As Australian undergraduate student numbers decline and postgraduate education morphs to include shorter and more concentrated online courses, universities are working to ensure students can tailor their own educational experience. Yet big institutions can move slowly, and in a time-poor and increasingly competitive world, students insist on flexibility and value for their money. “To put students at the centre of the experience, we have to understand how they learn best and what are the kinds of things they need to learn online,” says Macquarie University business school dean Eric Knight.
Post-pandemic, most universities are now giving students the option of hybrid learning, rather than giving them a binary choice of either fully online or fully in person, Knight says.
“I think we learned that students want flexibility in how they learn,” he says. “It isn’t just about what you can do in the classroom and on campus but also sometimes from home, and when you work you need flexibility in how you study. I think we’ve now adapted to a much more hybrid way of teaching.”
“I think we learned that students want flexibility in how they learn,” he adds. “It isn’t just about what you can do in the classroom and on campus but also sometimes from home, and when you work you need flexibility in how you study. I think we’ve now adapted to a much more hybrid way of teaching.”
Meanwhile, UNSW dean of lifelong learning Nick Wailes says universities increasingly understand that students’ life experience can have value in an educational setting, noting “it’s important not assume that people are coming in with nothing”. He adds that universities need more models to evaluate life experience in order to place incoming students at a suitable level.
“The amount of RPL (recognition of prior learning) that’s being granted now in programs is significantly increasing,” he says. “You can see very significant uptakes in that. That just reflects that people are not coming in naive or without prior learning.”
Australian Technology Network CEO Ant Bagshaw points out that students may have different motivations to those of institutions. The current financial model means that the university or higher education institution requires students to finish their courses, he says, but students may decide to leave if they feel they have absorbed sufficient learning.
“Clearly there’s high attrition, higher attrition than anyone would want,” Bagshaw says, “but we don’t know how many of those people leave their study and have a positive exit because they got the learning that they needed and the signal value that they needed, or actually they were failed by the system and they bought the wrong thing.”
Students have inexorably shifted away from the idea that degree completion is essential and the shift is especially marked in postgraduate study, says Keypath Education CEO Ryan O’Hare. Speed of completion is also changing.
“Our undergraduates now take longer to complete than they did 10 years ago,” he adds. “Our post-graduates now don’t complete in anywhere near the same measures, be they face-to-face or online.”
O’Hare argues there are three infrastructure barriers that universities have to overcome to fully meet student demand. First, he says, Keypath’s surveys have found that the standard university calendar does not fit “anytime learning”, or course pick-up, especially in relation to accreditation.
The second barrier, he says, is the Australian university workforce model, which he describes as heavily unionised and slanted toward non-variable staff.
The third barrier is the sector’s difficulties in providing simple course selection processes in a hyper-digital world.
“It is really hard to buy from universities”, O’Hare adds, noting providers of all types should take care to offer a reasonable user experience to purchasers. He expects students will unfavourably compare their university course selection experience with every other digital experience in their lives, from buying a car to getting a mortgage.