Why human-centered transformation design is critical for universities

Universities are underestimating student expectations

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed what students want from universities. Their educational norms and situations have shifted. In our survey, 60% of students are managing work or caring commitments alongside their studies. Partly for this reason, campus-based students expect to access content and administrative processes online, in their own time.

Concerningly, one-third of students told us they feel neutral about or unhappy with their choice of university. This should raise alarm bells for university leaders who are tasked with delivering a positive experience for all their students. Not meeting expectations around improving career prospects or preparing students for the workplace are key drivers of overall unhappiness. 

Student preferences if funds were available for technology-related investments:

Convince me your university can improve my career prospects

Not meeting expectations around improved career prospects and preparing students for the workplace are key drivers of overall unhappiness with university choice. To win student choice, universities must better understand what students expect from higher education (HE) and offer programs that directly support their career goals.

48% of students indicated that the main reason they chose their program was to qualify for a chosen career or improve their career prospects but a concerning 21% of final year undergraduates say their university experience does not meet their expectations regarding preparation for the workplace. 

Creating programs that provide students with the skills they need for the future workplace will require critical thinking.

Support me to succeed academically and find connection

Our survey found that almost three-quarters (74%) of students rate support to achieve academic goals as very or extremely important. Lack of support was also a key reason for students’ unhappiness with their choice of university, especially among mid-level and final-year students. 

Students also need to find connections with each other. Campus location remains students’ third reason for choosing a university, suggesting the campus experience is not over. But its role may need to be reimagined.  Nearly two-thirds of students say the campus is where they prefer to access social events and networking. This is key to students’ wellbeing, sense of belonging and developing social skills in addition to reducing feelings of isolation in an increasingly online learning environment. 

Universities misjudge the importance of the employee experience

While the student experience is fundamental to a successful digital transformation, university leaders must also pay attention to the staff (teaching faculty, researchers and administration) experience. The human experience includes all of the people involved in making a university work. To be successful, digital transformation needs to meet their needs and expectations, too.

Teaching faculty

Empower me to create quality digital content

Teaching faculty must be supported in carving out time to design and oversee the development of new curricula and learning materials that incorporate the best of digital and in-person learning modes. From our focus groups, we learned that many university teachers urgently need further training in blended teaching best practice. They need to understand how to both develop curricula and content for effective digital or blended learning and deliver teaching and learning support using the chosen modes.

Free me to focus on the important tasks

For teaching faculty, time is their most precious resource. Digital transformation should enable them to devote more time to their core missions of teaching and supporting students or leading research. Providing more asynchronous content will free them from needing to deliver in-person lectures, while using virtual meetings and online scheduling tools can help them provide one-on-one student support more efficiently. As a member of the UK/Ireland faculty focus group indicated: “We are trying to give back time to pedagogy and teaching by making things quicker. It is now easier to design timetables and organise assessments.”

However, simply implementing new tools and processes will not automatically lead to meaningful time savings. Faculty in our focus groups said they were faced with a myriad of new systems and tools, which were unintuitive, difficult to use or duplicative.

Enlighten me so I can better support learning outcomes

The higher education sector is currently grappling with improving learning outcomes. With the move to new modes of teaching and learning, faculty need to easily assess the effectiveness of their teaching and continuously adjust based on what is working well and what isn’t.  As more systems move to digital, there’s increased potential to analyze the data and create meaningful insights around student interactions, their levels of engagement and their learning progress. By collating that information into progress dashboards, faculty can track learning progress at an individual, class or program level, as well as identify students who require more support or programs that need adjusting. 

Researchers

Equip me to conduct leading-edge research

Universities have tended to under-invest in the digital transformation of research, as the focus shifted to teaching and learning. The investment needed is not just better equipment and computing power to support leading-edge research. There is also a real need to streamline and automate the significant level of administration surrounding research, to free up researchers’ time and help them be successful.

Processes ripe for digital transformation include grant applications and management, risk assessments, scheduling access to shared equipment, results disclosures, reviews, audits, publication and dissemination.

Connect me to other researchers

In many cases, research and innovation are not solo efforts but collaborative ones. The research community has a particular need to connect, share data and ideas, and work together to solve problems. The use of digital technologies for research is making collaboration within and across institutions much faster, more efficient and effective. This is greatly facilitating international research collaboration, widening the pool of potential research collaborators, which is particularly important in niche fields.

Administrators

Show me the data I need and save me from busy work

Our focus groups with administrative staff revealed a cohort that feels increasingly overworked and overwhelmed, with many digital transition initiatives actually adding to workload pressures.

The most cited challenge for administrative staff is that the data they need to perform their jobs resides in disparate siloed systems and cannot readily be combined. As a result, universities end up with a patchwork of siloed systems with different access points, that are not integrated, cannot share data, and have a very different look and feel.

Digital processes generate a wealth of data that administrators are hungry to use to drive decisions, but insights cannot be generated when data resides in silos.

In addition, many universities are looking at how to automate HR, finance and procurement processes across the institution. Automating routine student-facing tasks, such as processing applications can continue to relieve the burden on administrative staff. As Paul LeBlanc, President, Southern New Hampshire University puts it: “It’s about increasing the amount of time staff can spend making a difference to the students versus satisfying the system.”

For universities to truly survive and thrive in a digital era, university leaders need to maximize the value of digital transformation, focus on designing services and processes around the needs of the people they serve — from students to administrative staff, and deliver a distinctive student offering and digital experience that sets them apart. This means aligning the value proposition with evolving student and workforce demands, having a clear understanding of the end-to-end student experience and how to make it more convenient, engaging and supportive, using technology. It also means designing services and systems that enable faculty and staff to spend more of their time supporting students to achieve their learning and career readiness goals. And of course, the technology must be matched with investment in upskilling faculty and staff to deliver an exceptional student experience.  

Summary

Successful digital transformation in higher education is predicated on putting the humans that they serve at the center of all transformation projects – from students to teaching faculty to administrative staff. By understanding their needs and expectations, university leaders can build strong strategies, invest in the right technologies, and strengthen their university’s student offering so they thrive in a digital era.