I missed the webinar but I hope the recording will be available on this page later. Bates and Sanga have a book which looked at a variety of European and North American institutions. Their stated aim is
“to suggest ways to speed up the transformation of the post-secondary institution to a more modern, more effective, digitally-based organization that will better meet the needs of 21st century learners”
This immediately begs a string of questions:
- are they assuming the change is going in the right direction anyway?
- what is a “digitally-based” organisation?
- where is the data on the needs of students, which are supposed to be the guiding principle of this change?
Unfortunately our decision-makers tend to be the kind of people who read the executive summaries of this sort of book, and who cannot see any way of taking student needs into account. It’s worth noting that the spectacular failures of E-learning projects as documented in the European “Megatrends” project, (Desmond Keegan, Jüri Lõssenko, Ildikó Mázár, Pedro Fernández Michels, Morten Flate Paulsen, Torstein Rekkedal, Jan Atle Toska, Dénes Zarka) show that business miscalculations to do with costs, marketing and suchlike can quickly result in catastrophe….by contrast, I suspect that failing to meet “the needs of learners” rarely results in institutional collapse.
In course H810 we looked at how North’s Institutional Change Framework was applied by Konur (Disability & Society, Vol. 15, No. 7, 2000, pp. 1041–1063), to assess the likelihood of change in respect of accessibility / disability civil rights. I’d like to see an attempt to use this more broadly to talk about students’ needs, and I think it would reveal the students’ relatively weak bargaining position.