Engaging transformed fundamentals to design global hybrid higher education

ABSTRACT

The year 2020 began with grand ideas about building future higher education. Thereafter universities have been through a constant swirl of uncertainties and confusions as they respond to a novel suite of radically reconfigured fundamentals and prospects. This essay charts this journey in order to document 2020 experiences and to clarify evolving circumstances. We present our personal situations as the basis for articulating perspectives. We discuss shifts with higher education systems, education reconfigurations, research developments, the mobility of students, and faculty members. Finally, we explore the need and opportunity to design future higher education. Engaging with transformed fundamentals provides a means, we propose, to design a new, global hybrid higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education design
• system architectures
• academic research
• student experience
• global education

Inflection, then projection

As with nearly every colleague, 2020 began with grand ideas about building future higher education, diverted quickly into an uncertain swirl of changes and confusions, and seemed to precipitate a suite of radically reconfigured fundamentals and prospects. This essay charts this journey to document 2020 experiences and to clarify evolving circumstances. It contributes perspectives discussed among three colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing who study global higher education, an Australian professor, a senior policy researcher, and a doctoral scholar. Due to travel restrictions, during 2020, we found ourselves dispersed across Melbourne, Beijing, and Jiangsu Province. Our essay builds on dialogues, projects, observations, advising, teaching, and imagination. In taking stock of a substantial amount of accelerated transformation, the essay advances, most generally, that the next few years will both demand and afford a substantial amount of higher education design. Tentative projections are made to close the paper. While these reflect imaginative and contestable flurries rather than sure bets, it is helpful to probe apparent transformations.

Globalisation has been flowing freely in recent decades, with myriad 2019 experiences pounding rhythms of seemingly unstoppable growth. In October 2019, we hosted an international conference at Tsinghua on ‘constructing higher education for the global era’ giving specific emphasis to ‘proving student competence’ (Shi and Coates 2019). The meeting engaged dozens of internationally reputed experts in four days of workshops, seminars, plenary sessions, and studios. Throughout the year, we led the ‘Global University President Interview Project’ which produced and analysed transcripts from 18 in-depth interviews with the presidents of globally focused universities who had visited Tsinghua (Liu, Hong, et al. 2020). We finished an evaluation of XuetangX, the world’s second largest MOOC-type platform which was about to be unexpectedly thrust into supporting core education services. In late 2019, we started planning further development of Tsinghua’s Shenzhen International Graduate School, exploring scenarios and infrastructure for constructing the next phase of growth. Research for the Asian Universities Alliance (AUA) continued apace, building academic and institutional networks across Asia to shed unprecedented light on what has already become the world’s largest academic region. Hamish advised Schwarzman College masters students’ research with one of the world’s largest education technology (EdTech) firms, exploring the social impact arising from 100,000 teachers in the United States teaching one million students across China. On campus, we helped host, teach, and advise around 4000 students from 133 countries, and we worked with students and faculty who combined made around 160,000 trips to 104 countries. Each such experience signalled not just the meaningful development of higher education in Asia, but more importantly its global growth. While various nationalisms were already swelling in the United States, the United Kingdom, and certain parts of Europe, in general, with respect to education globalisation seemed to have become very easy.

Then, swiftly, the world got acutely personal and unusual. A lot changed. Many everyday experiences in the coming months signalled that this was not a conventional form of change underpinned, for instance, by policy, technology, or demography. Rather, the changes felt random, intersecting, and blurry. Unexpected ‘transboundary' (Boin and Lagadec 2000) problems kept surfacing, with just too many ‘un-’s in play. We introduce our personal experiences to provide background to this peculiar situation.

Hamish flew to Melbourne for a three-week holiday in the middle of January, to find himself stranded by border closures for the balance of 2020. From March until November in Melbourne, schools, businesses, and public places closed down for many months, with people restricted to their homes for 23 hours a day with a nightly curfew. He spent months teaching three courses remotely and online to students scattered across a dozen countries, bumping into novel international, regulatory, and technological frontiers. In a 2019 conference on graduate education, Hamish joked with Xi Hong about the rise of ‘online PhDs’, only to find ourselves collaborating remotely. Several of his graduate students found themselves homeless in foreign countries with limited visas and finances, spurring a need to activate contingent supports and find ingenious ways to sustain learning. A shaken, stressed, and unsettled global environment saw governments and media turn suspiciously on university funding, staffing, education, and research. The shuttering of schools led Hamish to spend three hours each day supervising his own children’s primary-level online learning at both a Beijing school and a Melbourne school. Counting two Chinese homestays who had earlier fled Europe for Australia, for several months his house supported online teaching at five institutions and online learning at six. Melbourne’s fixation with footy scores was displaced by anxiety about epidemiological asymptotes.

On the afternoon of Friday 19 January, Zheping Xie waved goodbye to a colleague in the office next door, wishing him a happy Chinese New Year and winter hometown vacation in Wuhan. Neither imagined that there would be a sudden and complete lockdown of Wuhan four days later, a national lockdown one month later, followed by a pandemic. Casual corridor contact was replaced with online meetings. National and international conferences were postponed, then cancelled. All teaching activities and meetings were switched online. Most of the year was spent working online at home, except for a few small-scale Tsinghua policy meetings. She spent months helping her daughter adapt to isolated home-based online learning, and react and toughen emotionally to the staccato tempo of yoyo-like school openings and closings. A primary school graduation was missed. Core facets of secondary education were switched online, as was much of university work life, including all international activities. At Tsinghua, she contributed to plans to switch much of 2021 online.

Xi Hong first heard about the mysterious pneumonia while visiting Japan. She did not realise its seriousness until getting back to China and seeing everyone wearing masks. The customary family and social Spring Festival gatherings were cancelled. Everyone went into a strange and long isolation period, never before encountered or imagined. Notice from Tsinghua came that the return to campus would be postponed, but that class would proceed online as scheduled. She participated in two courses. There were challenges with networks, distinguishing facial expressions and emotions, and the lack of peer communication. The basic structure was maintained, however, and online learning to some extent created a more equal and flexible platform for each student to openly express their insights or suggestions. This dreary and monotonous winter was an excellent period to focus on research, engaging in reading, writing, and research projects. The isolated reflection helped her transition into her new academic identity. Returning to campus after several months, it was clear that almost every detail of life and study was impacted. Thrice daily temperature checks were mandatory, canteen eating is planned and alone, and any campus exits must be approved. Various permutations of hybrid teaching and learning have been woven into everyday life.

Much higher education moves in half-yearly blocks and, even after accounting for obvious externalities, it remained unclear to us whether these unusual experiences were transitory or reflective of more enduring transformations. For months, it seemed better to suspend determination, push forward with academic immediacies, and avoid fraught efforts to fake certainty among muddle. After several months, however, it became clear that despite sustained confusion the nature of the disruption was such that fundamentals underpinning normalised forms of higher education were starting to be reconfigured. The pandemic revealed lots of tensions and, possibly amplified by the personal disruptions, certain big changes felt non-ignorable and seemingly non-reversible. As the pandemic dragged on, it appeared that certain changes were becoming less reversible. This was clear from media articles, from conference presentations, and from discussions with colleagues. Transformation of fundamentals is important, as it makes more certain the shape of things to come, what seems feasible, and what seems less likely. The transformation itself becomes a shaping continuity.

What shocks or changes have been evident, therefore, how have these registered, and what implications do they carry? Understanding such matters is essential to getting a grip on what’s going on and what feasible futures can emerge. While they touch every facet of higher education, the following analysis frames them in terms of system-level shifts, education reconfigurations, research developments, and the movement of people.

Shifting systems

One unarguable revelation of the ‘2020 experience’ has been clarification of the national basis of higher education. For at least 20 years, major universities, particularly in English-speaking countries, promoted themselves as ‘world-class’ or ‘international’. Econometric modelling in 2019, however, revealed that clear boundaries were marked out by education jurisdictions (Yang et al. 2020). The controls implemented by governments in 2020 made this very clear. Australia and China, for instance, closed international borders, stranding students, and faculty from universities. Governments worldwide closed campuses, distancing researchers from labs and studios. Governments took their various chances to turbocharge, neglect, or knife tertiary sectors, for the most part tweaking existing formulas and incentivising the deployment of short vocationally focused online courses. Importantly, governments opened unprecedented internet channels to enable a flow of hitherto ‘unregulated’ online education through firewalls and borders. Even in highly deregulated systems and uncertain times, government power was re-affirmed.

This re-assertion of governmental power in 2020 carries fundamental implications for higher education. The existential focus on health and security cast a further ‘modality’ or ‘locality’ dimension or vertex to Clark’s (1998) famous academic structuring. Governments stepped in to assure institutions’ bottom lines, bypassing spiralling economic debates about public/private returns. Even where governments had been standing back from tertiary sectors, their presence was felt. In the following months, they signalled re-engagement, showing policy interest in nationalising research, controlling research partnerships, re-asserting parameters for international engagement, and educating domestic students. While short-term cash injections will fade, regulatory embraces are likely to keep growing. This could feel painful to reasonably freewheeling universities but is almost inevitable given the articulation of learning as a new global currency.

Myriad shock vectors arising from the pandemic appear to have grounded the ‘isomorphic ivy striving’ fixations of plushily renumerated executives, directing their attention to more local communities and concerns. Mid-ranked universities were forced to stop gazing at stars while rugs were being pulled from beneath their institutional feet. Universities halted airport shuttles and started re-focusing on the urban challenges they were built to confront. This re-orientation stemmed partly from the disruption of international tuition fees, but also and more likely from a more general community re-awakening nourished by home-bound faculty recharging their local roots as they walked local streets and recognised the need for rejuvenation. ‘Teach local students like your job depends on it', one top-university president told his professors, sharply diverting from the entrenched ‘world-class university’ rhetoric of publishing and patenting to pump up the rankings.

Such fundamental re-orientation around local communities generates novel futures for education and engagement and carries broader implications for sectoral and institutional structure. Servicing local communities and industries with more education and training and with greater research partnerships surely bodes well for socioeconomic recovery. If it is nourished through funding and recognition, it could well see the emergence of distinctive institutional and academic formations. Rather than even ‘mid-ranked’ provincial universities striving to be Harvard or Oxford, they may carve out more nuanced and idiosyncratic directions. After decades of ‘global growth’ such diversification is timely, helping both communities and universities build productive capabilities, partnerships, and successes.

At the other end of the geographic spectrum, the pandemic shock spurred reconfiguration of important cross-border engagements. In early April, Australia’s Prime Minister told international students who had bankrolled the nation’s research efforts since the mid-1990s that ‘It’s time to go home' (Ross 2020). At the same time, universities worldwide shuffled out new platforms and appetites for the provision of all kinds of online teaching and learning. On the research front, governments around the world floated security concerns and new laws to marshal research engagements and outcomes. After a handful of free-flying decades, higher education began searching for more structured or stratified forms of micro-lateral cross-border and cooperation.

The reconfiguration of cross-border education, student mobility, faculty work, and research fundamentals will leave a lasting impact on higher education. There will be a greater need for global coordination around education regulation and quality assurance, particularly education that is broadcast online. The efficiency of online provision, for its part, will surely see Asian and increasingly African middle-class families more reluctant to fly to foreign campuses. Faculty, particularly though not only in high-tech fields, will be much more directed in terms of where they can work. The conditions placed on research will drive new forms of knowledge sharing, perhaps less publication and more informal verbal exchange, spawning fresh commercial challenges for major global publishers. This assessment conveys that cross-border academics are likely to become more controlled than they have been before. While impossible to discern with any certainty what international structures could emerge, it seems likely that they will be much more regional, regulated, and gradual in nature.

Educational reconfigurations

The shift to ‘emergency online learning’ caused by the shuttering of campuses is likely to be one of the biggest ever changes to education. In 2020, there were estimates that more than 90 per cent of the world’s learners, more than 1.5 billion people, were confined to their homes (Giannini 2020). Tsinghua’s leaders took a decisive step into the future in late January and became the world’s first prestigious university to evacuate the campus and shift all coursework online. Tsinghua did not spring into formal emergency online education in a vacuum, without resources or an eye to the future. As China’s premier technical university, Tsinghua plays a huge role in creating, designing, and distributing education technology, is top-ranked in computer science, sits at the heart of the world’s biggest technology ecosystem, and hosts the second largest MOOC (Shanghai Ranking 2020; TusStar 2020; Jing 2018; XuetangX 2020). While much formal education at Tsinghua had remained campus-based, it was already very technologically infused. But the university did take a bold and uncertain leap in quickly bringing online learning into its core given the lack of policy, procedure, faculty preparedness, student readiness, or precedent. Interestingly, research interviews we conducted with Tsinghua’s leaders revealed that the culture and history of resilience during crisis played a compelling role.

Online learning emerged from these emergency conditions as a plinth undergirding future higher education. Tellingly, however, online learning was relegated as a servant of in-person provision, not as the triumphant master, as long expounded by techno-zealots. Central findings from our evaluative research launched at the start of 2020 were, simply, that online education is functional more than fun (Liu, Zhang, et al. 2020). Like many universities, Tsinghua recoiled in subsequent months from its comprehensive reliance on virtual learning. While the campus was vacant, a massive amount of classroom renovation was undertaken to support Tsinghua’s plan for the next semester (Guo, Hong, and Coates 2020). This plan sought to nourish direct/in-person student–faculty contact as the bedrock of education, reverting to hybrid and fully online provision as necessary to service international or socially distanced provision. Nevertheless, the semester-length reliance on the internet seemed to achieve more than billions of dollars in technology investment or thousands of papers in forging a novel awareness, respect, and consideration for online education. Online education had ‘delivered solutions’ that genuinely helped to sustain core education services. Rather than write papers about promise and potential, the challenge henceforth is how to make best use of mature hybrid learning.

The maturation of hybrid forms of education was made possible by the consolidation of very sophisticated education service firms. Typically branded as online project management (OPM) firms, these businesses have grown by forming sophisticated partnerships with universities to deliver bundled commercial, marketing, platform and product ‘solutions’ (Coates 2020). While this tends to be a very secretive and ‘commercial-in-confidence’ world, despite involving many major public universities, there is evidence to suggest that partnerships surged in 2020 as universities leant on such companies to sustain efficient provision of known quality (HolonIQ 2020). Another more open means by which this trend played out was via the provision of open education resources. By deploying in-house and third-party teaching resources, for instance, Tsinghua supported ‘clone classes’ at dozens of other Chinese institutions.

Such partnerships carry step-change implications for future higher education. While discrete institutional agreements tend to span three to five years (Wong 2019), they lock right into the ‘academic core’ (Marks and Sparkman 2019) and load up in more pervasive and non-ignorable ways. These firms deploy sharp promotions to recruit greater and more diverse participants, monitor real-time digital touchpoints to sustain engagement, release designed resources which are easy to digest and deliver attractive financial returns. This work hovers beneath the gaze of governments and regulators, changing universities from within and in terms of their engagement with learners. There are obvious and large professional implications for university academics and for the functional/‘vertical’ specialists who work at the firms. Granular and even location-based and cerebral/cortical tracking of students generates new insights into learning. Epistemological implications flow from the use of tightly packaged materials. While financials are hard to unpick, the diversion of surplus funds into partnerships may carry consequences for subsidies directed to research or less lucrative fields. Universities must bolster their commercial governance capabilities.

Clearly, these education-related changes and reconfigurations merely scratch the surface. While ‘change rhetoric’ runs rampant in higher education commentary and scholarship, realistically education plays out across decades through large systems with long pipelines. It is too soon to calculate the effects of contemporary disruptions on students who have been preparing their whole lives for dreamlike university futures. Even when air travel returns, it remains unclear how student and teacher mobility will take shape, but even so health concerns and online efficiencies will surely linger for years. Gated campuses are already being reworked as sanctuaries, and are spawning external ‘walk-up shops’ and ‘fab cafes’ to engage local communities in knowledge-led socioeconomic transformation. Already, governments have amplified predicted calls (Bice and Coates 2016; Coates 2017) for more evidence of education value, social impact, and community leadership. While the shape of the post-pandemic recovery remains ‘a question mark’, the magnitude of disruption has already reconfigured education in ways which will ricochet for years to come.

Research developments

Perhaps even more than previously, online detachment delineated education, training, and research. Personal experiences, media stories, and discussions with colleagues all conveyed major shifts in academic research. We note movements regarding the field of higher education studies, and regarding research more broadly.

The field of higher education studies was shaped in both scale and substance. Trapped at home, all academics and consultants found more time to write, surely ensuring that through essays like this one 2020 will be one of the most highly documented yet. This is important given the profound scope of contemporary change. Indeed, the accumulation of so much change appeared to make many steps back and ask major questions about the field. Interesting studies and books emerged which tracked research trends and directions (e.g. Daenekindt and Huisman 2020). The year 2020 has required higher education research to deliver in robust and relevant ways, and at the same time, adapt to and create novel perspectives, evidence, and guidance. We became convinced, as outlined below, of the need for the field to engage with fundamental forms of higher education design.

Beyond higher education studies, it was hard not to project that abrupt changes to academic research will reap enduring consequences. Governments stepped in to subsidise fields not independently viable. Through writing, investigative, and editorial work, we noted swift changes with publishing. Fuelled by the vaccine quest, medical researchers cemented decades of debate into collaborative ways for expediting and strengthening peer review, which will carry universal implications. The swing towards open-access publications was accentuated, potentially to help faculty working from home, certainly affirming growing interest in open science and, related to this, establishing momentum towards citations and other impact-related metrics. China’s Ministry of Education announced that international bibliometrics would play a reduced role in many kinds of performance evaluation. The presidents of major universities, particularly in countries like Australia, had impressed on them the need to move beyond international student tuition to fund research. While the consequences of such changes remain uncertain, the reconfiguration of ‘world-class university’ logic (Salmi 2009) seems inevitable.

New global realisation emerged of the role of research in Asia, not just in supporting more established systems, but in pioneering frontiers and innovations. This is timely. By 2030, it is estimated that two-thirds of the world’s higher education will lie within five hours flight of Singapore. Several Asian countries have already developed mature higher education systems with stable governance, young home-grown faculty, established career tracks, and multilayered international partnerships. Regional university brands have grown in step with resilient economies, and while prestigious Western brands are strong, the coming years may temper their allure. China, already the world’s biggest academic system, is engaging in a range of strengthening and diversification initiatives and is committed to deepening internationalisation and postgraduate education. Such reforms will have an overarching impact on global higher education.

Moving people

Higher education is about people, and changes regarding people have already had the most profound impact and implications. Across Asia, travel which used to take 6 hours and 600 dollars in 2020 took 6 weeks and 6000 dollars, considering costs for visas, health certificates, flights, and quarantine. It has been impossible to ignore the impact of the pandemic on students, on faculty, and on broader global flows.

Twenty years ago during his doctoral fieldwork Hamish discovered that not all young people love technology (Coates 2006). As part of our research and teaching in 2020, we affirmed, unsurprisingly, that for young adults learning online in mum and dad’s apartment is far from an ideal experience. Teaching online affords wonderful scale economies and adds qualitative dimensions, but at the same time affirms the human significance of students and teachers coming together to talk, relate, stimulate, and care. While cognitively efficient, it is little fun, and the uncertainty and isolation can fuel anxiety and depression. It is particularly weird when it comes to facets of higher education requiring intense kinds of formation, such as during transition years, doctoral education, or professional and leadership cultivation. Tsinghua’s leaders sought insight from our research about the impact of the viral shock on cultivating each student’s leadership. We participated in several ‘online graduations’ during 2020 which while important and carefully choreographed seemed to bring fewer butterflies to our stomachs. Concerningly, it is exactly these human qualities which contemporary accountability and monitoring mechanisms have found it most difficult to grab onto and are most at risk of slipping through future cracks. Even when sophisticated service firms identify ‘touchpoints’ and ‘clickstreams’, and even when ‘big data’ is invoked, these don’t fully capture these intangible qualities. Eye-scans, mouse-clicks, and even brainwaves are poor proxies for feelings, involvement, and creativity. After two decades of formalisation and specification, 2020 revealed the need to bring humanity or soul back into universities.

The pandemic’s impact on faculty has been extreme. The initial impact was behavioural and emotional. Rather than meet, teach, talk, eat, travel, and walk with students and colleagues as we worked through research and everyday problems, we spent each day yelling into our computers about epidemiology and resilience. The subsequent impact was far more dramatic. Over the next 6 months Australian universities announced that maybe 10 per cent of academics may lose their jobs in just the first round of cuts, not counting the many thousands of sessionals who had already not been rehired. It will take time yet to discern how political, financial, research and educational factors have been balanced in these termination decisions, and whether academic or corporate powers are calling the shots. In contrast, Chinese universities, under the 35-year double world-class strategy (State Council 2015; Zhong et al. 2019) and 15-year reforms to turbocharge graduate education (MOE 2020a), sustained hiring programs, fuelling fresh cycles of discourse about the hunt for top-level talent. While university leaders in Anglospheric countries may execute decisions according to near-term fiscal anxieties, it remains to be seen how governments and professions protect and nourish the longer term cultivation of capability for their next phases of national and global innovation. After teaching finished for the first semester, previously vibrant projects were mothballed, and conferences deferred, it became clear that academic work in the next few years would be far less serendipitous and more contrived.

Short-term faculty changes will reverberate for years, notwithstanding ongoing and emerging crises. A tranche of retirements and career-end packages will bring a generational shift in workforce demography. Most likely, the enforced shift to more functional work has already accelerated the trajectory towards more differentiated work and roles (Coates and Goedegebuure 2012). Such movements may usher in major transformations of the pervasive and opaque ‘40-40-20’. In the recent decade, OPMs have realised step-change productivity gains by underpinning reconstructed education value chains with reconfigured professional expertise. As university budgets contract and student demand likely expands, these contemporary ‘education engineers' (Dede, Richards, and Saxberg 2019) will surely play a much greater role. After several months of leading research and teaching projects at universities across China, we wondered how the more formal acceptance of online teaching might globalise teaching, whether it will open opportunities, instil homogenisation, or spur novel differentiation. In mid-2020, several Chinese ministries issued a draft regulation on the management of foreign teachers (MOE 2020b) which given the scale and reach of China’s education system will shape major global debates. Like many things in 2020, numerous doctorates will be required to articulate patterns in such development.

Implications arising from changes in the way people move around the world will surely be amongst the most profound. In the first months of 2020, airlines grounded 20,000 planes and the people-to-people activities which undergirded globalisation ground to a halt. Within months, innovative platforms emerged to sustain connectivity. China’s Ministry of Education, for instance, implemented measures to enable prestigious Chinese and onshore foreign universities to support students who would normally be studying abroad, even for extended periods and during formative doctoral years (MOE 2020c). Big universities like Columbia and The Australian National University reconfigured Beijing and Shanghai venues as classroom spaces. Cornell University announced a ‘study away’ plan to enable students to engage within China at seven top Chinese universities, and Harvard allowed international students to study at universities in their home countries for a semester (Isselbacher and Su 2020). Students were housed on campus, foreign faculty were videoed in, and hybrid experiences were designed. Such trans-national innovations were forged quickly, but they have set precedents, signalling the emergence of ‘TNE4.0’ with myriad 2 + 2, 3 + 2, and even 4 + 0 permutations. What remains less clear is how quickly global higher education will pivot towards Asia, the stickiness of ‘Asian international students’ to wealthy-country ‘world-class brands’, and how to value and price hybrid experiences. Even deeper questions lurk around the shape and regulation of future trans-national markets, around the ‘baked-in’ quality governance arising from hybrid institutional and education partnerships, about revising ‘sending/receiving country’ mentalities into more sophisticated ‘scholar interconnectivity’ narratives, and about the course and research designs which will hold weight in the near future.

It does not take too much acumen or courage to foresee that trans-national education will look very different over the next 25 years. The pandemic has flattened ‘international education’ and fuelled the evolution of the new ‘global era’. As this essay conveys, the conditions and arrangements built up since the mid-1990s to sustain ‘international higher education’ have cracked, sometimes in irreparable ways. The ‘emergency’ arrangements patched in to sustain education across the first half of 2020 cranked important rachets which will prove hard or unpleasant to reverse. Asian students have become used to studying courses online. This has also proved that, along with most other experiences, a university degree can be done largely by phone (Johnson 2018). The government-blessed bilateral deals are particularly notable for students and for education more broadly. These deals bestowed formal equivalence between the universities, often long sought-after by the still rapidly developing Asian partner. Asian institutions including universities continue to shift from customer or partner into leadership or ownership positions. Major investors are buying up and knitting together talent development pipelines (Wells Advisory 2020). Resilient Asian economies and education are very attractive to students worldwide, many of whom prefer local cultures and employment networks, would prefer to divert available funds towards buying an apartment, and in any case, spend much time studying hard alone and online. With economies nationalising and travel disrupted, post-study migration and work seem less useful things to chase.

Circumstances such as these signal the need for new perspectives, partnerships, and practices. They map out the rudiments and stratifications underpinning TNE4.0. Very likely, top-tier markets will be taken care of in-country, with people expecting a much more sophisticated overseas experience. Such ‘collegial’ arrangements have traditionally unfolded informally, though are increasingly being curated by expert service firms. The largest volume and value will come from strengthening the normcore. Clear parameters have emerged as playing an important role in shaping the road ahead. Multinational and cross-sectoral partnerships will be required to deliver accredited and quality-assured education. Knowing the standing of university teachers will be essential, which will thereby require the formulation of internationally recognised forms of professional accreditation. International quality governance and assurance will be required, ensuring consistency and economies of scale. High-return delivery in mass-market fields has been commoditised and will likely be delivered through smart platforms by charismatic teachers. Well-established education institutions will have to find a new place in a much more contested value-chain, shifting beyond the provision of formal education to engage students in much broader enriching experiences. Higher education institutions will need to reach down into the pipeline and use sophisticated learner potential and achievement records to attract and engage promising talents. Institutions will be valued reputationally in terms of the value-creating contributions they make to enhancing community sustainability.

Design time

We started 2020 researching global higher education futures, sustained life, and academics through pandemic-induced turbulence, then realised that contemporary changes had reconfigured fundamentals. A volatile, exciting, and thought-provoking time. Far from muting or stalling the initial research, we realised that our experiences in 2020 have presaged the shape of things to come.

Amongst all these global, institutional, and personal flux, how then to understand, consider, and prepare for the future? Many months of ‘homely work’ provided Hamish with spaces and boundaries to articulate ‘higher education design’ (Coates 2020). Higher education design focuses on creating systems, institutions, and resources. It builds on contemporary design science research and practice which has grown way beyond graphics, software, and objects to enrich a host of diverse industries, stakeholders, and systems (Plattner, Meinel, and Leifer 2016; McKinsey 2020). Springing from ‘design thinking’ (IDEO 2020), ventures begin by understanding problems through research, observation, consultation, and reflection. Having these liberating foundations in hand made it possible, as we sketch in this essay, to delineate ideas, systems, roles, constraints, and experiences. Such analytical work can underpin subsequent creation of options, solutions, and scenarios and, further down the track, the construction of prototypes, the curation of storylines, and the production of business and implementation models.

Higher education design is dynamic, nimble, and engaged, and seems a useful epistemology and methodology for grappling with the scale and extent of the 2020 transformation. After stepping through inevitable anxieties, the period offers a chance to ponder and shape life-scale experiences. Rather than wait months or years to finalise evaluations, adopting a design perspective is more immediate and relevant. The design perspective focuses on solutions rather than problems. It skips beyond dystopian anxieties which underpin too much discourse about higher education, and instead imagine, prototype, and build future higher education. It is theoretically and methodologically eclectic rather than formulaic. It embraces insights residing within the scholarly discipline, but also and importantly in surrounding research and practice ecosystems. It avoids tinkering around delicate scholarly debates and instead advances important innovation frontiers. In turbulent times, higher education design promises an optimistic approach to understanding contemporary transformations and their implications. It resonates with the way institutions, people, and ideas behave as they ingeniously negotiate stress and innovation.

As this essay conveys, studying higher education in 2020 emboldened our sense of urgency for articulating and advancing research on higher education. Lots of major research frontiers emerge. New perspectives and narratives will be required to help learners, teachers, institutions, and governments navigate emerging education economies. With economic headwinds buffeting, to sustain growth, more must be done to report and affirm higher education’s value and contribution. The governance and financing of systems and institutions need rethinking, shifting into line with new global spaces and flows. Rather than swoon over bibliometrics, we see the need to help universities find a way to prove how they add distinctive value by producing talented graduates, promoting innovation, impacting communities, and creating sustainable societies. In times of financial stress, there is a need, for instance, to implement more productive teaching and learning arrangements. There is a related but distinct need to reform doctoral education in ways that ensure that graduates are ready for professional academic work. Regulations and new norms must be established for online teaching, student assessment, curriculum management, and intellectual property. Guidance and subsidy for infrastructure and technology must be provided to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. There is a need to report academic work to the public in more accessible, engaging, and open ways. Undoubtedly, more attention must be paid to cultivating the next generation of university leaders and constructing technologically infused learning spaces. A huge amount of work is required to define these frontiers, enchant university presidents, and reform practices.

As these ideas convey, designing higher education charts a fresh frontier in sector-specific research and development. The field of higher education studies flourished from the 1990s as Anglospheric, European and Asian universities grew large. Education and research programs, centres, and communities formalised around topics such as student affairs, policy and leadership, teaching and learning, and internationalisation. Many warning lights have been flashing, however, that this work has been wandering aimlessly and failing to deliver. These ominous indications of distress must be taken seriously as inducements for reform and rejuvenation. The year 2020 has clarified that it is time for a stocktake of frontiers and emerging research directions, and clarification of methodological and practice communities. Higher education has never been more important.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge their families, friends, and colleagues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).