Designing higher education

The Higher Education Futures Lab (HEFL) resets the higher education research and innovation agenda, setting course for a fresh wave of impactful dialogue and design. It stimulates discussion around large and significant issues, looking beyond contemporary challenges at longer-term opportunities and contributions. HEFL serves as a platform to deliver briefings, advice, analysis, insights, and more. Tangible options will be articulated, framed by contemporary operating environments.

HELF targets the ‘research and innovation zone’. This cuts across governance issues focused on longer-term complexity, across leadership concerns about medium-term strategy, and across shorter-term management and media-driven practice. The ‘research and innovation zone’ has always been where the future of higher education comes alive, and where it can be sculptured into prospects for advancing what happens now. It is where higher education futures play. Play is not frivolous, secondary, superficial, or childish. Play means creative and meaningful research, innovation, education contributions to the environment, to roles, and to large institutions. Hasn’t this always been core to great higher education?

Ideas into action

Many countries surfed globalisation to build reputed and successful higher education systems. Continued thriving requires reinvigoration of the creative, entrepreneurial and robust research contributions that fuelled core ideas and ventures. The world needs thriving higher education design that generates and attracts expertise, ideas and impact. There is a pressing need to make ideas which inject fresh thinking into policy and practice, raise the bar on sector analysis, and keep higher education connected.

Yet across the world, the sector-specific research that drove development has dilapidated or disappeared. As higher education rocks from global abandon to nationalist reform, finding itself stunned to be the source of not the solution to spikey norm-core problems, attention narrows around zero-day troubles rather than broader or medium-term matters. It is imperative to separate higher education research, be it conceptual or empirical in nature, from political or contextual work which is much more situated, problem-focused and applied. There is a gaping need for sound research which takes a longer-term view looking beyond today’s threats to longer-term challenges, deploys robust methods, and publishes important results and findings. The world now has a shortage of such intelligence, right at the time of change when it is most sorely needed and can add most value.

Now’s the time

The role of higher education in the national and global economy demands rigorous and relevant research. Expert advice and transparent evidence have a very important role to play alongside the consideration of stakeholder identities and interests, and commercially protected advice. Governments, consultants, lawyers and advisors work on reforms of varying scales and timeframes, yet these are invariably bound by perceived pragmatic and often political or commercial constraints. Researchers and sector entrepreneurs offer broader and further reaching views, integrate more complex evidence, and situate contingent experiences in broader frames.

Once, the world had an abundance of such research insights. They flowed from conferences and national offices and budding experts, and from people with deep experience in academic and institutional systems. Sector agencies had leaders and experts who created dialogue to prototype and implement possible futures. Today, such insights are hardly planted, created, commissioned, produced, delivered, or published. This is a problem. It is imperative that such research topics be co-designed and delivered by expert-driven collaboration to curate and advance intellectual leadership in and of higher education.

Not all, but much, higher education has become somewhat mechanised algorithmically. This may be an inevitable consequence of the sector’s swing from armchair conversations to the micro-managed release and increasingly automated marking of pre-packaged digital resources. Yet mechanisation is far from imperative or simple even with large-scale service provision. Indeed, research and the problematisation and possibility that it yields is of greater importance given growth in scope and scale.

Thinking forward

Professor Hamish Coates directs the Higher Education Futures Lab (HEFL). For over 25 years Hamish has worked to improve the quality and productivity of higher education through leadership, research, innovation and advising. He has led hundreds of projects involving thousands of universities across dozens of countries, using acumen and foresight to create sustainable institution and systemwide solutions. Hamish is a highly cited author and editor of hundreds of trendsetting books, papers and reports. He has contributed to education innovation through executive appointments, public speaking, steering policy and regulatory reform, leading partnerships and consortia, convening conferences and workshops, designing platforms, and advising learners and leaders.