The digital disruption facing higher education: opinion

Authors: Emeritus Professor Jim Mienczakowski and Emeritus Professor Greg Whateley

The new reality is upon us – whether we like it or not.

AI cheat ware and HE streaming are new challenges that we need to face head-on. There is no need for panic – just a sensible approach to dealing with these new (and sometimes imposing) issues.

Prior to COVID there was media panic over self-driving vehicles taking the jobs of global millions of human truck, bus and taxi drivers.

Self-Driving Cars? Not useably here yet - unless you’re ambivalent about surviving your drive home. And the much-heralded arrival of the electric car? Far more traction on this issue due to valid ecological concerns and, as ever, hyper-promotion.

But EVs remain a work in progress.

And now, Chat Bot AI. Slipping into our lives overnight like an unanticipated technological ninja, AI threatens to derail the very fabric of our current education system, or so it is said by some.

Unquestionably, it clearly does have huge potential to negatively impact both academic integrity and revenue.

AI cheatware

There is no way around it – this genie is out of its bottle and there’s no going back.

We’ll need to learn to explore and exploit AI Bot potentials constructively and establish clear understandings around their application – if we can. Three things to consider:

It is debatable whether an AI programme or its architects can be held to account for its operational plagiarism.

A software app is neither ‘sentient’ nor functioning with ‘human integrity’ – but those students who seek to use such applications are. The choice to utilise what we term as AI cheatware - when it is applied to student assessment assignments - is clearly the responsibility of its users.

• There will be a surge in tools designed to detect and defeat AI incursions into producing academic assessment submissions. Software designers and developers and the software industry, in general, are going to benefit significantly in the war to protect against AI applications.

• Educational institutions will ramp up their digital capabilities and acquire the necessary tools to defend their academic integrity and ensure their students demonstrate authentic critical thinking capacities. They will strongly resist having to entirely change their current assessment approaches - if they can.

Sector responses

Initially, universities are reverting to traditional practices: examination hall F2F assessment regimes; timed assignments written in class, etc.

However, we doubt it will be long before better, more technological, strategies come into play. Strategies and applications which once again will allow universities to digitally move away from F2F engagement with undergraduates, such as invigilatorPlus style online examination proctoring and the many other new tech developments.

HE streaming

Whilst the media habitually focus on how the traditional university sector responds to issues such as AI the world is quietly moving on.

Many of the research-intensive (rather than teaching focussed) universities have adopted digital approaches to assessment and teaching in order to be ‘flexible’ and reduce their delivery costs, however, their physical locations remain central to their identities.

There are alternatives. On the B side of this old technology, long-playing vinyl (traditional) education records are the less-known, emergent tracks of newer, exciting engagements with higher education.

Institutions that are jumping from vinyl to streaming (without ever progressing through tape decks or CDs) and who are quietly striving to keep ahead of the AI game and respond effectively: the Mega Universities.

Western Governors University now has 150,000 students – all online. Southern New Hampshire University has 145,000 online students.

They are revolutionising online teaching and student experience and according to NYU’s Robert Ubell (2023), “These models are worth highlighting at a time when higher education is no longer just for the privileged but is an essential part of the nation’s economic life...”- https://www.edsurge.com/news/2023-03-02-how-mega-universities-manage-to-teach-hundreds-of-thousands-of-students

Game changers

We predict that AI Bots in offices and Autonomous Delivery Vehicles will, like the introduction of factory and farm machinery in previous centuries, replace humans in the workforce. Even EVs will reduce employment opportunities.

School graduates will (as we already know) need tertiary qualifications.

Affordable tertiary qualifications. The future experience of HE for most undergraduates is, we believe, eventually going to be online and via mega university streaming platforms rather than through vinyl-era, on-campus real estate operations.

Ironically, private providers are currently offering the most affordable means for successfully obtaining accredited degree qualifications.

And no question, the future experience of the undergraduate university will be vastly different and far less social and connective than that of our vinyl LP days, but the current university business model of incessant need for high volumes of international students with migration aspirations and huge escalating HECS debts for domestic students simply lacks credible sustainability.

Emeritus Professor Jim Mienczakowski is a Higher Education Advisor.

Emeritus Professor Greg Whateley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice President (Academic) at Group Colleges Australia.

This article is republished from Campus Review under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.