{"id":61819,"date":"2022-02-25T04:43:14","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T09:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=61819"},"modified":"2022-02-25T04:43:14","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T09:43:14","slug":"higher-education-must-reinvent-itself-to-meet-the-needs-of-the-world-today-enter-the-richard-f-heller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/higher-education-must-reinvent-itself-to-meet-the-needs-of-the-world-today-enter-the-richard-f-heller\/","title":{"rendered":"Higher education must reinvent itself to meet the needs of the world today. Enter the Richard F. Heller"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nUniversities face many threats to their future. The traditional universities have become\u00a0over-managed business enterprises<\/a>, which may not reflect societal, national or global educational needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many of these issues into focus.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0new book<\/a>, I propose a model that responds to the broad range of challenges universities face. I call this model the distributed university \u2013 that is, a university that distributes education online to where it is needed.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I have been involved in online master\u2019s-level programs to build public health capacity in both high-income and low-to-middle-income countries. Face-to-face teaching designed for the\u00a0International Clinical Epidemiology Network<\/a>\u00a0was augmented by distance learning \u2013 first paper-based, followed by online. I established the University of Manchester\u2019s first fully online master\u2019s program.<\/p>\n

More recently, I founded and co-ordinated the global, fully online, volunteer-led\u00a0People\u2019s Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What are the problems facing universities?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The pressures on universities are both external and internal.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0overly dependent on income from overseas students<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The distributed university responds to these problems by:<\/p>\n