Professor Robert MacIntosh is a specialist in strategy and change-related research
As a strategy researcher, it has been a real pleasure to be involved in the project to refresh Heriot-Watt’s strategy. Any such strategy work requires an element of looking backwards and some attempts to peer into the future. In an academic year when Heriot-Watt researchers reached the world finals of Amazon’s Alexa Prize challenge, it seems timely to contemplate how technology might impact the higher education sector. There’s a familiar narrative that bank tellers, hotel receptionists and assembly line workers might eventually be replaced by technology because their roles are structured and repetitive in nature. In contrast, universities might feel greater insulation from technological disruption given that that teaching, grading assignments and undertaking research surely require the services of a living, breathing academic.
During some research for our Strategy 2025 project, I was struck by the pioneering work of Ashok Goel at Georgia Institute for Technology. Goel introduced a new member of his teaching team called Jill Watson. Students loved Jill. She would answer questions quickly, politely and with the occasional jaunty ‘Yep!’
She would sometimes say something odd, but don’t we all? Since Goel didn’t initially tell his students that Jill was in fact an artificial intelligence (AI) system, he was forced to add a short delay to her responses. Otherwise, he reasoned, her students might notice how much quicker she was at answering questions than her living, breathing counterparts.
Jill Watson’s status as a teaching assistant sounds a salutary note for those of us in higher education. There is widespread acceptance that human jobs will be lost to technology. When we focus on the nuance and subtlety of what academics do in teaching and research, we are overlooking the monotonous regularity of some aspects of our work. Not everything a university does can be reduced to a multiple choice form of assessment, but simple heuristics can allow targeted feedback suggesting particular learning materials, examples or activities that students might find helpful given how they’ve performed in their last assessment. If voice recognition, augmented reality and AI are being used to enhance retailing in our domestic lives, it is surely only a matter of time before they begin to have significant influence on our education system. A booming sector combined with the potential for technological disruption has left some UK university leaders feeling anxious, with the annual PA Consulting report on vice-chancellor sentiments suggesting that the sector could be facing a stormy period.
Alongside the potential for technological disruption, there is a small but growing trend that sees universities operating across more than one location. Heriot-Watt is a pioneer in this regard, operating across five separate sites in three countries. The UK has been a net exporter of higher education, but there is the threat of global brand names setting up in earnest in our own backyard. Further challenge will likely come from an expansion of private provision. Maybe UK vice-chancellors are right to be a little worried, but those outwith the sector see huge opportunities to deploy AI in ways that personalise learning economically and at scale.
As we work together to develop our new strategy, both institutional and individual consequences flow from a brief reflection on the future of higher education. Building a robust strategy in the face of significant short-term uncertainty is a challenge. Individual academics need to focus on what they can do that technology cannot. Universities need to develop compelling answers to the question: ‘Why study with us?’ Whatever your connection to Heriot-Watt, I’d invite you to help shape our future strategy by joining our global conversation at www.strategy2025blog.hw.ac.uk.
The Alexa Prize
The Alexa Prize is an annual competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI. The 2018 competition is focused on creating a ‘socialbot’ that converses coherently and engagingly with humans. Participating teams will advance several areas of conversational AI, including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modelling, common-sense reasoning and dialogue planning. Alexa customers will have engaging conversations and the feedback will help students improve their algorithms.