to new modes of teaching and learning, faculty need to easily assess the effectiveness of their teaching and continuously adjust based on what is working well and what isn’t.  As more systems move to digital, there’s increased potential to analyze the data and create meaningful insights around student interactions, their levels of engagement and their learning progress. By collating that information into progress dashboards, faculty can track learning progress at an individual, class or program level, as well as identify students who require more support or programs that need adjusting. 

Researchers

Equip me to conduct leading-edge research

Universities have tended to under-invest in the digital transformation of research, as the focus shifted to teaching and learning. The investment needed is not just better equipment and computing power to support leading-edge research. There is also a real need to streamline and automate the significant level of administration surrounding research, to free up researchers’ time and help them be successful.

Processes ripe for digital transformation include grant applications and management, risk assessments, scheduling access to shared equipment, results disclosures, reviews, audits, publication and dissemination.

Connect me to other researchers

In many cases, research and innovation are not solo efforts but collaborative ones. The research community has a particular need to connect, share data and ideas, and work together to solve problems. The use of digital technologies for research is making collaboration within and across institutions much faster, more efficient and effective. This is greatly facilitating international research collaboration, widening the pool of potential research collaborators, which is particularly important in niche fields.

Administrators

Show me the data I need and save me from busy work

Our focus groups with administrative staff revealed a cohort that feels increasingly overworked and overwhelmed, with many digital transition initiatives actually adding to workload pressures.

The most cited challenge for administrative staff is that the data they need to perform their jobs resides in disparate siloed systems and cannot readily be combined. As a result, universities end up with a patchwork of siloed systems with different access points, that are not integrated, cannot share data, and have a very different look and feel.

Digital processes generate a wealth of data that administrators are hungry to use to drive decisions, but insights cannot be generated when data resides in silos.

"It’s about increasing the amount of time staff can spend making a difference to the students versus satisfying the system."

Paul LeBlanc, President, Southern New Hampshire University

In addition, many universities are looking at how to automate HR, finance and procurement processes across the institution. Automating routine student-facing tasks, such as processing applications can continue to relieve the burden on administrative staff.

For universities to truly survive and thrive in a digital era, university leaders need to maximize the value of digital transformation, focus on designing services and processes around the needs of the people they serve — from students to administrative staff, and deliver a distinctive student offering and digital experience that sets them apart. This means aligning the value proposition with evolving student and workforce demands, having a clear understanding of the end-to-end student experience and how to make it more convenient, engaging and supportive, using technology. It also means designing services and systems that enable faculty and staff to spend more of their time supporting students to achieve their learning and career readiness goals. And of course, the technology must be matched with investment in upskilling faculty and staff to deliver an exceptional student experience.  

Summary

Successful digital transformation in higher education is predicated on putting the humans that they serve at the centre of all transformation projects – from students to teaching faculty to administrative staff. By understanding their needs and expectations, university leaders can build strong strategies, invest in the right technologies, and strengthen their university’s student offering so they thrive in a digital era. 

This article is by Catherine Friday, the EY Global Education Leader and EY Oceania managing partner of government and health sciences. It is summary of an Ernst &Young (EY) Digital Transformation survey and report, which asked over 3,000 students around the world how they think their university performs in the digital learning space.

Mike Ilczynski is the director of education at SEEK Investment and a global investor in ed-tech and higher education. In this conversation with Martin Betts he shares why he invests in tech, and how that contributes to lifelong learning. Mr Ilczynski says significant growth is waiting for providers willing to be 'tech optimists', like SEEK has been. The episode also covers the opportunities for technology and partnerships to help address some of the challenges facing the Higher Education sector.

The Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal nanosatellite (SpIRIT) launched at 5:19am (AEDT) on December 2 from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, will extend its one-metre long solar panels and thermal radiators in the next few weeks.

The shoe-box sized 11.5kg device will then orbit 513 km above Earth for two years to make sure all its features are working, travelling backwards and forwards from the north to south pole, turning to always face the sun.

It is carrying an Italian X-ray detector that is designed to search for bursts of gamma rays, which are created when stars die or collide.

The spacecraft is the first Australian satellite to have a foreign space agency's equipment as its main instrument onboard.

The university received $7m funding from the Australian Space Agency to develop the nanosatellite, which has new space-tech including a thermal control system and electric propulsion system.

UniMelb professor and SpIRIT Mission Principal Investigator Michele Trenti said the launch was an 'incredible milestone' for the Australian space industry.

"SpIRIT is one of the most sophisticated nanosatellites in the world, with the potential to contribute exciting information about the universe and complement areas of investigation traditionally carried out by much larger satellites," she said.

In its full operational phase, two years from now, the spacecraft will test the performance of the new gadgets, and measure their long-term performance for future endeavours.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched SpIRIT into space, which will enter 'safe' mode and reenter our atmosphere to 'burn up' after its work is complete.

The Thrive smartphone app was rolled out to the Monash community – providing mental health support in response to the challenges and needs reported by students throughout Victoria’s pandemic lockdowns.

Developed by Thrive researchers at the Turner Institute, and co-designed by students, the app encourages users to check in daily, be more aware of their feelings, and identify if they’re struggling.

Turner Institute director and Thrive co-lead Professor Kim Cornish said the app is unique in Australia because it is a not-for-profit resource that records no student data.

"There are hundreds of mental health apps available via app stores, and unfortunately, many share private health information with third parties without disclosing it," Professor Cornish said.

"Thrive has been developed by a mental health research-trained lab for the community good, with privacy, co-design and evidence-based research baked into the development from day one - and it’s free for all users."

Users can log and monitor trends in their mood and access well-being resources covering topics like dealing with stress, mindfulness and breathing exercises, journaling, and procrastination-fighting tools.

Thrive co-lead and lead researcher Melinda McCabe said the app’s intensive design phase included two clinical trial-type studies, one with over 60 students and another with over 150 students. 

"The main goal of the app is to help students become more aware of their mental health and to seek help early if they need it," Ms McCabe said. 

"We hope all students find something within the app that they benefit from, whether it's the journaling tools called the ‘Wheel of Feels’ or the evidence-based Pomodoro timer to fight procrastination when their workload starts to build."

"We wanted something for everyone."

The Thrive app is available to all Monash students and staff with an active Monash email address and is available for free through all major app stores.

Her Royal Highness Princess Astrid of Belgium arrived in Australia with 350 delegates, some of whom are teachers and educational technology (Ed Tech) experts from Europe, who networked with their Australian counterparts on Tuesday to talk about AI in education.

Campus Review spoke to Thomas Van Cauwenberghe, chief of industry hub Edtech Station, who said AI is proving to be a great tool for Belgian teachers to create lesson plans and write exams.

A survey conducted by Edtech Station in February found that of the 350 Edtech companies in Belgium, one-third had already implemented AI in their tools, and the other 60 per cent said they were looking into it.

Another survey in August found that 98 per cent of the same participants said they had implemented AI into their tools, but had shifted from student-focused to teacher-focused uses.

"There was a shift. While in February, the tools were used to assist the [student], in August, most of the tools that used AI were to help the teacher," he explained.

"There was a big shift in the comprehension of how to use AI, and I'm sure that's something that will evolve in the future."

Mr Van Cauwenberghe said although AI has been around for a while, it really exploded when ChatGPT became popular, which gave teachers the wrong impression of the technology.

"Before Christmas last year, one of our professors asked his pupils, 'Who knows about ChatGPT?', and only a few hands were raised," he said.

"When they came back from Christmas holidays, he asked the same question, and everybody knew ChatGPT."

This rapid growth in a largely unknown tool in the education sphere prompted a reaction from teachers, Mr Van Cauwenberghe said.

Concerns about students cheating remained and their infringement of privacy whilst using generative AI services.

"It makes me think about when the calculator was introduced, people thought that students wouldn't learn maths anymore," he said.

"Now, people use the calculator to [learn] maths, and that's the same thing that's going to happen here."

"We need time to learn how to deal with what is provided by this new tool presented to us."

Australia and Europe have both released frameworks to regulate AI and protect its users' well-being and privacy, but Mr Van Cauwenberghe said the technology is evolving so fast that in six months, these frameworks might be irrelevant.

He explained that although AI can be used for learning, it is evolving too quickly to really see any huge benefits for students

He believes it will become more useful in the future when it slows down.

Critical thinking skills

The EdTech creator went on to say that, ultimately, schools will have to teach students how to spot lies and misinformation on services like ChatGPT because there was no way to stop its integration into schools.

There is concern that generative AI or AI used for learning, will inhibit the development of critical thinking skills in students and cause them to believe whatever an AI source tells them.

D-teach is a Belgian online training centre that makes education accessible for those who need to learn remotely, and it has worked with Australian universities, such as the University of Queensland, to deliver critical thinking courses.

Director of D-teach Lieselot Declercq told Campus Review those skills must be used to ask chatbots like ChatGPT the right questions and decide whether its responses are correct.

Ms Declercq said traditional schools and tech companies needed to work together to upskill teachers and complete their understanding of AI.

"A lot of people are anxious if they don't know what it is about. The first [step] is to inform people about what AI is, and how they can use it," she said.

"We must inform our students, parents and teachers about the ethical aspects of AI, [have them] be aware they are using a platform that is collecting their data, so they must think critically [about that]."

Ms Declercq said personalised study buddies and AI chatbots can improve education, particularly for students who need extra support or a specific type of teaching, and AI can provide that future for the sector.

An accurate prediction of what AI technologies’ impact will be, is complex for students and universities alike. After decades of research into AI technology, the release of ChatGPT and other AI technologies in changed everything. Yet AI hardly gets a mention in the interim report of the Accord.

AI has undoubtedly changed the landscape for higher education irrevocably. It is leaving more of us needing to, and few of us currently able to, fully understand how or what its implications will be. It is critically important that those reviewing the sector address it fully as an issue.

There is a growing body of knowledge on AI in education, arising from research, which needs to be looked at in combination with the business experience exhibited in multiple sector best practices. These developments are discussed on the HEDx podcast in an episode you can access here, in which we dissected various responses to breakthroughs in AI technologies.

This discussion surfaces the need for responses to be proportional by identifying which higher education problems we need to solve. Once these starting points are established we will be able to take the right steps in exploring how AI will impact us all.

There is clearly a need for responses to the technologies from individual practitioners, universities, and other HED institutions and their leaders. But a response is also needed for the sector as a whole, all of which must progress beyond the initial reactions of fear so we can respond beyond head-in-the-sand attempts to ban the technology.

But the more measured responses will take time to become established and thought through. This will require a larger number of us to be armed with appropriate and relevant understanding and experience. We need ongoing research and ongoing access to global and out-of-sector best practice.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale and range of ways and areas in which AI might impact the learning processes and business operations of our sector. To cope with that we need to define manageable, bite-sized, and specific HED problems and issues. Once this is done we can experiment with how AI can contribute or otherwise. 

This requires a managed response within our institutions, which in turn calls for appropriate leadership, strategy, governance, and resourcing and management of innovative processes. Research understanding will continue to inform some of these. Experience from practical implementations based on that research will also be needed.

Much of the leadership challenge is cultural and relates to the need to demonstrate, through role modelling behaviour, our ability to be vulnerable.  We are not used to this.

Given that all leaders are ill-prepared and blind-sided by these technologies, the worse response would be to present as invulnerable, or ignore them.  The process of developing understanding and experience, to help with a journey toward future mastery, comes from demonstrating and adopting authentic vulnerability. It needs a questioning and exploratory mindset.

A further principle that is enabled by cultural foundations of vulnerability, is to adopt exploratory behaviour into the specific and proportional problems and solving them through partnerships. These problems will be of both a pedagogic and administrative nature. Pedagogic matters obviously include academic integrity. But an over-focus on that from a controlling mind-set might lead to babies being thrown out with the bath water. It could add to our isolation from students who do not see being controlled as the opportunity they are looking for, nor one they need.

In a world of increased democratisation of HED, and with the need to ensure increased equitable student access and support to completions, applications that focus on student retention are a good place to start. This may mean more cooperation and collaboration with EdTech providers of student support services.  We might also need to increase collaboration with other technology and service providers to our sector, particularly those that develop understandings of technologies in business and areas of future work skills. These may be in parallel and complementary to how academic and research environments advance technology and scientific and ethical expertise and experience.

The over-riding principle needs to be acting in our future students’ and learners’ best interests. Not doing so might add to our irrelevance to and distancing from our future customer base, which might no longer see the value of our offering as worthwhile.  This would relate to the skills that students will need, and the preferences they have for working and learning. They include attitudes they have for how rapidly advancing, and ubiquitous and freely available technology, can be used to help.

This will create a new and complex leadership and cultural agenda for practitioners and leaders who wish to keep in step with students and learners. It also creates a dynamic policy challenge for the sectors’ leaders and policy makers when forecasts and preparations for long-term visions are being made.

At a time when the Australian Universities Accord is looking to reposition the sector and its institutions for a doubling of student completions by 2050, primarily from under-represented equity groups, ignoring the potential contribution of AI to achieving that end is an oversight. The most significant recent breakthrough productivity technology needs a bigger place in our plans than that. Given limitations of funding and the issues with student pipelines from our school system, this might be the only means of realising the vision.

The challenge to be proportional, vulnerable, and exploratory, with a student focus, is required of our sector leaders and policy makers, as behaviour to model. We need leaders and practitioners throughout the sector to then follow that lead and be truly focussed on future students and learners needs. This will require embracing and making visible global best-practice learning experiences, while in a period of fast-paced continuous technological innovation, alongside investing in the research underpinning the science and understanding.

She makes a case for much stronger partnerships between higher education providers, employers, and innovative tech companies, and outlines ways in which technological innovation will reshape the world of higher education.

Dr Kaslowski and her team at MBS have created an online education brand (MBS Online) and set up a future of learning lab called 'MBS&', which recently launched its first future of learning incubator.

Dr Nora Kaslowski holds degrees in psychology, management, and teaching. She began her career as a researcher focusing on human-technology interaction and advanced to head of department before the age of 30. Dr Kaslowski consults with many ASX top 100 organisations, helping equip leaders with a deep sense of purpose and hope for the part they can play in shaping the future.

It is particularly challenged by having a dynamic, highly distributed and open environment, which has
an impact on enforcing access control.

Size also plays a part; universities comprise over 1.3 million students, 130,000 employees, and a vast
amount of valuable data.

“Unique and complex, the sector remains a significant target for cybercriminals and foreign interference attacks,” a recent report by RMIT to the government states.

A desktop review of annual reports by state auditors shows that universities have some key areas
around IT controls, and specific management of access controls and privileged user account
monitoring that needs to be urgently addressed if ongoing cybersecurity threats and risks for the
sector are to be remediated.

While not all states and territories publish an audit of universities’ annual reports each year, at least
four do, and it is quickly apparent from those four that there are shared weaknesses that are indicative of the challenges faced by the sector.

The most recent NSW audit found “many repeat issues” related to IT controls around privileged user
activity monitoring and user access management.

These included: 23% of universities not reviewing logs of privileged user activities, 62% “not quarantining activities of privileged users to environments that do not have internet-facing capabilities, and 77% “not having automated notification systems to alert the IT function when user permissions are changed”.

There was also a specific example identified of a university that lacked proper access controls for accounts payable and payroll files, leaving the files accessible and editable by too many people.

Victoria’s most recent audit found one-third of IT control weaknesses in 2021 were issues with
privileged and user access management, and that was consistent with the prior year.

“We continue to find a high number of deficiencies in this area,” the audit stated, adding that third-party access, as well as “logs of access to administration/privileged user accounts”, were deficient at some universities.

Western Australia's most recent analysis is also based on 2021 figures, where it observed a 20% increase in information systems control weaknesses year-on-year.

Out of 124 weaknesses identified, 49% related to information security issues, including system and network vulnerabilities and weak access controls, while 38% covered “the monitoring and logging of user activity, processing and handling of information, and review of access privileges.”

Occurrences were marginally higher than in 2020, again showing the challenge universities face in mitigating user access weaknesses.

The Queensland Audit Office, meanwhile, has uncovered issues such as “ineffective management of
access to the systems" and "not enough monitoring of the access and activities of privileged users."

In total, information systems security and access deficiencies increased from 36 in 2020 to 55
in 2021.

Australia’s universities, as a general rule, are aligned with the need to invest in cybersecurity,
particularly after several high-profile attacks against participants in the sector over the last couple of
years.

In addition, where universities are taking on government-related projects, they are often
required to meet minimum cybersecurity standards.

However, as Queensland’s auditors noted, while universities are “continually improving the security of
their systems, the risk of cyber attacks continues to increase”.

The sector will maintain its stature as a valuable target, given “the sensitive nature of the information the entities hold about students and research”.

It’s clear that some universities, more than others, are ‘ahead of the game' when it comes to
addressing cybersecurity risks and embracing industry best-practice - such as the Australian Cyber
Security Centre’s Essential Eight - to uplift their controls.

Federal Education authorities recommend Essential Eight and NIST as obvious framework choices. In NSW, all but two universities use either of these frameworks or a hybrid of both.

In Queensland, auditors said “some education entities” had made progress, setting more complex password requirements and implementing MFA on user accounts, though auditors rightly concluded that more could still be done.

For universities that struggle, there are often clear signs that point to relative immaturity, and that put
their access control and privilege user problems into perspective.

In NSW, for example, 54% of cyber training is untailored to staff positions and levels, meaning those in elevated positions, with access to sensitive information or systems, receive the same training as someone who is less of a target or who has more locked-down permissions.

To improve access control and privileged user account management, an access review at least once
a year is advisable.

This can identify who has access to what and whether that access is needed; and uncover instances of privilege creep, where people continue to accumulate privileges or system access as they change jobs internally.

Universities should also work to adopt Privileged Access Management (PAM) technology that is
capable of securing every privileged user, asset, and session that can automatically discover and
onboard all privileged accounts, secure access to privileged credentials and secrets, and audit all privileged activities.

There is also a growing adoption amongst Australian universities of solutions that provide endpoint
controls that remove the use of high-risk local administrative accounts along with application control to monitor and block unwanted applications, including malware.

With broader adoption of these kinds of capabilities, universities have a better prospect of moving the
the needle on access control and shrinking their threat landscape.