Changing Purposes and Priorities in Higher Education

A look at the changing landscape of higher education in a post information revolution society, reviewing literature and thinking, with implications for policy and practice Pen Lister MSc MBCS FHEA EDP081N MA Learning & Teaching in Higher Education March 2013

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Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Background .................................................................................................................................................................. 5 Early Foundations...................................................................................................................................................... 5 Recent Past ............................................................................................................................................................... 5 Information Revolution and Society ....................................................................................................................... 6 Post Information Revolution ..................................................................................................................................... 6 Purposes......................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Curriculum, Learning, Teaching & Assessment...................................................................................................... 7 Learning and Teaching in a new landscape ........................................................................................................ 8 Priorities ........................................................................................................................................................................ 10 The Student Experience ......................................................................................................................................... 10 Economic Sustainability, Quality Assurance and Value .................................................................................... 10 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................................................. 13 From Miner to Data Miner ...................................................................................................................................... 13 Future Forward ........................................................................................................................................................ 13 Core Values ............................................................................................................................................................. 13 References .................................................................................................................................................................. 15

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Abstract
A review of some of the literature as well as current thinking within the context of higher education in a post information revolution, commercially orientated marketplace. USA and UK experience, the implications for future business models, teaching, learning and assessment methods, success evaluation criteria and economic sustainability are discussed. Looking at higher education in the UK (England and Wales), we see a currently difficult and possibly bleak future. Some are arguing that we are in the Perfect Storm (Popenici, 2012) of the university industry and its possible complete demise (Harden, 2013). In a digital society where the role of the mediator be it bank, high street store or educational institution is becoming irrelevant even as the role of the consumer grows ever more empowered, universities are not perhaps best positioned to react to such fast moving market driven changes, senior academics warn that universities which suffer a substantial decline in student demand for two or three years could collapse (Fazackerley, 2013). After all, their principal way of doing things is, like The Ents in Lord of the Rings, very very slow, the historic challenges facing universities and colleges are less related to technological disruption or market evolution and more causally related to self-induced bruising, glacial cycles of adaptation, and torturous processes that pass for decision-making (Gonick, 2013). The current rush toward the MOOC to save the day is beginning to be seen by some as the emperors new clothes, or worse, another excuse to monetize and de-personalise higher education, creating a commodified mechanistic dystopian educational space, where student support is non existent and lecturers are left merely to facilitate student experiential learning, (Cost et al, 2013). This paper looks at these issues, and tries to find some way forward through the maze. Some of the focus is from a Web Technologies discipline point of view, which may in some way represent a variety of new disciplines in the 21st century employment economy.

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Introduction
Universities, it may be argued, have become businesses, and whether we like it or not the monetized model of higher education as seen in America is now a reality here in England and Wales, at least for the foreseeable future. What are the implications of this? The variety of topic areas for consideration are many: curriculum priorities and design, learning, teaching and assessment methods, notions of academic skills, quality assurance and monitoring, economic sustainability, value - both for society and of the modern student experience, the university as a business with changing expectations in a market driven education industry, and the impact of technology on all areas of university life. Discipline specific considerations that increasingly impact on the value and expectations of the student experience could provide some answers by which universities might create more recognizable identities. Placing this in brief relevant context helps to frame discussion in terms of the university within the wider world, with focus on changes to the university business model in a Post Information Revolution context. Ronald Barnetts theories on student being, interdisciplinarity and supercomplexity provide some insight alongside multiple other voices in the current discourse. Reasoning behind the choice and focus of this topic is because I am frequently faced with students who complain about lack of up to date skills in staff in our discipline (Web Technologies) and lack of appropriate skills being taught impacting on engagement, perceived relevance and value of study. I also see a lack of awareness amongst senior managers in relation to technological learning and teaching possibilities and potentials in a post information revolution landscape. The idea of the physical, real world mediator of a service may be becoming a thing of the past see the Death of the High Street and exponential growth of online commerce, so perhaps university as a concept of going somewhere to learn and be taught in exchange for fees may become fully redundant (Harden, 2013). It may therefore be increasingly important to show how it could be, and how universities can benefit from multiple use and reuse of learning and teaching environments and content. The paper is divided into three sections Background, Purposes and Priorities.

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Background
Early Foundations
How did we get to where we are now? Rothblatt notes in The Modern University and its Discontents (1997) that to accommodate the diversity of Victorian Britain, the federal principle (circa 1836) allowed regional colleges to associate themselves with some centre empowered to award degrees, in order to help their local students become qualified. However, the prejudice that persists today connected to institution reputation is not new. At least one of the key supporters of the original University of London admitted in Parliament that a London Degree was at first likely to be of lower quality than an Oxford or Cambridge []but Professors would exert themselves in the cause of education as to bring respect to the degrees conferred by the institution. (Lushington, House of Commons Debates, 1835). Rothblatt later quotes Lord Bryce in the 1870s referring to these new institutions as Lilliputian Universities, but the precedent of colleges becoming part of the higher education landscape was by then established. Student attendance also held sway in relation to the awarding of degrees at that time. In 1836 a student was required to present a certificate of attendance at a college or other establishment before being permitted to sit formal degree examinations, but by 1858 this had changed to allow some institutions to open their doors to anyone wishing to sit the exams. Interestingly, both these issues still lie at the core of higher education debate today.

Recent Past
In 1963, the 'golden age of student grants was just beginning (Dyhouse, 2007). This period was perhaps a peak of liberal education, when much educational reform took place, not least of which was the introduction of the grants system and the later formulation of Polytechnics. But higher education was still an exclusive club, before the Second World War (and more than fifty years after Bryces statement,) less than 2% of 18 year olds went to university in the UK. Now a third of all 18 year olds attend as almost a right of passage (Dyhouse) perhaps even more in 2011/12, and contrasting deeply with the 10% or less of even the recent past (1960s -1980s). From 2% to nearly 40% of the population attending university in the intervening 75 years after WW2, a huge change in comparison to the previous similar time interval (1865-1935). Gender was also a battleground less females attended university in the early sixties than had done in the mid twenties, which only began to change in the seventies. The Robbins Report (1963) acknowledges the difference in gender statistics early on, stating: ... we shall be discussing various aspects of the place of women in higher education (Robbins et al, p17), which sounds quaint today, but was likely a breakthrough at the time. The Robbins report also considered student loans, and, though maintenance grants had been introduced in The Education Act 1962, stated loans to students for the payment of fees and maintenance [were possible] but that students in higher education should in general be financed either wholly or partly by loans rather than grants [was] an entirely different matter. The report discusses the two arguments in relation to adopting loan schemes: distribution of burden and moral and incentive (section 644-647). The Dearing Report (1997) and The Browne Review (2009) have also had huge impact. Dearings report, Higher Education in the learning society, began the process of fundamental change to funding. Number 72 of the 73 recommendations made was We recommend to the Government that it shifts the balance of funding, in a planned way, away from block grant towards a system in which funding follows the student, assessing the impact of each successive shift on institutional behaviour and the control of public expenditure Brownes funding review was chiefly removing the cap on the level of fees that universities can charge, and increasing the income level at which graduates must begin to pay back their loans to 21,000, and brought this policy into full effect, but it is only this academic year (2012/2013) that sees it take shape for the first time.

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Information Revolution and Society

The Information Revolution1 perhaps began in 1995, with the Windows 95 PC operating system, which may have been the most significant thing to happen to society since the telephone or air travel. The changes this Graphic User Interface operating system made affected every sphere of society. With easily operated, very powerful and affordable computing, together with the introduction of affordable broadband Internet connections, the world changed within a few months. Thomas Friedmans now famous book The World is Flat (2005) outlines many of these changes, which continue to impact all of day-to-day life. For universities this meant that information could be filed, stored, shared and re-used limitlessly, at little or no cost. The old models of content production and dissemination, and retrieval of knowledge (libraries) became at least partially redundant. Now, information could be retrieved in a variety of forms instantaneously, as easily as typing a query into a browser search engine.

Post Information Revolution

The significance of the impact of technology on the university has therefore outgrown any argument against it. This might be some of Barnetts assertion that we contend with university in a supercomplex age, society is undergoing massive forms of change [] aided by the information technology revolution creating associated conceptual challenge (Realizing the University, 2000). This is manifestly increased by superconnectivity, mirrored by Friedmans Flat World, all conspiring to potentially end the university as we know it. We find ourselves in a whole different ball-park, as the post information revolution is upon us, with its backdrop creating chaos across all areas of society and economy. Popenicis The Perfect Storm for Universities lists a variety of related disruptive factors, all happening at once: lack of employment opportunities after graduation (contested by Weissmann, 2013, in the USA), contradicting evidence for sustained greater earning power, contested by Pam Tatlow (2013) The lifetime graduate earnings premium for men is approximately 128,000, lack of worth as taught knowledge (see informal learning, Horizon Report), an unraveling of the social contract, whereby economic growth is expected to trickle down and benefit all in society, when in fact the socio-economic divide (across Europe) is widening. The 2012 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium uses the expression Time-to-Adoption Horizon and describes clearly the changes that are currently taking place in higher education relating to technology diffusion, giving us one year or less to adapt to mobile and tablet use for learning and teaching, annotation (and) personal information. Harden says: As a society, we are experiencing a broadening of access to education equal in significance to the invention of the printing press, the public library or the public school in his recent article The End of the University As We Know It (2013), which describes the virtual university not of the future, but of the present. So the digital literacy of academic staff is now arguably more important than that of students with studies, for example The Big Blue Connect (JISC, 2002), and more recently Nawaz and Kundis Digital literacy: An analysis of the contemporary paradigms (2010) demonstrating that lack of skills amongst academic (and administration) staff, as well as a lack of personal or organizational responsibility for updating and developing those skills is a continuing problem.

The term Information Revolution is commonly associated with the advent of popular computing, and does not refer here to the Theory of The Information Revolution, which is an expression used to describe the entire period after the Industrial Revolution.
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Purposes
Higher Education in the UK is in crisis begins The End of Knowledge in Higher Education (ed Barnett & Griffin, 1997). This was written fifteen years ago. The prevailing atmosphere then is of permanent crisis, but no solution. Whilst the issues are complex and should be considered deeply so as not to replace rigourous critique with lax reflexivity (Scott in Barnett & Griffin), there should be more will to action than is currently apparent.

Curriculum, Learning, Teaching & Assessment

Disciplines, Skills and Knowledge Biglans Relationships between disciplines (1973) - Hard and Soft, Pure and Applied - have given us the framework by which we think of differences in disciplines in learning and teaching contexts, and these differences are significant. The learning, teaching, assessment, curricula, aim and purpose of different disciplines might vary so radically that to blur this model of skills based (hard or soft applied disciplines) and knowledge based (hard or soft pure disciplines) within one idea - the university - may result in all aspects becoming compromised. Neumann et al (2002) noted profound and extensive (Braxton & Hargens, in Neumann) differences between disciplines in every fundamental aspect of university culture and professional practice. Kolbs (1981) quote sums it up: The diversity that lies (below) is staggering not one university but many, each with its own language, norms, values, its own ideas about the nature of truth and how it is to be sought. The Joint Academic Coding System, used by UCAS, by contrast, transmits little of these huge differences, and to the outsider or novice there might appear to be one system, with only small partitions between the disciplines. This is misleading, or worse, damaging. Kolb again, on students who by the end of freshman year discover their chosen field of study was not what they had expected, most decided to wait and see, but experienced a distinct loss of energy and increase in confusionthese shifts [] stemmed in many cases from a fundamental mismatch in personal learning styles and the learning demands of different disciplines [] The implications for degree completion are serious, as are the foundation for either a successful graduation or a student drop out. Sarah Mackie (2001) identified four forces of influence in her study on student drop out behaviour individual, social, organizational, external. The deciding factor on student leavers not persevering with their studies was about levels of commitment in relation to integration with these four forces. It wasnt that problems were worse, but that commitment and motivation decreased in relation to feeling integrated. All students come with some level of commitment and an intention to complete their course of studybut by the beginning of the second term we succeed in turning this expectant hope into fears realized and may have failed to exploit the potential within that initial commitment. This may in part be related to what Kolb is noting in his earlier work. How can we classify new multidisciplinary (or interdisciplinary) professions, springing up regularly in our post information revolution landscape? One concerning aspect of these deviant specialism (Neumann) multidisciplinary new degrees is that they can often be in inappropriate faculties, potentially limiting aspects of learning, teaching or assessment. Is this new and natural multi/interdisciplinarity more of the reality of Barnetts university in the context of supercomplexity? The Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Group at the University of Southampton (Canning et al, 1997) gives insight into practical aspects of interdisciplinarity. The collection of essays from a variety of subject area practitioners imply interdisciplinarity already exists, starting with disciplinarity as thinking in the box, and working from the perspective that it is interdisciplinarity that will inform a sustainable educational model - scientists may identify environmental problems, but responses are also social, political, economic, ethical and cultural It becomes clear that many new areas of knowledge could benefit from this transfer of methods from one discipline to another (Nicolescu, 1997, in Canning). New discipline degrees may challenge the accepted procedures on which academic quality, practice and professional status are based. The degree validation process, in the tradition of Gonicks torturous processes, is lengthy, and is a problem in that by the time a new degree is validated it is often out of date. The doctorate may not be relevant to a modern discipline like Digital Marketing, which does not fit neatly into any existing faculty or department, being business, computing, media and communications, and
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perhaps has no use for peer reviewed research (usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong, Horton, in LERU) that may take 6 years to complete.

Learning and Teaching in a new landscape

Always On, always connected If we agree that the post information revolution landscape now allows for total access to vast resources of information, generally free or at little cost (that of the Internet connection), does this finally mean that the information provider and collator role of the university is over? If the opportunities for informal learning in the modern world are abundant and diverse (Horizon Report, 2012), and that technology in daily life is now so ubiquitous, so as to perhaps say Elearning is dead, (and) Long Live Learning (Shepherd, Kineo, 2013). Always on Learning is not dependent on prearranged sessions like the live webinar. Time is no longer important, as class runs all the time. While it may deeply concern the average lecturer to think they need to be available 24/7, in a superconnected world we are always available to communicate and share with. The Horizon Report states that people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life is an increasingly busy world (where) work and learning are often two sides of the same coin, and people want easy and timely access so perhaps the future is in the Massive Open Online Course. Freidman thinks so, I can see a day soon where youll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world (NY Times online, 2013). However, this is hotly disputed: The current instantiations of MOOCs are unlikely to have a long and enduring impact but they have catalyzed conversations on the future of higher education in the United States like little else since the GI Bill (Gonick, 2013). They are not then, the utopian solution that some might be proposing (Freidman, 2013, Harden, 2013). They do appear to be an interim quick-fix to easily and cost effectively educate populations, see California States recent decision to use Udacity - a Silicon valley startup with big venture investment - to provide remedial courses for San Jose University students. Ian Bogost, a Professor at Georgia Tech, isnt too happy because siphoning California taxpayer receipts and student tuition directly into a for-profit startup created, like all startups, with the purpose of producing rapid financial value for its investors is like the National Transportation Safety Board providing funding to test the effectiveness of my hypothetical private road illumination service (Bogost, 2013). MOOCs certainly are disruptive: This model will seriously challenge many institutions, but most significantly the elaborately constructed and expensive online educational programs currently run by individual universities or systems that operate as Internet extensions of the individual university campuses (Lombardi, 2012). Seen by some as the noose by which higher education will hang itself (Grove, THE, 2013), not everyone favours the MOOC as any solution at all (Cost, 2013). MOOC accreditation remains problematic, but Lombardi suggests the MOOC only accredited degree, not associated to any one institution or even a conventional degree validation process, but rather assessing a portfolio of eligible submitted work (see also Freidman, 2013). Cost et al (2013) however, think this will lead to an overall discrediting of the value of the degree as a qualification benchmark, The last thing we want to do is hand out paper that doesnt mean anything. Flexibility, Engagement and Learning Styles Tooheys (1999) comments on the relentless funding pressures that institutions face indicates clearly the close relationship and impact funding resources have on teaching and learning methods and practices. But she emphasizes some real advantages that flexibility of access, learning and modes of delivery can bring: a greater flexibility in programmes of study enables students to pursue individual academic and professional interests. Not every student wants this freedom, but those that do are often the most creative and most highly motivated. Kolbs work (referred to earlier) on disciplines, academic success criteria and learning styles reiterates this need for flexibility. Barnett (A Will To Learn, 2007, p126) speaks of releasing the student to become themselves in relation to their curricular challenges fostering authentic engagement that being so energized, drive themselves forward of their own volition [] to come into a relationship with their experiences that is theirs, i.e. a complete student empowerment of study and learning. Flexibility also now might refer to the plentiful opportunities for informal learning that present themselves so easily via the
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Internet. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia (Horizon Project Retreat, 2012). Student Centred Learning Placing the student at the heart of the learning process is not new (see Carl Rogers), and much theory surrounds how that might be interpreted. In Barnetts The Will to Learn, the authentic student takes hold, becoming creative and disencumbered, fully committed to the higher education process (ch3, p51). Authenticity lies at the heart of any value in this process. The concept of student developed learning, with a mixture of syllabus content dependent on discipline specific criteria and perhaps in part selected by the student cohort, plus social (informal) learning and flipped classroom techniques is of interest. The Pitrik & Holzinger case study (2002) showed great value in a similar approach, which creates a more engaging and worthwhile experience, as shown by the student results in that study, with the additional bonus of transferrable work related skills being inherent in the whole exercise. Learning how to measure, narrow down and prioritise different areas of knowledge is key to authentic (student-centred) engagement. Bringing creative thinking to problem solving, using technology in creative innovative ways, inventing new ways for people to engage with each other, or identifying unforeseen risks all require very adept skills in relation to navigating content, information and learning, as well as cross-discipline skills like communication and project management the importance of collaborative skills to industry means that (academic) institutions are introducing, or looking to introduce, more interdisciplinary work [] one possible approach to support the skills requirements of industry is to forge links between departments and [] between students of two or more disciplines (Burd, in Canning et al, 2007).

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Priorities
The student as consumer (Molesworth, 2009) might now be having a bigger say in what may be regarded as the quality of any course of study or institution, and while the university may be focusing on Quality Assurance in relation to academic rigour and standards, the student-consumer is focusing on other perceived factors of quality, like prestige, usefulness and cost.

The Student Experience

Student as consumer The student experience has now taken on greater importance than it may have had previously in the life and success of a university. The Guardian roundtable (2012): For universities to recruit successfully, [] marketing and branding needed to be woven through university life. You can radically alter people's perception of the university by marketing, [] many universities had multiplied applications through [] encouraging students to create advertising campaigns [] in one case, a student marketing video posted on YouTube, went viral and has been watched by millions. This confirms what Ernst predicted more than 10 years ago: In what some characterise as an emerging buyers market for higher education, parents, students, donors, research sponsors and legislators will demand increasing institutional accountability for the quality of all aspects of campus activity. (Ernst, 1994, in Boys & Ford, 2006.) Student support services rank highly in importance, with Ruth Williams referring in the Centre for Higher Education Research Informations Looking Back Looking Forward to the recent study from the AMOSSHE Value and Impact Project (assessing the value and impact of services that support students), which states an increasingly diverse student population brings new or enhanced requirements and costs in terms of physical infrastructure and support services required to enable such students to remain and progress in higher education . This would clearly indicate that success depends on support, which in turn raises costs. Student as social player Informal communities of experience are pervasive on the web, with university reputations now guided and built not only by marketing departments but also by the significance of authentic stakeholder feedback. Whilst all industry contends with the modern phenomena of user experience, universities have been slow to take up the challenge of harnessing this power, and see it with some scepticism (Warwick, 2013). However, through work on my own research project, (SocialMet, 2011), I suggest that social student behaviour can be a powerful engager in all aspects of academic experience, helping to contribute to recruitment, student transition, brand ideals of marketing departments, and enhance the study, social life and collegiate atmosphere of the institution, for staff as well as students. Building authentic public facing academic communities through social media may become a major player in how universities reinvent their brand to fit the modern changing expectations of students, parents and even academics themselves. The deciding factors of how a student chooses their institution of study are now external and internal (authentic) brand experience, and indirect as well as direct academic experience.

Economic Sustainability, Quality Assurance and Value

Commercialisation of education Political ideologies, selective funding and capitalist values, as well as educational theory all pose problems in the university marketplace. JISCs E-Revolution and Post compulsory Education, from 2006, looked at ebusiness models in H.E, and puts it this way: The sellers [] are educational institutions offering educational services and the like for exchange. Buyers are potential students seeking educational services and if this is a market in the traditional sense, it is one that has had substantial intervention by the state. Consequently, there is no market mechanism in operation The problem then, is that no clear price is set, other than an arbitrary one, and value is not measured against true market pressure.

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The complex priorities of academic pedagogies and quality assurance in relation to the marketisation of education persist: Studies of changes in higher education in the UK have tended to leave unexamined the context of political economy in which and through which the direction and management of higher education takes shape [] (Willmott, 2003), and from Andrew McGettigan in Pearsons Blue Skies (2012): excellence will be protected and lead to a greater monopoly by the Russell Group of elite researchintensive universities plus a handful of others. What we will see will resemble what happened to English football after the formation of the Premier league in 1992 but without relegation or promotion. Molesworth et al (2009), in Having, being and higher education: the marketisation of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer, discuss motivations of vocational education: in the new HE now being bought [] students tend to reject deep reflection of vocational subjects, especially those rooted in consumer culture, such as public relations, marketing or advertising. A student that is committed to such work (and the consumer lifestyle that is inherent in these professions) may experience unpleasant dissonance where education facilitates critical reflection on a consumer culture. This discipline-value-biased interpretation sums up current problems inherent in reinventing the business model for universities for post information revolution times. The return to separate institutions based on disciplines, (with their widely varying needs and priorities) may be the only answer, as it seems one discipline cannot hold sway over another in learning styles, amount of required or desired critical thinking, perceived academic success criteria or any other aspect. Student Debt and the Notion of Value The largest single reason for individual debt in the USA is now student debt. Student loan debt is at an alltime highan average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts - and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades (Harden, 2013). Though these are American figures, the same situation is gathering apace here in the UK. Hardens reasoning that credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary heaps coals on the debt fire creating a spiral of meaningless qualifications as more in the workplace population obtain them, at potentially crippling cost. This leads to questions around the real nature and purpose of a degree: what these qualifications actually signify, their worth in relation to cost as well knowledge, skills, expectations and usefulness. Barnetts interdisciplinarity in The Idea of Higher Education (1990) outlines a set of factors useful for consideration relating to degree value for the (changing) society and the individual within it. These factors potentially could have practical application as some form of evaluation criteria if applied meaningfully to measuring the worth of a qualification in any given discipline (p178-182): Educational Epistemological Communicative Pedagogical Preparation for the labour market Technocratic (Closely aligned to labour market factors) Managerial Informatory (the role of informing wider society of given or discovered knowledge) Normative (attempts to circumnavigate or even influence pervasive societal values, in some ways then, the opposite of technocratic or labour market values) Rational Critical (thinking, researching, knowing)

Measuring Quality The Quality Assurance Agency review universities periodically, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England has now proposed a new risk-based quality-assurance regime, scheduled to take effect in 20132014, where students will get direct say in how a university ranks in QAA terms. Using metrics in part garnered from The National Student Survey, itself a flawed mechanism, it will give power to students to trigger quality

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reviews where there are grounds for concern, yet cuts back the burden of review for high performing institutions (Morgan, 2012). Other metrics will be Higher Education Statistics Agency indicators on dropout rates, and data from the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey, as well as levels of professional accreditation for staff in an institution. Whether this has any meaningful effect on an institutions ranking in Global or European terms remains to be seen. The League of European Universities Research universities and research assessment (LERU, May 2012), recommends Governments, funders and other external agencies should work together to ensure that the information required from universities for assessment purposes is collected in a consistent manner which allows reliable comparisons to be made between universities nationally and within Europe. The recent introduction of rankings is also flawed because blanket application to the whole university when there may be wide variations across the institution gives an inaccurate picture. Without real market value measurement, the result will be a bean counting culture detracting from the real quality of research and the boundless search for new knowledge (LERU). The value and quality of a Reputation The New Universities that began life in 1992 were all formally Polytechnics, which generally taught vocational or skills based degrees, and were usually formed from pre-existing separate colleges set up for specific purposes such as architecture, engineering or art. Their heritage then, is that of the technical college. The Lilliputian University reputation of Victorian prejudice persists in that competition for resources and market share for funding, research, students and reputation is more likely with each other than with Red Brick institutions or Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews, and McGettigans fixed premier league analogy may be right. Reputation, in a commercial competitor model, becomes everything, and may (already) be a core measurement of value in a degree qualification. A really good brand takes the risk out of buying [] brand leaders deal in confidence, which gives customers confidence" (Guardian roundtable, 2012).

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Conclusions
From Miner to Data Miner
Careers change over time, but few would imagine the differences we have witnessed in the past 50 years: from miner to data miner. Train driver, web traffic driver, semantic optimizer, general specialist, content strategist. In my professional arena these roles are real and persistent and will only increase, but to others in more traditional fields they might be perceived as Orwellian nightmare. The truth is that many jobs are now advertised with such titles, and with real need in the workplace. Are we adequately providing for the training of these people? Do current academic mechanisms for validation and quality assurance allow for agile development of course structure and content? A variety of web design blogs circa 2007-2010 discussed this, with much negative response. An article by Jeff Way (2009) on Net-Tuts (an established web developer community website) survives, with 174 comments, noticeably focusing positively on the value of other aspects of degree study (academic and professional soft skills), not the core skills of the web designer or developer, i.e. being willing to pay to learn academic critical thinking and communication skills.

Future Forward
University needs to be Agile to reshape to society and business needs and market expectations. The implications for academic staff might be in agile up-skilling both in their discipline but also in current learning and teaching practices like curriculum content and success measurement, always on feedback provision, ability to make full use (that is, to be highly skilled digitally) of current technology to enhance their teaching practice. University needs to be Novel/Unique each institution needs real focus, creating more reasons for why a person would wish to invest in spending time there, that is, focusing on identity and specialism, not generalisation. It may well be that we return to the model of the technical or art college, but with more sophistication. The Hawkesbury College case (Macadam 1985, in Millar 1998) would appear to still serve as an inspirational model of what can be achieved with relevant focus and the right kind of matrix of competencies and matrix management structure. Today these competencies are complex, and must be at once discipline specific and self reliant chameleon (Barnett) in nature. University needs to be Personalised the personalised experience is essential. Smart in the sense of smart search or smart city; we increasingly expect an individually tailored experience (not cohorts of arbitrarily grouped people), and this will come to apply to higher education programmes of study. The context here of personalised does not (only) mean personal learning plans, which have been around for a while, but also refers to the delivery of chosen (or semantically suggested) content, based on a learners preferences and requirements, as well as search and consumption history. A curriculum may well start to have metadata and other semantic associations in order for it to be found easily and efficiently in a smart delivery scenario. This would also encourage use and re-use amongst multiple courses and even interdisciplinary learning and curriculum approaches with content.

Core Values
There is no virtue in producing socially well-adjusted members of society who are unemployed because they do not have the skills. Nor at the other extreme must they be technically efficient robots, (James Callaghan, 1976). We therefore need multiple priorities, so might think of Barnetts interdisciplinary factors, perhaps modifying them somewhat. Barnett (In Higher Education: A Critical Business 1997) believes that transferrable skills themselves are outdated (and have been since 1995), replacing them with self reliance the onus falls on individuals to develop the widest repertoire of skills and extra clever chameleons who can change not only their colours but their whole working selves in an instant if necessary. If this is the case then university faces the near impossible challenge of being all things to all possible situations. This certainly is the reality of Barnetts supercomplex university. In a market driven landscape, perhaps one thing will support the continued existence of the real world university: the collegiate community, which is at the core of the transformation of the individual from student novice to knowledgeable practitioner, the transformation of knowledge, knowing, becoming and being that Barnett talks of (2009), which in turn brings most value to the individual and to society at large.
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TeachThought Facebook page (fb.me/teachthought) 2013, sharing http://www.teachthought.com/trends/10-trends-in-edtechfor-2013/

NB Slides that accompany this paper are available at: http://prezi.com/8yoc9f_cakrm/changing-purposes-and-priorities-of-higher-education/ The SocialMet project is currently being written up, the website is at http://www.socialmet.co.uk

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References
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