Just been talking to Matthew about capturing stuff from the conference, and saying that some of the most valuable stuff comes out of discussion after the talks – so I thought we could try and get some of this down as we fly home…

Should also say that the presentations are online

Collaboration and Competition in HE

Are we competing in a collaborative environment or collaborating in a competitive environment?

HE is moving from the former to the latter – Roger McClure from the Scottish funding body made the distinction, and it seems as if Scottish HE has grasped this much more readily than English HE – also think about the success of the IU that David Farquhar talked about.

Also, in England at least, the aim seems unclear from a government level – are they really aiming for a open market, or will they bail out anyone who looks like going under. We had quite a good chat about this, comparing it to other similar commercial environments – e.g. Post Office – they are supposed to compete, but can’t increase the cost of postage. Is HE headed the same way.

How we become competetive as HE providers also came up a few times – should we specialise? Are we clear how we (as organisations) make our money, and where we should concentrate effort. The last talk also touched on this, with examples of how airlines collaborate to survive, but are also in competition – sometimes your closest competitor has the most in common with you.

I was struck by a comment from Howard Newby that at the moment it was theoretically possible for students to easily transfer credit between institutions, and take courses in different places – but the institutional processes get in the way. Look at the Gas and Electricity market where people come to your door to get you to change suppliers, you sign, and they do it all for you – why aren’t we providing this kind of service? Should we be more aggressive in recruiting continuously (i.e. not just a single UG intake in a year, but ‘why not swap to RHUL’ – thousands of customers are returning to BT every month etc.)

Howard Newby also emphasised that universities have to capitalise on their strengths – can they continue to offer a broad range of courses across disciplines at an appropriate standard? Are we going to see more specialist institutions? Should RHUL become more specialist? And what will it mean to be a university in that environment?

Technology is changing faster than you think

Several times I’ve been struck by how quickly things are changing. Why are our students worrying about storage on our network, when they can pick up a 120Gb drive that fits in a rucksack for less than £100? Why aren’t we exploiting this more?

The younger students coming through our doors now are immersed in this – they don’t even think that it might not be there – they’ve never known a world without mobiles, PCs, the Internet.

Reflecting on what has changed in the last 20-30 years and thinking what the implications of that rate of change continuing (or even increasing) for the remainder of my working life. But also, as we were reminded this morning, we cope with this incredibly well in general – although I’ve only owned a mobile phone for that last 5 years, I haven’t found it in anyway difficult to adapt – when technology works, you don’t even think about it.

Leadership and Vision

This probably relates to the first point of competition, and where we go as an organisation – but we need both leadership and vision. We need to know where we are going, and what we are trying to acheive.

If we can’t continue to do everything, we need to decide what we stop doing, and what the consequences of this will be.

Something that came up several times was that we are ‘risk averse’ both as a profession, but also (I think) as organisations. This coincided nicely with the presentation on Risk Assessment – so perhaps we need to be less risk averse, but at the same time understand the risks we are taking.

OK – that’s it for now, perhaps some more later.