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Dirk Van Damme reports back from the:
European Blackboard 2009 Conference, held in Barcelona 6-8 April
The European Blackboard 2009 Conference attracted a large gathering of Blackboard users and institutional leaders, so a rather large community of higher education innovators, mainly from the UK, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, etc.
At this conference I disseminated CERI’s work on educational innovation, as a leading centre of research and policy-development on educational innovation. I was invited to hold the first opening keynote, which I somewhat provocatively titled ‘The Future of Higher Education : Innovate or Evaporate’. The following abstract summarizes my keynote presentation:
Higher education institutions (HEI’s) are operating under very different circumstances than a few decades ago, when leaders of contemporary societies have been educated. Demographic, economic, social and cultural transformations are affecting the environment in which institutions are functioning. In the first part of the keynote lecture, a brief overview will be presented of the main trends affecting HEI’s, drawing upon recent OECD data. Demographic transformations, internationalization, the need for expanded and more equitable access and the demand for increased investments in human capital will stimulate further expansion of higher education. At the same time HEI’s will have to turn away from the pitfalls of massification, by developing tailor-made educational servicies tuned to the needs of contemporary learners. Diversification of provision to an ever more heterogenous student population will lead to the development of very different institutional arrangements for learning and knowledge creation. Technology certainly will provide some of the answers to these needs, but may also further stimulate diversification. A short overview of the available evidence on technology-driven innovation in higher education will help to clarify this point. Finally, some possible scenario’s for the future of higher education will be presented. Some of them are perhaps not particularly reassuring for present-day’s institutions, as they will have it increasingly difficult to defend their quasi-monopoly on high-skills development in knowledge societies. The conclusion is evident: HEI’s need to make strategic choices for radical innovation if they want to uphold their status as the most powerful and responsive institutional teaching and learning arrangements for future human capital development.
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