University Challenge

For me, the greatest compensating feature of the past month has been learning how to use online learning platforms to deliver lectures and tutorials to students. I got through six online lectures during the last two weeks of the spring term and have a couple more to undertake later this month. As a confirmed technophobe given to losing the plot at the first sign of a transmission glitch, I can hardly claim to be a master of Teams, Zoom, Adobe Connect and Skype but I just about manage them.

The most telling moment in my breakneck dash for online competence four weeks ago came when the brilliant Lisa from the Learning Development team at Cass Business School introduced me to the use of breakout rooms during Adobe Connect online lectures. It has been a godsend this week, she said, for the teaching sessions we have been doing with staff and students. We always knew that it was there but we never got round to really using it.

Therein lies the challenge which, cliche as it may sound, surely lies ahead for universities. Even if that may not at first blush appear to be the case. As and when today’s restrictions ease, there may well be an initial rush to re-establish the face-to-face contact which students have sorely missed. This may even result in a first-year lift in applications for on-campus university places. This will support the view that the much prized “student experience” remains the super brand par excellence of tertiary education. And we can all go back to face-to-face lecturing and consign online delivery to the vocational and other less academic courses.

Yet Lisa’s moment of revelation about the value of online breakout rooms will have been repeated many million times over in recent weeks. And will continue to be repeated over the weeks ahead. Just as in my little way I have discovered the joys of delivering exactly the same lecture which I had been planning to deliver face-to-face, but with more control than in a lecture room and at least an equal level of interaction with students. Plus feeling a lot less exhausted during and afterwards. And being able to pop out into the garden when the students were tackling practice questions.

The missing link here is what the students made of it. Too early to tell since their attention (and that of university authorities) is focused on just getting through this current period of revised teaching, coursework and examination formats. But the polling sleuths will not be far behind with their feedback surveys to gauge the customers’ rating of the service provided. I anticipate that the reaction will be significantly positive – in part out of that instinctive appreciation which the human spirit tends to show for any service provided in adverse conditions but also reflecting some surprise at how clear and useful and informative the online lecturing experience turned out to be.

So can the universities sustain the competitive appeal of the campus life over the greater flexibility, and much lower cost, afforded to the student by this online delivery? In the answer to that question lies the future viability of the massive infrastructure in which universities have invested over the past decade. Including all that student accommodation which has sprouted a whole new branch of the buy-to-let housing market. Long before this latest dash for online delivery, questions were being raised about the value-for-money of accumulating over £30,000 of debt (at a crippling interest rate of 3% over RPI) in return for a routine BA degree handed out to half the nation. Hence the focus on employability in the marketing campaigns of so many universities. If the same degree (and hence employability) level can be attained whilst living rent-free at home and carrying on with that school holiday job in the local butcher’s shop, then the economics for the student looks compelling.

The rub lies in those claims of employability. Sure, the campus experience carries the cachet of excitement and zeitgeist and peer group partying but this is the millennial generation that knows the score about the gig economy and property prices. Unless the university can sustain faith in the competitive advantage which its campus experience offers for future careers, then it will increasingly seem like an expensive luxury only for those financed by the bank of mum and dad. And as yet more universities feel obliged to offer a competitive online package (rather than be outdone by their peers as well as the specialist online providers), they will find themselves forced down that dreaded path known to the corporate marketeers as “cannibalising” your mainstream business. Could today’s surge in the use of online delivery spark the student behavioural changes which erode the university’s financial model? The annoying half-answer is yes but not just yet. It will be a long drawn out process and will hurt the lower end of the university food chain most, but it will happen.