The digital capabilities of 2034

Strong foundation of durable skills, deep domain knowledge and lifelong learning of technical skills

AppsAnywhere recently attended UCISA’s (UK’s Higher Education IT peak body) Spotlight24 event, focused on the digital capabilities of 2034. The conference promised a gaze into the future, trying to predict the digital capabilities needed to effectively engage with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and deal with some of the present challenges in this area. What it delivered is a strong anchor in the present, as institutions are grappling with the wave of transformation on a shoestring budget.

Here are the top highlights:

Everyone is in the race

The entire higher education sector is on the digital band wagon or perhaps speed train. Some are securely fastened, well into their ride, others are just getting on, trying to find their seats, while a few more are still waiting in the station.

There is growing pressure on higher education from employers, funders, and students alike to produce job-ready graduates, whatever that job may be. This recognizes the fact that many students will end up doing completely different jobs to the subject of their degree.

The key challenges for universities are three-fold:

• taking an institution-wide approach to digital transformation and capabilities;
• embedding capabilities into the curriculum (that means teaching and assessment);
• upskilling their own workforce to the same level

The Digital Student program at the University of Nottingham showed just how monumental this challenge is, but also how taking a systemic and human-centered approach can bring huge gains. It takes institution-wide commitment, corporate structure, governance and strategic alignment to get results. The program is informed by data, including students’ self-assessment questionnaires on the Jisc Capabilities Framework, backed by interdisciplinary governance focused on digital by design, with a holistic remit across digital transformation and includes student involvement.

What does this mean for the sector?

Competition is heating up. If your institution is not in the race, prioritizing digital capabilities (or at least be seen to do so), it can impact its reputation, its appeal to students and employers, and eventually its bottom line.

It could lead to digital capabilities standardization. There is an increased desire to have a more unified definition of digital capabilities, particularly from students and employers. Universities are treading carefully in this space, as this currently gives them a competitive edge, and could add to their regulatory burden. Micro credentials could pave the path to that in the not-so-distant future.

Digital capabilities, like most capabilities, are best taught in content and context, embedded into the curriculum. This means teaching staff need to master those skills first before teaching them. A growth mindset of agility, new technology adoption and course changes is necessary, something that doesn’t always come easy to academics.

The race is not just within the sector, but also with continuous disruption from many places. If education and digital capabilities are democratized, how can universities keep their relevance? As Prof. Helen Laville put it, the role of universities is not necessarily to provide the knowledge itself, but to curate that, provide added value to students, and ensure that the sum of all the courses is bigger than its parts.

The equity and inclusion approach of “levelling up” digital capabilities must go beyond “build it and they will come”. It needs to support the students who won’t enroll in “catch-up” courses for many reasons, it needs to work on the dispositions that may hold them back, as well as access to technology. During the pandemic we discovered the extent of digital poverty and saw the gap of digital literacy for children living in poverty widen. It is unwise to assume that being at university closed that gap without specific interventions. With 83% of 16–18-year-old doing their homework on a smartphone, a lot more needs to be done to achieve digital equity and engagement.

Cyber-physical fundamentals are key

To keep innovating and solving the world’s complex challenges, we should focus on the integration between the physical and cyber (which includes but not limited to digital) worlds.

An interesting perspective from Chandrakant Patel, HP Chief Engineer and Senior Fellow, who gave plenty of examples of groundbreaking technological innovations that first started in the physical domain. Also, a very poignant reminder that the future starts now. And what we have now in the Western world is a growing shortage of young people, and an acute shortage of young people who want to do hard things.

We have made technology so simple and intuitive that 'even toddlers' can work it out when left alone with an iPad. And this easy technology has developed an expectation that everything else should be easy, solvable with a few clicks away, so there is no patience or curiosity to problem solve or dive into hard to solve issues. Why train for 10 years to become a doctor when you can earn a small fortune as an influencer? Or a gamer? With no training.

Some interesting concepts from Chandrakant Patel, were hierarchy of computation and net positive impact (NPI). What most of us don’t realize is that our digital activity uses energy. Every email, instant message, or Teams call, not to mention the mindless social media scrolling, transmits reams of data, which consumes energy. That’s why the physical should take priority over digital or cyber, and data analysis should primarily take place at the source. This is particularly interesting from a sustainability perspective, as we are going headfirst into a “digital first” direction. Sustainability is currently a retrofit, something that gets added at the end of the design phase, whereas technological advancements now allow us to start with sustainability and achieve gains at design phase.

So, the future student should be a T-shaped student, one with depth of domain expertise and breadth of cyber skills and who learns by doing.

Focus on durable capabilities and lifelong learning

Going back to the role of academic higher education, it’s the durable skills (problem solving, communication, critical thinking, etc.) and not as much the perishable skills (specific technology or what we might call today digital skills) that will put students in a good stead for lifelong learning. Or perhaps the combination of both.

Helen Laville, Provost and Deputy VC of Kingston University makes a good point – that universities need to move beyond the binary discourse of degree vs lifelong learning and get serious about credentialing if we are to build an innovative society.

As the pace of technology development and adoption increases, the skills lifecycle decreases. Once the half-life of professional and vocational skills was 10-15 years, today that is estimated at about five years. So, a skill learnt today will be half as valuable in five years’ time. According to IBM, it is important to categorize skills by their half-life value:

• Perishable skills, with a half-life of under 2.5 years. That is specific technology skills that are frequently updated
• Semi-durable skills: half-life <7.5 years (base sets of knowledge that derives specific processes and tools)
• Durable skills: half-life > 7.5 years. That’s what we normally call “soft skills” – mindsets, dispositions, such as problem solving, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, design thinking, etc.

With that in mind, universities’ role is not only to deliver quality undergraduate and graduate education, but also to offer quality and relevant lifelong learning in a future where we will need to re-learn a skill every few years and learn new ones probably just as often.

‍