UK higher education has under-invested in digital for years. When it comes to bricks versus clicks, universities have tended over the past decade to invest many times the amount in buildings as in IT, preferring to focus on campus expansion.
But, nearly three years on from the start of the pandemic, universities have also made widespread progress with technology-enabled teaching, witnessing the benefits that it can bring and most now realising that investment in technology is strategically vital. This has been underlined by the publication recently of the Office for Students’ blended learning review. Professor Susan Orr’s report confirms that the higher education sector is now in an ‘emergent context’ and identifies examples of high-quality blended approaches, acknowledging that the balance of face-to-face, online and blended delivery is not the key determinant of teaching quality.
