The University of Edinburgh was recently brought to a near standstill by a switchover to a new payments system, with PhD students going unpaid, contracts cancelled and the overseers of multimillion-pound research projects unable to order basic necessities such as paper.
While an extreme example, the case demonstrated what many who work in higher education have known for years: the systems universities rely on to function on a day-to-day basis are often apparently not fit-for-purpose.
It is feared that such endemic problems with digital infrastructure will now hamper the sector’s ambitions to pivot to offer more online and hybrid learning, with technologies unable to cope with expansion drives into areas such as microcredentials and lifelong learning. In a survey conducted last year by Jisc, the UK sector’s main technology agency, 82 per cent of staff reported experiencing technical problems while teaching online.
