Session Narrative
The year 2025 looks different from the first half of this decade. We’re less reactive. We’re more focused on anticipating and shaping the future of higher education. Our data and technology priorities and investments express our institutions’ aspirations, risks, constraints, and values. Prepare for 2025 by learning what the EDUCAUSE community has identified as next year’s Top 10.
Session Notes
10. Supportable, sustainable, and affordable (tie)
- Developing an institutional strategy for new technology investments, pilots, policies, and uses
- Watch out for change fatigue & politics
10. Building bridges, not walls (tie)
- How to increase digital access for students while also safeguarding their privacy and data protection.
- What is IT’s role in this?
- University of Nevada, Reno is creating student “passports” for digital access to all services and learning resources.
9. Taming the digital jungle
Updating and unifying digital infrastructure and governance to increase institutional efficiency and effectiveness.
- Needed to improve institutional efficiency
- Need to watch out for legacy governance vs. modern needs
- 90% of student applications are accessible by a single app (Oral Roberts University?)
8. Putting People First
Helping staff adapt, upskill, and thrive in an era of rapid change and ongoing digital advancements.
- Create career paths
- Use AI to save time
- People are your most valuable asset
7. Better, faster, and cheaper
Using technology to personalize services, automate work, and increase agility
- Don’t let reduced costs endanger educational and research quality
- Use AI to help make processes more efficient
- IT and non-IT leaders sharing responsibility
6. Institutional Resilience
Contributing to institutional efforts to prepare for and address a growing number and range of risks
- Reduce the impact of risks through preparation
- Using crises as opportunities
- Creating room for transformation
- Top-down decision-making can slow things down
5. The CIO Challenge
Leading digital strategy and operations in an era of frequent leadership transitions, resource limitations, societal unrest, and rapid technology advancements.
- Advice: Let go of perfection
- “What got the institution here won’t get it there…”
- Connect institutional strategy to IT strategy
- Strive for transparency
- Someone is accountable for the ROI of each project (San Francisco?)
4. A Matter of Trust
Advancing institutional strategies to safeguard privacy and secure institutional data
- Trust focuses on people, not just data
- Challenge: Staffing and complex institutions
- Advice: Take a risk management approach
- Finding common ground
- Sharing solutions and staff with other institutions
3. Smoothing the Student Journey
Using technology and data to improve and personalize student services
- Can assist with recruitment
- Don’t oversimplify the work
- Beware of short-term economizing
- Find strong external partners
2. Administrative Simplification
Streamlining and modernizing processes, data, and technologies
- Leads to
- Improved operations
- Cost savings
- Time savings
- Executive leadership needs to be committed and aligned
- Find consultants and solution providers who understand higher education
- Take time to understand what a new product is capable of
1. The Data-Empowered Institution
Using data, analytics, and AI to increase student success, win the enrollment race, increase research, etc.
- Benefits enrollment, student success, finance and operations, and student retention.
- Find a balance between privacy and making data available
- Invest in data and analytics literacy
- Get the right staffing and skills
- Update job descriptions
- Start with temp workers
- Invest in professional development and cross-training
Session Reflection
There was a lot mentioned in this top 10 list that resonates with concerns and in some cases, initiatives, already being addressed at ACC. Trust is a huge issue across the institution, not just between end users/IT but also between staff/administration. Especially given the shifts that were required as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders who assume that once-in-a-lifetime (OIAL) events are just that, are prone to make the same mistakes over and over. I’m proud to say that Academic Technology has developed processes and documentation to support future OIAL events.
One of the things that I found interesting in this session is the number of institutions that are streamlining access to student-facing technologies/services into a single app. With the number of tools and services we make available across the institution, it would be great to simplify access for students in this way. Political, financial, and silos are the bottlenecks that stunt our ability to move forward at every turn. Hopefully, through the Chancellor’s Theory of Change Initiative, this can improve over time.
In a few of the Top 10, there are references to doing things in a more streamlined way, doing things cheaper, faster, etc. While I agree that there is a place for AI in helping with this, we need to be careful that we don’t continue pushing staff to “do more with less.” Less flexibility, less funding, less support, less resources, fosters employee burnout that is a very real issue facing higher education.