Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.
It makes sense to divide a large organisation like a university into parts – each unit with its own distinctive expertise, community of peers, and leadership. Historically for the execution of effective teaching and research, what was mostly needed was a group of academics working in a similar subject area. Those academics were supported by administrators housed in their departments. The “centre” existed, by and large, to serve the functions of the departments, and nobody minded very much if each department did things a bit differently.
Over time, in response to the growth in the scale and range of university activity, and associated pressures to be externally accountable, as well as a more competitive HE landscape, the range of “central” university functions has grown, along with a squad of expert professional staff to manage those functions: record keeping and data management, provision of student services, finance and HR, institutional policies, estates, IT and digital, learning and teaching enhancement and local and international engagement. The governance of all this complexity shifted from a collegial model of departmental representatives coming together, to a central executive team.
Yet that shift has not been absolute – each academic discipline has its own distinctive curriculum, research agenda and disciplinary culture. Students tend to derive their sense of belonging and identity from their department and their relationships with course peers and academics, more than from their institution as a whole. And it also remains the case that while the “corporate” bit of the university does an enormous amount to keep the organisation as a whole accountable, solvent, and generally functioning, responsibility for execution of the core mission of the organisation remains with departments and disciplines.
It is undeniable that the shift has not been to everyone’s satisfaction, and that it involves a redistribution of power in the institution that some view with suspicion. But there can be a positive creative tension between department and centre – while each may have different priorities and motivations and a different expert lens through which to view these, all share the higher education mission, and the success of the institution depends on the ability of department and centre to work productively together, neither assuming dominance.
Achieving this in practice, however, is clearly far from frictionless, hence the “silos” complaint. For everyone, from the newest minted PhD to the vice chancellor, sometimes getting anything done in their institution that requires them to operate outside their immediate sphere of connection and influence can feel like wading through treacle. And the retention of the tradition of collegial committee-style deliberation and decision-making arguably doesn’t always quite manage to create the environment in which these creative tensions can be worked through productively.
Holding me back
Ongoing efforts to develop institutional digital capability has foregrounded the silos issue in many institutions, with digital leaders trying to bring coherence to a patchwork of systems, used in different ways and with different workarounds by different parts of the institution. While there is always a case to be made for the distinctive needs of different departments, digital fragmentation causes frustration to everyone, makes the institution more vulnerable to cyber attack and, leaders report, is increasingly holding back progress on key institutional strategic agendas in education and student support.
Broadly speaking, where digital and learning and teaching connect is where institutions are trying to:
- Visualise and better understand the whole “student journey” to more effectively recruit, retain, and support the full breadth of students, an endeavour that requires good quality data to get to the people who need to see it in as timely a way as possible
- Improve the quality of digital education provision, ensuring that students benefit from a degree of flexibility in how they access their learning and that the online elements are engaging and widely accessible
- Deploy technology and automation to reduce the mental load on students and staff, make institutional processes more efficient and user-friendly and generally give the impression that things “work” around here. Which, given that arguably the vast majority of staff and student interactions with their institution are digitally mediated, is a fairly important way in which institutions signal that their staff and students matter to them
Getting this stuff right requires a cross-institutional conversation, with the right balance of attention to pedagogic expertise and the evidence on what helps diverse students succeed, and to digital expertise and the need to adapt to how AI is changing the education landscape and affording opportunities to further advance all of the above agendas.
In partnership with Kortext, we’ve been exploring how that conversation is unfolding inside institutions, hearing from senior leaders in both education and digital, to see how they think about and make real strategic agendas that cross the digital/education divide. We’ve found that while resolving digital silos may present as a technical problem – requiring different systems to talk to each other – tackling silos is also about effective process design and operations, and about culture change.
Two hats
Helen O’Sullivan, provost and deputy vice chancellor at the University of Chester has strategic oversight of both the university’s teaching, learning, and academic innovation, and its digital/IT teams. Though education is her first love – she is a self-confessed “accidental online person” – she is unusual for a senior leader in education in having direct hands-on leadership of IT. So it was to her we turned in the first instance to help us begin to chart the terrain.
The Covid-19 pandemic and associated changes in student expectations is often credited with driving the shift towards a more systematically blended learning and teaching environment in HE. While the hasty pivot to online in March 2020 certainly felt like a watershed moment, Helen argues that flexible digital learning was already coming – the opportunities that digital offers to create flexibility for busy students, capture and analyse relevant data, and create a richer, more engaging learning experience were well-understood in 2020. In a previous role at Keele University she had developed a flexible digital learning strategy six months before the pandemic, only to see it deployed in a matter of weeks and months, rather than years.
While the pace of the switch to online is often cited as evidence that higher education can move more quickly than is widely believed, Helen believes that there are downsides to pace. “Lots of institutions defaulted to recorded lectures, and proctored online assessments – and rightly to an extent because they had so little time to evolve – but it gave digital a bad name. People who hadn’t had the experience of operating in a rich digital environment thought online learning was a bit rubbish, when actually they just hadn’t had the opportunity to see what it’s supposed to look like. It needs that thought about how you put things online with the aim of creating engaging digital spaces, not just mirroring the in-person experience.”
What was lost, possibly for many institutions, was the opportunity to go through a process of thoughtful digital transformation of learning and teaching, rather than bolting new practices on top of the old systems. So in one sense institutions are supporting their staff to work through some “unlearning” as digital provision becomes less of an emergency response and more of a strategic development of organisational capability.
“In higher education there is still a bit of the ‘two cultures’ effect between education and digital that reflects the division between academic and professional in most universities,” says Helen. “It makes me laugh when people say ‘pedagogy first’ or ‘digital first’ – these days you can’t have one without the other, and you have people coming through now into institutions that can span both.”
Helen reports that in her current role she has observed less of an academic/professional divide and a strong culture of collaboration in a shared endeavour – I presume, initially, thanks to some kind of cultural secret sauce brewed only at Chester. But with a bit of further interrogation, it’s clear that there are elements of bringing in different perspectives on issues by design.
As chair of the university’s academic leadership group, for example, Helen actively switches between multiple lenses for interrogating policies and proposed projects. The education technology forum is jointly chaired by the Head of the Learning Information Service and Head of Digital Education, ensuring no one perspective dominates the business of the forum. And increasingly in recruitment and staff development the university is actively seeking third-space professionals who can work across both domains.
Building the toolkit
Indeed, while strategy and leadership are clearly important for setting direction and creating the conditions for change, realising the benefits of technology in learning, teaching and student success depends much more on individual or smaller groups of university staff deploying technology in ways that make their lives easier and help them make better decisions.
Helen points to the example of using data to inform the enhancement of learning and teaching. “We can build dashboards so people can have the data at their fingertips,” Helen says. “But for the vice chancellor and me, the real focus is on helping staff to understand and use their own data. If you have a particular subject area struggling with demographic trends, and the traditional approaches aren’t helping students to succeed in the subject, we can show them data on who passes on the first attempt and who on the second, link that to attendance and demographics, and give that course team a shape to think about how they can change things.” The university maintains an online set of resources on Teams to support innovation in a cost-effective way, with staff across the university contributing examples of how they have, for example, updated their assessment practice in light of generative-AI.
The framing of staff development is very much about improving staff experience rather than building digital capabilities as an end in itself. “If I were to run a series of sessions about Office 365 basics nobody would come but if it’s about solving people’s problems then you can achieve lots,” says Helen. “For example, that issue you see across the sector where students are emailing their tutors and not getting a response as quickly as they expect. But it’s not surprising that staff might feel overwhelmed by students wanting to contact them. The solution isn’t to manage that from the centre through something like turning off the ability for students to contact staff through Teams or leaning on staff to devote even more time to it. It’s about how staff think about managing that connection with students in a digital age – that’s not necessarily a pedagogic skill, more of a design and workflow challenge.”
In the rollout of the university’s new academic framework and curriculum, one team of learning technologists focuses on the pedagogic side, for example, developing good assessment practice, and another is tasked with streamlining processes and reducing burden. A small team – half of two people’s time – is devoted to “ways of working,” exploring where there are small-scale opportunities for people to come up with ways of making their professional lives a bit easier and more streamlined. “A lot of people don’t know how to use our digital professional platforms beyond sending an email or setting up a call,” Helen points out. “To get the most from our technology we are asking people to think about how to build genuinely digital processes that are more secure, and more efficient.”
As the digital learning and teaching landscape continues to evolve, institutional strategic agendas to make the most of technology to enhance student engagement and support won’t be driven by small teams of experts, or even by digital leadership. It will require all student-facing staff to have the confidence and skills not just to follow processes and use systems but to actively work to deploy technology creatively and interpret data to take forward improvements to learning and teaching (and that don’t depend on staff simply working harder and longer). To get to that point, institutional leaders will need to continue to find creative ways to break down those silos and build whole-organisation digital capability.
This article is published in association with Kortext. Join us at an upcoming Kortext LIVE event in London, Manchester and Edinburgh in January and February 2025 to find out more about our joint work on leading digital capability for learning, teaching and student success and be part of the conversation. If you have a view on these issues or good practice to share feel free to get in touch.
