Adapt or Die: The Changing Education Landscape

Ronan Gruenbaum, Global Director of Undergraduate Learning & Development at Hult International Business School

Ronan Gruenbaum, Global Director of Undergraduate Learning & Development at Hult International Business School

Every few years, an innovation comes along which proves to be disruptive to many and a great opportunity for some. Those who seize the opportunities afforded by innovation tend to excel and leap ahead in their field compared to the competition. Often, they are smaller organizations, startups even, and because they are small, they tend to be agile and can pivot and embrace new strategies quickly, whereas the larger, more entrenched organizations, like the proverbial oil tanker, take a comparatively enormous amount of time to move to a new direction.

Now, this is, of course, obvious. We teach it in strategy classes and courses on disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship at business school, and it is probably true of all sectors. It is most definitely true of education in general, higher education, universities, and business schools.

Back in the 1960s, the UK's 'Open University' embraced television to engage and teach its students spread throughout the country and broadcast lectures late at night on BBC 2, when all other channels had switched off for the night. Many of us in the UK will remember seeing these beardy academics in ill-fitting shirts and wide-knitted ties doing the same thing they would in a lecture hall, but now able to reach thousands studying part-time.

The 80s brought the personal computer, and with the CD-ROM in the late 80s and 90s, encyclopedias and other didactic resources were available at reasonable cost to millions. The worldwide web in the 1990s took a while to get going, restricted by low bandwidth technologies but allowed the development of the 'crowd in the cloud' where everyone was able to create their own website and expound on their pet topic. The development of faster broadband at the turn of the century meant that we could start enjoying video calls for free! We could watch videos on YouTube and create our own, building on the personalized content-creation from before and discovering new resources. The growth of social media in general and the plethora of platforms for content sharing has since made the options available enormous and allowed for the growth of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), where costs went down and, as per the laws of supply and demand and price elasticity, demand went up.

"It has still been the rare institution that has fully embraced the ability to have students interacting en masse with the professor being more the guide on the side to the crowd in the cloud."

In the nineties, virtual worlds started to expand, with many international business schools and universities building campus buildings and lecture theatres in Second Life, experimenting with having the educational experience entirely within a 3-dimensional virtual graphic interface.

And, of course, we had the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing everyone to barricade themselves at home and join classes on Zoom, Google Classroom, or MS Teams.

Some universities, such as the Open University, were again quick to exploit these new technologies early, but despite the ability to get more interaction with the students, most seemed to still focus on teaching in the same way that humans have taught each other for millennia: the sage on the stage. One learned person (teacher, professor, lecturer, instructor) reading their notes to the dozens, hundreds, or thousands who would listen passively, hopefully taking notes to then regurgitate the content at a later stage in some form of assessment.

It has still been the rare institution that has fully embraced the ability to have students interacting en masse, with the professor being more the guide on the side to the crowd in the cloud. Teachers, professors, and instructors love to impart knowledge. That's what we get into teaching, for it's nice for a class of students (and at the university level, these would be adults in their twenties, thirties, or older) to respect and acknowledge how 'clever' one is.

But let us not remember that thanks to the growth of these technologies over the past thirty years, we now have all the knowledge in the world online. Available to anyone for free. They might need to look for it, and they won't necessarily have the critical thinking skills needed to sort the truth from the nonsense, to identify the teachers in the crowd who are true experts and the ones who trade in rumors, gossip, and misinformation. So surely all universities should be focusing more on teaching critical thinking rather than imparting knowledge, right? That's certainly what we've changed the Bachelor of Business Administration degree at Hult International Business School to do: focusing on the five core skills (critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and learning to learn) rather than focusing purely on teaching students what they can get elsewhere.

And so it's time to address the AI elephant in the room. This latest disruptive technology will change society in every way possible. Some jobs will be lost; others will be created. It will give us the ability to have personalized experiences, including personalized education, in a way that was only available to the very rich previously. Some universities have already said that any use of generative AI is banned whilst they look straight ahead in their tanker at the iceberg 4 miles ahead of them. Some, like Hult, have created a policy that is aimed at embracing AI and teaching students how to navigate it sensibly, responsibly, and ethically. There's no point in teaching our students how to do analysis that AI will be doing in two years; they have to know how to be better than AI and provide more value to their future employers.

This is what excites me about this period at the birth of AI. Its capabilities and scope will increase exponentially in the coming years, so we, in the education sphere, need to ask ourselves how we can embrace this new tool to give a completely different, personalized, exceptional educational experience to our students. Just as students' jobs will change very quickly, and they will need to know how to use AI in the workplace, our jobs as educators are changing now, and we can either adapt or die.