On this episode of HEDx Podcast, Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) director Shamit Saggar joins Martin Betts and co-host Paul Harpur to reflect on equity actions recommended in the Universities Accord.

ACSES is a newly rebranded centre that will collect evidence-based data on disadvantaged and low-socio economic groups, the cohorts the Accord strongly suggested need to have more opportunity to obtain a university qualification.

Strategies developed through its trials will be presented to universities, so they know exactly where to allocate funds to support and attract those student cohorts.

Professor Harpur leads Universities Enable (UE), a disability steering group that offers support to universities in developing disability action plans. UE submitted feedback to the Accord's interim report, advocating for students and prospective students living with disability.

Professor Saggar's and Professor Harpur's reflections on the Accord final report, and the prospects for its implementation in the months and years ahead, provide great insight into what needs to be done to carry out the review's mission of inclusion.

There is a widely held view among higher education leaders and commentators that the current UK university funding system might lead to a crisis. More than 50 per cent of UK universities are operating in the negative with no prospect of funding levels improving. The hope that increased international student fee income will save the day is diminishing. Current policy changes are coinciding with these declining international student numbers. This scenario is replicated with less intensity in other countries, and the fate of global universities is painted as bleak.

The Japanese word for "crisis", Kiki, when written in Kanji (危機) is a combination of the characters for "dangerous" (危) and "opportunity" (機). It is possible to experience both at the same time and Japanese leaders are admired for recognising the need to respond to danger whilst striving to boldly embrace opportunity.

Sensitivity, ethics and wisdom serve leaders well in both aspects of 'Kiki leadership' when responding to challenges. Last year's emergence of generative AI caused some leaders, institutions, and regulators to see crisis and only respond with a defensive mindset.

It was eye-opening to learn that Arizona State University recently responded by announcing a strategic partnership with OpenAI, the first university to do so. This partnership liberates its staff and students to embrace, experiment and innovate with the technology, grasping opportunity. Loughborough University also made news for using AI avatars to replicate lectures from global experts and subject leaders from the design world. In both instances, a rational approach to exploring opportunity among crisis requires caution and determination in equal measure, with consideration of ethics and viability to be balanced with boldness and experimentation.

Higher education leaders are typically experts in their field of discipline, which they then apply to their wider institution. They lead diverse universities with diverse histories, seeking the opportunity to create distinct missions. Loughborough has a history of being research and sports focused, but its new strategy looks at creating a better future through partnerships with technology providers and ed-tech companies.

There are many opportunities for UK and other global universities to follow in Arizona State's footsteps. There is a strong ed-tech sector well placed to support opportunistic approaches. Forging strong partnerships with ed-tech companies can be one route to differentiation that is not well measured by rankings, but still an opportunity in current circumstances.

All universities would do well, as Loughborough has, to see itself as more than its rank. There is demonstrable evidence that rankings can hinder a university's mission and inhibit bold leadership.

Loughborough University started in a position of distinct subject specialisation, and its partnership approaches are now led by an AI computer scientist with a strong research pedigree. Will a vice-chancellor's role eventually be replaced by AI? It appears unlikely in our lifetimes, because of the role's requirement of social interaction, ethical judgement and the ability to decipher big, complex university issues.

We may need more leaders that can practice the art of Kiki. It would be easy at the start of 2024 for leaders to be overcome by a sense of crisis and to be blinded from seeing opportunity. Is the quintessential start-of-year 'all-staff email' a message that will cause a fragile culture to spiral downwards? A response that stirs an ethical and rational approach to seeking opportunity is most needed at this time.

This is a time when we least need our vice-chancellors and presidents to be formulaic and replaceable by AI. We need to see boldness and distinction that will differentiate one university from another. I reflect on these matters in this HEDx episode with Andrea Burrows and Professor Nick Jennings.

Andrea Burrows is the UK managing director for Online Education Services (OES), an education body that partners with universities across Britain and Europe to create 'student-centric' online learning. She has a professional leadership background in marketing, advertising and digital transformation across higher education, finance and professional service sectors.

Professor Nick Jennings is vice-chancellor of Loughborough University with a research background in AI and cybersecurity. He researched AI systems that use both human and software aspects to be robust and useful in large scale environments. Loughborough is a UK university renowned for its sports and research capabilities.

The Australian Universities Accord final report is a response to longstanding debate among Australian providers about what form of Tertiary Education Commission to recommend.

Roger Smyth (pictured below) shares his experience working at the New Zealand Ministry of Education with co-host, Professor Giselle Byrnes (pictured right), provost of Massey University in New Zealand. 

The discussion explores what Australia can learn from the HED sector across the ditch, including how a commission should be set up and operated.

As a means of developing an Accord across the sector’s providers with the government, it has been a big step forward.

But other key stakeholders have largely missed the conversation, including students and employers directly impacted by the reforms. The Accord should also include global higher education leaders and innovators from other sectors in the conversation.

The final report and subsequent oversight mechanisms offer a chance to engage these stakeholder groups.

To ensure global competitiveness and future-proofed learning experiences, it's essential to look at the higher education sector's future through a technology lens.

It would be a significant oversight if the process didn’t incorporate views on how technology impacts future student learning in higher education.

Rapidly evolving technologies significantly impact the university environment and learning experiences.

As the Accord process considers ways to strengthen universities for the future, we would be remiss if we didn’t position the potential of technology at the centre of our policy thinking.

Mandala Partners has helped to inform the public policy debate by researching the role of EdTech in higher education.

The Coalition for Digital Learners report investigated what’s working well, what needs improving, what the barriers to progress are, and what the benefits of reform could be.

Importantly, the report focused equally on hearing from students, university administrators, and policymakers.

The survey showed that Australian university students place high value on technology to help them succeed in their studies and that they use technology ethically and effectively.  

Of the survey respondents, 80 per cent said online learning has positively impacted their academic experience.

Nearly 60 per cent of respondents agreed that greater technology integration would improve their learning and make it more engaging and entertaining – less than one-fifth of students disagreed.

Notably, the survey also showed students from diverse backgrounds – including those from lower socio-economic groups, those who don’t speak English as a first language, those caring for others, or those balancing study with work responsibilities – place greater importance on the flexibility and support EdTech tools offer.

These are the cohorts the Accord is seeking to grow to meet future national skills needs and university attainment targets.

Over half of students from diverse backgrounds said the availability of online learning was one of their top priorities compared to other learning preferences.

More than 45 per cent listed the ability to learn at their own pace as one of the most critical issues.

These results indicate that technology-enabled educational support tools are essential in driving greater equity in participation and graduation outcomes.

The report also found that fears about technology-related academic integrity – especially generative AI – are misplaced.

Most university students use technology as a supplementary tool to help them succeed in their studies – not for academically dishonest reasons.

Most students use online education tools to help them learn at their own pace, enhance their learning experience, or make their learning more personalised and engaging.

Just 10 per cent of students reported using technology to help them access answers to homework or exam material that they needed help understanding.

While this small cohort may include some with unethical motivations, it also includes students driven by a genuine lack of understanding of course material, seeking to use technology to overcome this knowledge gap

Any new policy on regulation needs to recognise that regulation and compliance measures shouldn’t hamper the proper and productive use of technology in education.

Allowing regulation and compliance to stifle ethical use of technology will put student learning and engagement at a disadvantage.

Given the links between technology use and equitable engagement, technology should play a central role in lifting equity in higher education.

Technology should also play a more central role in the Universities Accord process and what it leads to, potentially in conjunction with the local and global EdTech industry.

Embracing technology in teaching and learning will improve the quality and equity of the university system overall.

At a time when we’re looking to increase student numbers and make education more inclusive, we can’t overlook the power of technology to achieve policy goals.

As we aim to engage more students from broader backgrounds and support more of them to succeed, it’s critical to consider students' views about the technology support they need.

To have a genuine Accord based on innovation within the higher education sector, we must consider what will serve its future primary stakeholders effectively.

We discussed these topics in a conversation on a recent HEDx podcast episode available here.

We support the involvement of key stakeholder groups as an essential input to the Accord process and believe technology is critical to creating innovative learning experiences in a way that will serve national interests.

Today's learners want technology that supports personalisation by allowing them to augment and self-pace their learning and engagement.

Is compliance a barrier to giving learners - equity cohorts in particular - the technology they need?

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.

The accelerating decay in the value of acquired knowledge and experience is behind much of the increasing drive and need for lifelong learning. 

And with numbers of applicants for traditional postgraduate award programs falling, there is plentiful evidence that lifelong learning is about more than giving graduating recent school leavers, an opportunity to do a master's degree, in fully face-to-face mode on a university campus.

Beyond a call for increased funding for sovereign research, lifelong learning was a common factor in submissions to the Universities Accord.

The panel has now submitted their interim report to Minister Jason Clare. We might expect to see lifelong learning feature prominently when it is released.

But what role, if any, will we see for technology companies?

The consultation process around the Accord discussion paper, issued in February, saw more than 300 submissions.  They included thoughts from most of the 40+ universities and each university grouping. 

These inevitably gave a perspective from the providers’ current positions.  Submissions from student and staff unions, and groups of discipline leaders and professions, were also inevitably shaped by the needs of their current place in the eco-system.

These are likely to be responded to in the interim report which after all seeks to develop an Accord across the sector and between it and government.

What is less certain is whether the report will feature lessons from other sectors that our higher education system might learn from.

As we tick over the EOFY, there has been a rise, after a shaky post-pandemic period, in the value of global technology stocks.

This reflects how recent developments in technology generally, and generative AI in particular, have caught investors' and multiple sector business leaders’ attention. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a new business venture not powered by AI right now, whatever the sector.

This has added to what was already a force for disruption and transformation in the economy, and in workforce and customer service expectations. 

The use of technology in hybrid environments is undoubtedly the way of the future in all sectors. The way this will guide our rethinking of where the higher education sector is heading remains high on the agenda that comes out of the Accord process at its interim stage.

The technology sector undoubtedly has much to contribute to how we might all conceive of that despite few submissions coming directly from technology companies.

Other sectors are rapidly coming to terms with how technology allows business models to transform, to allow personalised services to be delivered at scale. 

In the best situations, this is involving partnerships between sector providers and technology companies and specialists. There is a business climate of unleashed creativity and new ways of doing things enabled by digital fluency with technology.  

The need for checks and balances in governance is being partly met by stronger partnerships and dialogue between Big Tech companies, specialist technology providers, and core sector service providers.

This is occurring across finance, healthcare, retail, entertainment, and many other sectors.

There is mounting evidence of the same shift happening in higher education. The emergence of a growing EdTech sector, from K-12 through to HE, is creating much of the dynamism in student experience, student support and learning innovation. 

It is also allowing support to areas of research infrastructure and research collaboration. We are all seeking ways of this being possible with the obvious constraints and concerns around authentic assessment and academic and research integrity.

The focus of BigTech providers to higher education has progressed and matured from being one of a product and service supplier to a partner, co-investor and collaborative innovator. 

Big tech companies are themselves entering the market for skills development and lifelong learning through industry and skills certification and in the areas of micro-credentials. And they are going further in entering new partnerships to lifelong learning ventures both in the design and delivery of digital skills programs and aligning and integrating their own certificates with award offerings of universities and other higher education providers.

A great example of this lies in the venture of the Institute of Applied Technology Digital in NSW. 

This collaboration between two well-established universities in UTS and Macquarie, with TAFE NSW and Microsoft as the founding Industry partner, was formed from the Shergold-Gonski review of the NSW VET Sector.

This partnership recognises that to meaningfully address skills gaps across sectors, government, education and industry must work together.

Collectively these partners have stepped up to create curricula from the ground up to provide new digital skills training under a new model.

This form of multi-sector dialogue and partnership has much to offer higher education. 

A strong EdTech sector provides a means for Australian higher education providers to have high-quality online delivery systems and student experience and support.

Doing so with an understanding of the needs and context of an Australian environment has advantages for institutions, staff, and students. But there is a great rate and extent of change and advancement in all areas of technology and how it is being applied, adopted, governed, and used for new business models and creative solutions in all sectors globally.

This requires our sector to have an eye on, and in accord with, global advances in technology partnerships.

Global technology companies are key co-investors and partners with local EdTech providers and innovative start-ups. But they are increasingly key partners with, rather than simply suppliers to, all Australian higher education providers.

This is vital if our student and staff experiences and support are to keep pace with advances in the needs of lifelong learners and their experience expectations.  They are also key partners to us to ensure a continuous insight into governance issues and our understanding of changes in the future of work.

We are delighted that Microsoft and HEDx are partnering together, along with other technology providers and so many sector leaders, in a conference about the future of Australian higher education on July 20^th in Sydney.

We had the chance to discuss this landscape for technology partnerships and the role that technology companies will play in the sector in a recent episode of the HEDx podcast you can access here.

Martin Betts, Co-Founder of HEDx.

Tiffany Wright, Microsoft Australia.

This initiative and other related initiatives such as the Leiden Manifesto and the Hong Kong Principles have sought to show that there are better ways of assessing research and researchers than current ranking systems, which are often commercially owned. 

DORA also highlights that, regardless of who makes the measurements, we need assessments of research publication quality that are sensitive to discipline differences and which support different research goals and objectives.

Many would argue that university rankings are equally inappropriate in assessing diverse missions of universities and their broader purposes beyond research.

The arguments would be that they do so for the same underlying reason of suiting the purposes of commercial gain by ranking companies and publishers. 

What about the matters that are important to the experiences of staff and students and university partners? How many rankings measure staff culture and feelings of safety on campus?  How many rankings genuinely measure and include what we all say is important, that we value the student experience?

Research value, and its importance to our society, arises in part from its diversity in focus and approach and its ability to address a broad range of questions.

If we subject research value to narrow and prescribed ways of measuring and assessing it, we are in danger of restricting breadth of enquiry, discriminating between approaches to pursuing it, and introducing motives for gaming of the system.

Some of the biggest challenges to research exploration have come from systems restricting inter-disciplinarity and assessing impact.

Early journals that celebrated inter-disciplinarity and open access, such as PLOS ONE, had to overcome the tendency of journal impact factors and research grant awarding bodies to value established disciplines and outlets more highly.

The most recent university rankings from Times Higher Education (THE) have described themselves as focussing on impact, with the most recent 2023 awards seeing some Australian universities achieve high rankings. 

Inevitably, these rankings are celebrated in how universities promote themselves to audiences.

The measurements are made using a methodology created by THE, within the wider framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

Other universities, of the many that did not enter the rankings, took the opportunity to publicly launch sustainability reports to demonstrate their own commitment to sustainability in terms of how they measure it, rather than THE Impact rankings. This included the University of Melbourne.

Other changes are happening in research assessment – for example, how we think about curricula vitae (CVs) is changing from current practices of more quantitative type CVs (i.e. listing every publication and grant without identifying themes and main contributions) to the concept of narrative CVs.

Narrative CVs differ by allowing significant and themed outcomes and outputs to be discussed within a more individualised narrative of impact, with a smaller number of papers listed.

Are there lessons here of how different universities might choose how they want to describe their impact in regard to their purpose and goals? They could do so by choosing to demonstrate their impact meaningfully rather than be subjected to ubiquitous and universal one size fits all rankings.

The problem with taking a one size fits all approach is also that it discriminates in terms of variability in opportunity and intent.

It results in encouraging unduly rule-bound approaches to measuring and promoting research. And it creates incentives to game the system.

DORA, as a truly global initiative, aims to ensure that research assessment reform is relevant to both developed and developing countries.

Furthermore, within nations, it aims to understand and reflect the relative mission and opportunity between large and established metropolitan universities and smaller and newer regional universities that serve vitally important local and community employment and engagement opportunities. 

We have been pioneers in Australia in some of our research funding schemes in recognising outcomes relative to opportunity (ROPE).

We have seen important initiatives in both the NHMRC and ARC, though many of these initiatives between bodies are not consistent.

A number of these ROPE approaches have since found their way into institutional promotion schemes and research management systems, and provide opportunities for better assessment of publications, rankings, grant awards, and institutional reward and recognition schemes.

The ultimate route for meaningful research assessment is for researchers themselves – and universities and grant-awarding bodies – to take ownership of the issues, to counter discrimination, and to focus on genuine research purpose and impact, over the gains to be had from playing the game.

This generates an enormous opportunity but also a clear need for leadership within the research sector.

After 10 years of DORA it is now clear that there is a global appetite for reform in research assessment, especially to ensure that research is assessed with integrity.

Ginny Barbour is vice-chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

Martin Betts, co-founder of HEDx.

There are now broader global moves towards lifelong learning and to a competency-based approach to future higher education.

These trends are of great consequence to the current deliberations taking place by the review panel for the Australian Universities Accord. The lessons from SkillsFuture are vital to learn from in shaping the future of other global higher education systems, including Australia’s, through this once-in-a-generation change.

Singapore has a very different environment from elsewhere in the world in terms of how policy is set by government and accepted by multiple stakeholders. The concepts of industry and government partnerships, and the setting of national strategy, are vital in a Singaporean approach to industry development and workforce planning. They have served it so well through 57 years of independence and nation building.

Diversification in higher education providers there has been recent, pronounced and influential. Building upon two well-established comprehensive universities, four new publicly-funded universities were founded in the past two decades, including discipline specialist institutions and other new institutions with an applied learning focus.

Together with the more vocationally-focused polytechnics and technical education institute, these post-secondary education institutions provide a strong base as part of workforce planning and system capacity building which are nationally strategically focussed.

It is noteworthy that from having followed so closely some individual models of UK, US and other international exemplars in their early development of its universities, Singapore has struck out more on its own path with SkillsFuture in 2015. It did so to be an early pioneer of a comprehensive national approach to lifelong learning.

While the formal higher education system was until now young, fast-growing, and responsive, it has now responded ahead of many others in making non-formal lifelong learning a national priority.

This is now an increasingly important need globally.  Demographic change toward ageing populations through health improvements is being added to by widespread declining birth rates. The resultant ageing workforces are then additionally subject to the need to work longer in careers increasingly subject to technology and business model change, in a knowledge economy of accelerating knowledge and experience decay.

Lifelong learning is the new global learning priority and differentiator in a similar way to how needs of schools and school leaver populations has been until now. 

Sharing experiences in this context is now crucial. The Higher Education Planning in Asia network founded in 2012 seeks to do this across the Asian region including with active engagement from more than 30 Australian universities.

Innovative private universities, such as Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico, are applying the principles to their own 150,000 students. They are doing so through close links with local, regional, and global industrial leaders and implementation through global partnerships.

The broader global drivers for this focus on lifelong learning could not be more important or urgent.

The higher education supply side is changing with mounting student debt often focussed on the highest levels of non-completors. There is widespread recognition of the need for new pedagogies, for technological innovation, and for new business models and learning products, including a widespread recognition of the value of skills and competency-based approaches. 

But the delivery base is stubborn to adjust to these system issues with infrastructure, culture, leadership and systemic inertia leading to incremental change at best, and resistance in many parts.

The tension with the slow pace of supply side evolution is being met by a demand side that is also dynamic.  Structural demographic changes in learner populations, are adding to accelerated changes in student expectations.

These are increasingly focussing on employers’ needs, and they are becoming more articulate in expressing need and dissatisfaction. Their needs are evolving increasingly quickly, without it only being a case of them finding their voice, through the changing nature of work, and accelerating technology change.

Generative AI has great implications on the university business model and its prevailing pedagogy. The assumption that current graduate outcomes match long term workforce needs is under increasing pressure.

Rather than thinking that the only priority is more public funding, or tweaks to the existing set up of current providers and settings, the most critical need right now is for a national lifelong learning strategy. 

This is not being met by piecemeal approaches to micro-credential developments, and short course funding provision, alongside capped funding and job ready graduate packages, that seem as ill-suited to job readiness as it is possible to be.

What seems clear is that the lifelong learning needs of any nation cannot be met in the same way as those that were identified for immediate post-secondary education. They are particularly ill-suited to being left as the concern and responsibility of current higher education providers in isolation.

All nations in developing a lifelong learning strategy need a strong focus on demographic data and its understanding, an ability to model and understand future workforce needs, and a national debate and dialogue on the nature of the future of work. They will require new multi-stakeholder models of collaborative and partnership-based provision in a shared strategy.

Many countries will benefit from a new agency to own this problem across government, business, and a range of providers.  It appears almost impossible to be met by being left to current providers in the sector alone. For Australia to borrow from the SkillsFuture experience might mean adding the Independent Higher Education Australia organisation, different state-based TAFE providers, representatives of groups of employers and the dedicated input of futurists.  It needs skilled and detailed demographic data input from organisations such as birthgap.org.

This needs a breaking of the mould of our current hierarchy and arrangement of providers and the policy support that surrounds them.

That includes the current separation in HELP arrangements between FE and HE, and provider standards and their registration that are unhelpful to a lifelong learning focus. And it needs dedicated lifelong learning-oriented funding and support.

Australia does not have to reinvent the wheel to do this.  It can learn from SkillsFuture in Singapore, which when they made their first forays into this had much to learn from the Australian TAFE system of its time. 

The key lesson is strategic partnerships between government, industry, and providers, all informed by common frameworks and standards, data and a strategic mindset across the ecosystem.

But Australia can also learn from partners in Asia and from global innovators.

The work being done to design, reconceive and experiment with the future of education in innovative places like Tecnologico de Monterrey, and its annual international conferences every January participated in by 5,000 global educational innovators, are a good place to start.

We covered many of these ideas and priorities together in a recent conversation on the HEDx podcast you can listen to here.

Emeritus Professor Martin Betts is the founder of HEDx and Michael Fung is the director of the Institute for the Future of Education at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico.

Avoiding a downward spiral and seeking new revenue sources is gaining prevalence. Some appear to be asking themselves how to change their long-term prognosis.

Looking in from the outside, it is tempting to ask whether we have 40+ frogs in a soon to be boiling pan, all starting to feel the heat of the moment. If that is their predicament, what are they going to do about it?

The messages coming out of US universities and their broader eco-system are also challenging.

Enrolment decline, questioning of product value, and mounting student debt particularly of non-completing students are bringing about much pre-occupation with short term survival and fixes from which it is hard to lift the head towards the horizon.

And in the UK and much of Europe, the short-term cost of living challenges, and the aftermath of a post-pandemic reset and budget repair, are making many leaders focus more on near term priorities than be able to really look much further ahead.

In these global circumstances, in marked contrast to the Soviet-inspired pre-disposition to plan in five-year cycles, the University of Waterloo in Canada has paused and taken stock for the very long term.

With the help of extensive consultation with the internal and external stakeholder communities, Waterloo has imagined how, as a world-renowned industry engaged university, it might reconceive its programs, research and external partnerships.

It has done so to reposition where the university is heading for the long term and how it will get there.

In last week’s HEDx podcast we talked together about the new strategy recently developed for Waterloo at 100, a time 35 years from now.

Waterloo sees the institution enhancing the goals it measures itself by, and changing culture internally and in the broader eco-system, to make achieving those goals possible.

And if that means changing the way research is measured and valued, and the relationship with university rankings, so be it.

Waterloo is doubling down on its founding principles as industry-engaged to commit even harder and further to a cooperative model of workplace-based educational experiences.

These reflect the founding principles of its original industry backers and reconceives them for a different global future.

As an institution, it is thinking beyond narrow concerns with impact rankings in its deep commitments to such crucial global phenomena as sustainability.

It is thinking of a wider range of dominant prevailing global challenges for the 35 years ahead. It is seeing itself as a university for the future.

In doing so it is overcoming the limitations of discipline-bound academic structures to build interdisciplinary teams and culture.

These would allow it to more effectively research wicked problems related to grand challenges in partnership with industry.

It is having to take on internal and external cultural challenges in making this work.

The university has always been industry engaged. It has values, a brand and many initiatives in entrepreneurial activities that reflect that. 

But telling its staff it values, and will promote them for, applied work is hard to make stick when the broader eco-system offers conflicting cultural symbols around research. It does so through measures such as citations and journal impact factors.

These are typically prioritised in the wider environment over industry engagement, for example.

This is why Waterloo adopts a critical and detached view of the importance of ubiquitous and misaligned drivers that lie behind university ranking.

And it is why Waterloo is considering signing on to statements such as the Declaration on Research Assessment or DORA.

It sees these as in contrast to measures of industry engagement and support more central to its brand position and mission.

There is great value in overcoming the isomorphism that drives all our institutions to look ever more like each other.

There is great merit in deriving a distinctive mission, learnt from a university’s founding principles, and to revisiting and reaffirming that with the conviction that can arise from an occasional longer and deeper look at where an institution is and where it wants to be heading.

Waterloo has now completed this with a fundamental and longer-term re-evaluation of where it is heading in the next 35 years. 

It is ground-breaking as a strategic planning exercise in a world of ubiquitous short-term planning. That short-termism can feel like a treadmill sometimes to many who work in our sector.

There is merit in more universities considering how to look beyond the five-year planning cycle in re-examining their purpose and commitment. 

It is even more important at times of global challenge and change than when things are relatively stable. It is a planning mindset particularly suited to these times in many parts of the world. 

It allows the broader set of issues of demographic and geopolitical change to influence what we do and build responses to them.

We might expect more examples of that approach to strategic planning to emerge.

With less than one month until the Universities Accord review panel in Australia submits an interim report to the minister, how much of our Accord submissions and ideas have come from positions of immediate and short-term need from close to the current situation? 

And by contrast, how many of them have come from longer-term blue-sky reappraisals of positions and missions informed by global perspectives and out of sector thinking?

In Australia right now, it would be beneficial if what is left of the last month of our Accord review took one last long look at ideas from further afield and from a longer-term perspective.

After all, isn’t that what the Accord was meant to be about? And it is what future learners, staff and university partners really need right now.

Professor Martin Betts, Founder of HEDx

Professor Vivek Goel, President and Vice Chancellor of University of Waterloo, Canada