Higher education must reinvent itself to meet the needs of the world today. Enter the distributed university
- Written by: Richard F. Heller, Emeritus Professor, University of Newcastle
Universities face many threats to their future. The traditional universities have become over-managed business enterprises[1], which may not reflect societal, national or global educational needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many of these issues into focus.
In a new book[2], I propose a model that responds to the broad range of challenges universities face. I call this model the distributed university – that is, a university that distributes education online to where it is needed.
Read more: Amid global crisis, how can universities be regenerated to serve the common good?[3]
In more than 50 years as an academic in Australia and the UK, I have seen the potential for a pivot to online learning that, through distributed learning, could solve many of the problems the higher education sector faces.
I have been involved in online master’s-level programs to build public health capacity in both high-income and low-to-middle-income countries. Face-to-face teaching designed for the International Clinical Epidemiology Network[4] was augmented by distance learning – first paper-based, followed by online. I established the University of Manchester’s first fully online master’s program.
More recently, I founded and co-ordinated the global, fully online, volunteer-led People’s Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni)[5].
Read more: COVID has changed students' needs and expectations. How do universities respond?[6]
What are the problems facing universities?
The pressures on universities are both external and internal.
Externally, universities need to be responsive to the ways people access information today (and will tomorrow). They also need to ensure environmental sustainability. And amid global inequalities in access to higher education, our universities are overly dependent on income from overseas students[7].
Internal developments pose multiple threats too. Universities have downgraded teaching, with academics not rewarded for educational excellence as opposed to research. They have adopted a competitive business model, rather than a collaborative model of education, and intrusive managerial oversight instead of placing trust in academics. And they work in centralised ivory towers rather than engaging with local communities and industries.
Read more: Amid global crisis, how can universities be regenerated to serve the common good?[8]
The distributed university responds to these problems by:
- reducing global inequalities in access
- emphasising local relevance
- reducing impacts on the environment
- building trust in place of managerialism
- collaborating rather than competing.
How does the distributed university work?
