Tag: Educational

  • AI is challenging us to relocate our sense of educational purpose in the outward-future rather than the inward-past

    AI is challenging us to relocate our sense of educational purpose in the outward-future rather than the inward-past

    As the debates and discussions around use of AI continue to develop, I reflect that, perhaps too often, the questions we ask as educators about the impacts of AI can be too small.

    There seems to me to be a current over-preoccupation with inward-facing considerations of the impact of AI on our own practices and processes: How we can manage the risks of academic misconduct, how we make our assessments a bit more authentic, how we quality assure students’ development of “AI skills”. I don’t deny that these are important and timely questions, but I think they miss the bigger (knottier) purpose-led picture.

    As AI continues to infuse our work in a variety of means and ways we seem sometimes too focused on management and adaptation of processes, rather than working strategically and purposefully to define broader outcomes which face off into the professional and graduate futures of our students and the world they will occupy and shape over the next 50 years.

    Until we start asking the bigger questions about the more fundamental challenges to educational purposes that AI brings in its wake, we will not be in a position to understand the shifts in educator capabilities and competencies and indeed professional identities that such a paradigm shift will necessarily require.

    Recently, with Prof. Nick Jennings, I argued that we can see two “swim lanes” emerging in AI: one focused on process optimisation and efficiency; one on invention and co-creation. Both are useful, but they require very different things from educators.

    AI literacy for optimisation

    AI tools offer compelling possibilities to support students with personalised learning support, rapid retrieval of relevant information and coaching prompts for personal and career development. I don’t see these tools replacing human academic and student services professionals; instead they offer a degree of personalised insight and augmentation to human-centric services.

    Similarly, AI tools can assist with many of the functions of teaching and learning “delivery”, offering ideas for small-group activities, generating reading lists or other learning resources, offering prompts to structure discussion, rapidly processing student feedback, and so on. Again, this is an efficient, step change augmentation to the spectrum of digital tools that can support effective learning and teaching. Educators will adopt these if they find them to be useful, and according to their disciplinary culture, and their personal orientation towards technology in general.

    Just as we have adapted to email or MS Excel (other software is available) as baseline administrative tools used in organisations and businesses, over time I see that academic workflows will no doubt evolve in response to collective learning and accepted wider practices about the usefulness and effectiveness of various AI tools when applied to different elements of academic practice. Some tools might genuinely make academics’ lives easier; others may promise much and deliver very little.

    From an institutional perspective it makes sense to curate a flow of discussion about the adoption of AI tools for learning, teaching and student support. Doing so allows for the dissemination of useful practice, contributes to collective understanding about AI’s capabilities and limitations and, optimally, ensures that where AI tools are adopted they are applied ethically and in ways that do not compromise academic quality.

    AI literacy for reimagining education futures

    With the potential benefits of AI for optimisation duly noted, I don’t think that is the conversation that is going to be the most material for education leaders in the next few years. For me, AI does not represent a specific set of digital capabilities that must be mastered so much as it points to a future that is fundamentally uncertain, and subject to tectonic disruption.

    That loss of predictability speaks to a very different set of purposes and outcomes for education – less the acquisition of a body of knowledge than the development of high end human competencies exercised and mediated through a developed technological literacy, all underpinned by a disciplinary knowledge base.

    Every new technology, from writing to print to the internet to large language models has prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between educational purposes and disciplinary knowledge. Over time, instead of a student “coming to the discipline” as an apprentice and an assumed future practitioner, disciplinary knowledge is increasingly deployed in the service of a broader range of student outcomes – the discipline “comes to the student.” This is also increasingly reflected in portfolio careers in which core knowledge is rehashed, redeployed, recontextualised and directed towards the challenges of the world and of the workplace, none of which are solved by a single discipline. The difference between previous shifts and the paradigm shift being ushered in by AI is the speed, volatility and unpredictability of what it will do. We are in uncharted waters and, if we are honest, we are not really sure where we are headed or how best to help shape those future outcomes and destinations.

    Despite these shifts, or perhaps in part because of them, the idea of the professor still defaults to the guardian and steward of disciplinary knowledge. Recognising that the strength of UK HE in particular comes from a tradition of being organised around somewhat compartmentalised deep disciplinary knowledge, this conceptualisation has remained remarkably consistent even as higher education has become more widely available and serving purposes beyond the passing on of knowledge.

    In this sense AI can never (and should never) “replace” academics as stewards of disciplinary knowledge, but it should prompt a deep examination of what that reconfiguration of the relationship between knowledge and education purpose looks like for the different disciplines – and the moments when students need to cross disciplinary boundaries in service of their potential futures, rather than the futures we imagined when in their shoes.

    The questions and discussion I am interested in curating asks academics about the potential shape of their discipline and its associated professions in 50 years: What does it mean to think, and “do” your discipline with and alongside AI? What does AI do to the professional practices and identities of the professions allied to your disciplines? The answers to such questions are more readily imagined through contemporary cutting edge research agendas than by established approaches to engaging students with existing bodies of knowledge.

    It is only in light of our imagination of the possible futures that await our students that we can start asking what kind of educational environments and approaches we need to build to create the conditions for the development of the skills sets, attitudes and competencies they will need.

    My hunch is that we will collectively need to “unwire” ourselves from “standard” PG Cert and PG Dip teaching development tracks and be prepared to look outside the classics of higher education pedagogy and literature, including to primary education, and innovative workplace CPD to find the approaches that work best. While we might retain a foundational basket of knowledge and skills required for entry to the academic profession, I think these will resonate more strongly with a broader set of high end human competencies than with the traditional skills associated with teaching development.

    It is likely we’ll need to take a more experimental, co-creative approach to the higher education pedagogy, which engages in the outward facing futurology of graduate paths across the next 50 years as a fundamental starting point for considering our own purpose-led practices. In this we might then retain concepts and theories that serve those purposes while discarding those that have outlived their usefulness.

    Sam Grogan will be among the speakers at Kortext LIVE education leaders event on 11 February in London, as part of a panel discussing the Wonkhe/Kortext project Educating the AI Generation. Find out more and book your free spot here.

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  • Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

    Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

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  • Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

    Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

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  • Towards an educational gain approach to TEF

    Towards an educational gain approach to TEF

    This blog was kindly authored by Johnny Rich, Chief Executive of Push and Chief Executive of the Engineering Professors’ Council.

    You can read HEPI’s other blog on the current OfS consultation here.

    The Office for Students is currently consulting on plans to use the Teaching Excellence Framework to regulate fees and student numbers. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the TEF is a poor measure of what deserves to be rewarded. Secondly, even if it weren’t, using fees as rewards will damage the higher education sector.

    Paul Ashwin has already dismantled the notion that TEF has the heft for such heavy-lifting. He correctly criticises its broad institution-wide sweep, its data time lags, its susceptibility to gaming and so on. At its heart, the TEF is largely dependent on metrics that are, at best, questionable proxies of how effectively universities perform their core educational purpose. These are then reflected in four cliff-edged, unnuanced ratings.

    Hanging fees on this hook is a weighty burden, and it’s a hook that’s stuck to a wall with Blu-Tack. 

    But before we dismiss the idea faster than a toddler being offered broccoli, it’s worth considering what it would take to make it easier to swallow. Palatable, even.

    To this end, it’s worth taking a step back. The purpose of teaching – especially excellent teaching – is surely to see that learning is achieved. And, given that the current framework relies so heavily on outcomes as the indicators of teaching excellence, surely what TEF is really trying to appraise is how well universities support learning gain.

    In the early days of TEF, until 2019, HEFCE explicitly led a hunt for a holy grail metric or algorithm for ‘learning gain’. The quest concluded that learning gain was not a simple one-dimensional thing. Rather than being an attribute of a course (let alone a whole university), it was inherently a measure of a relationship between a student and the education they receive. A function rather than a point on a graph.

    No single metric would work for different courses, different institutions and different students.

    Having one overall TEF rating per institution with little room for context creates a driver that creates risk for universities that might want to try anything new.

    Instead of universities asking themselves how their educational experience might be improved for their students, the safer question is What gets gold? Let’s copy that or Let’s stick with that.

    And instead of thinking about how they could diversify to offer something innovative to students who have been traditionally underserved by higher education, it’s less risky to try to recruit whatever students are historically most likely to succeed.

    That has a cooling effect on innovation and diversity in the sector, especially when coupled with the effect of rankings, which drive institutions to emulate the so-called ‘best’ and to count what’s measured rather than measure what counts, as Prof Billy Wong brilliantly explained in his recent HEPI blog. It is ironic that one effect of the marketisation of higher education has been to increase homogeneity across the sector, rather than competition driving universities to seek out niches.

    We need to return to the quest for a multi-dimensional measure of learning gain – or, as it is now being called, ‘educational gain’ – the distance travelled by the student in partnership with their institution. Prof Wong’s blog accompanied the publication of a paper outlining just such a new approach. This – or something similar – could give the OfS the load-bearing hook it wants.

    In the spirit of offering solutions, not just criticisms of the OfS’s plans, I propose that, instead of a TEF with stakes stacked high like a poker chips, the OfS could define a ‘suite’ of metrics (most of which already exist and some of which are already used by the TEF) that it would regard as valid measures of different dimensions of educational gain. These would be benchmarked by socio-economic background, region, discipline mix – or whatever is relevant to the metric in question.

    Each institution regulated by the OfS would need to state which measures from the suite it thinks should be used to judge its educational gain. Some would veer towards employment metrics, others would champion access and value-added, and others would aim for progression to further study as a goal. Most, I suspect, would pursue their own multi-faceted mix.

    Whatever selection they make would be based on the institution’s mission and they would not only have to say which measures should be used, but what targets they believe they should achieve.

    The OfS’s role would be, in the first instance, to assess these educational gain ‘missions’ and decide whether they are sufficiently ambitious to deserve access to fee funding and, subsequently, to assess over time whether each institution is making satisfactory progress towards its targets.

    This is not as radical it may sound. The OfS already operates a similar approach in inviting universities to define goals from a preset list in their Access and Participation Plans, although in that instance the list is made up of risks rather than targets.

    If the OfS feels the bronze/silver/gold signalling of the TEF is still important, it could still give awards based on level of achievement according to the institutions’ own sufficiently ambitious terms of success.

    This would encourage, rather than dampen, diversity. It would be forward-looking rather than relying on lagged data. And it would measure success according to a sophisticated assessment of the distance travelled both by institutions and by their students.

    If this were the hook from which OfS wanted to dangle funding carrots, it would drive excellence through each autonomous institution being encouraged to consider how to improve the education it individually offers and to chase that, instead of palely imitating familiar models.

    However, even with this educational gain-driven version of TEF, that still leaves the second problem I mentioned at the start.

    How would using the TEF to regulate fees damage the sector?

    On the one hand, ‘gold’ universities would win higher fees (relative to other institutions at least). Given they are succeeding on the fees they’re already receiving, it would seem an inefficient use of public funding to channel any more money in their direction, as apparently they don’t need it to deliver their already excellent teaching.

    On the other hand, for those universities that are struggling, a lack of financial resource may be a significant factor either in their lower assessment or in gaining ground in future. Denying funding to those that need it most would condemn them to a spiral of decline.

    The effect would be to bifurcate the system into the gold ‘haves’ and the bronze ‘have-nots’ with the distance between the two camps growing ever more distant, and the silvers walking a tightrope in between, trying to ensure they can fall on the side with the safety net.

    An education gain-based approach to TEF wouldn’t solve this problem, but – as I’ve outlined – it could provide a system to incentivise and regulate excellence that would mean the OfS doesn’t have to resort to creating a binary divide through a well-intentioned, but inefficient and unfair allocation of limited resources.

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  • Reclaiming the narrative of educational excellence despite the decline of educational gain

    Reclaiming the narrative of educational excellence despite the decline of educational gain

    There was a time when enhancement was the sector’s watchword.

    Under the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), concepts like educational gain captured the idea that universities should focus not only on assuring quality, but on improving it. Teaching enhancement funds, learning and teaching strategies, and collaborative initiatives flourished. Today, that language has all but disappeared. The conversation has shifted from enhancement to assurance, from curiosity to compliance. Educational gain has quietly declined, not as an idea, but as a priority.

    Educational gain was never a perfect concept. Like its cousin learning gain, it struggled to be measured in ways that were meaningful across disciplines, institutions, and student journeys. Yet its value lay less in what it measured than in what it symbolised. It represented a shared belief that higher education is about transformation: the development of knowledge, capability, and identity through the act of learning. It reminded us that the student experience was not reducible to outcomes, but highly personal, developmental, and distinctive.

    Shifting sands

    The shift from HEFCE to the Office for Students (OfS) marked more than a change of regulator; it signalled a change in the state’s philosophy, from partnership to performance management. The emphasis moved from enhancement to accountability. Where HEFCE invested in collaborative improvement, OfS measures and monitors. Where enhancement assumed trust in the professional judgement of universities and their staff, regulation presumes the need for assurance through metrics. This has shaped the sector’s language: risk, compliance, outcomes, baselines – all necessary, perhaps, but narrowing.

    The latest OfS proposals on revising the Teaching Excellence Framework mark a shift in their treatment of “educational gain.” Rather than developing new measures or asking institutions to present their own evidence of gain, OfS now proposes removing this element entirely, on the grounds that it produced inconsistent and non-comparable evidence. This change is significant: it signals a tighter focus on standardised outcomes indicators. Yet by narrowing the frame in this way, we risk losing sight of the broader educational gains that matter most to students, gains that are diverse, contextual, and resistant to capture through a uniform set of metrics. It speaks to a familiar truth: “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

    And this narrowing has consequences. When national frameworks reduce quality to a narrow set of indicators, they risk erasing the very distinctiveness that defines higher education. Within a framework of uniform metrics, where does the space remain for difference, for innovation, for the unique forms of learning that make higher education a rich and diverse ecosystem? If we are all accountable to the same measures, it becomes even more important that we define for ourselves what excellence in education looks like, within disciplines, within institutions, and within the communities we serve.

    Engine room

    This is where the idea of enhancement again becomes critical. Enhancement is the engine of educational innovation: it drives new methods, new thinking, and the continuous improvement of the student experience. Without enhancement, innovation risks becoming ornamental: flashes of good practice without sustained institutional learning. The loss of “educational gain” as a guiding idea has coincided with a hollowing out of that enhancement mindset. We have become good at reporting quality, but less confident in building it.

    Reclaiming the narrative of excellence is, therefore, not simply about recognition and reward; it is about re-establishing the connection between excellence and enhancement. Excellence is what we value, enhancement is how we realise it. The Universitas 21 project Redefining Teaching Excellence in Research-Intensive Universities speaks directly to this need. It asks: if we are to value teaching as we do research, how do we define excellence on our own terms? What does excellence look like in an environment where metrics are shared but missions are not?

    For research-intensive universities in particular, this question matters. These institutions are often defined by their research outputs and global rankings, yet they also possess distinctive educational strengths: disciplinary depth, scholarly teaching, and research-informed curricula. Redefining teaching excellence means articulating those strengths clearly, and ensuring they are recognised, rewarded, and shared. It also means returning to the principle of enhancement: a commitment to continual improvement, collegial learning, and innovation grounded in scholarship.

    Compass point

    The challenge, and opportunity, for the sector is to rebuild the infrastructure that once supported enhancement. HEFCE-era initiatives, from the Subject Centres to the Higher Education Academy, created national and disciplinary communities of practice. They gave legitimacy to innovation and space for experimentation. The dismantling of that infrastructure has left many educators working in isolation, without the shared structures that once turned good teaching into collective progress. Reclaiming enhancement will require new forms of collaboration, cross-institutional, international, and interdisciplinary, that enable staff to learn from one another and build capacity for educational change.

    If educational gain as a metric was flawed, educational gain as an ambition is not. It reminds us that the purpose of higher education is not only to produce measurable outcomes but to foster human and intellectual development. It is about what students become, not just what they achieve. As generative AI reshapes how students learn and how knowledge itself is constructed, this broader conception of gain becomes more vital than ever. In this new context, enhancement is about helping students, and staff, to adapt, to grow, and to keep learning.

    So perhaps it is time to bring back “educational gain,” not as a measure, but as a mindset; a reminder that excellence in education cannot be mandated through policy or reduced to data. It must be defined and driven by universities themselves, through thoughtful design, collaborative enhancement, and continual renewal.

    Excellence is the destination, but enhancement is the journey. If we are serious about defining one, we must rediscover the other.

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  • Securing educational excellence may demand a new leadership compact

    Securing educational excellence may demand a new leadership compact

    When education leaders describe their institutions as being in “existential crisis” or on a “wartime footing,” you know that something important is happening.

    A new report, “Securing educational excellence in higher education at a time of change,” from Wonkhe and Advance HE, based on roundtable discussions with 11 institutional leaders, 15 principal fellows of Advance HE, and three student representatives held in March 2025, explores institutional interpretation of and responses to change, and asks what measures should be taken to secure educational excellence for what could be quite a different future.

    While institutions are understandably focused on managing their immediate pressures, with, in some cases, institutional survival at stake, sustainability means little without the long-term mission of inclusive, high-quality learning that prepares students for their future lives. While financial security would help, the changes higher education is navigating require a deeper consideration of how institutions make decisions, deploy expertise, and engage their communities.

    The report maps four critical tensions that leaders are navigating across the political, economic, social and technological domains: public trust versus sector autonomy; public good versus private return on investment; traditional academic community versus new student models; pace of technological change versus institutional capacity. A fifth tension emerges from this complex environment: a need for distributed leadership that allows for a deep knowledge of the issues versus clear lines of accountability for decisions. These tensions play out daily in everything that higher education institutions do.

    A wave of change

    In the political dimension, higher education is implicated in broader losses of confidence in institutions. Though not technically public services, universities occupy a distinctive position in British civic life: historically connected to the state, still partly publicly funded, yet operating with considerable autonomy. That hybrid status leaves higher education uniquely vulnerable to simultaneous public and policymaker scrutiny.

    Higher education institutions are not insulated from the broader political landscape. Student representatives in the research raised questions about institutional awareness: “Universities believe that students are exempt from the effects of public austerity…they believe we are creating a community of highly educated people, therefore they cannot fall for the tricks and stories that the media or certain political parties are trying to tell.”

    The economic tension is similarly complex. Universities are expected to deliver public benefits without reliable public funding, creating what one participant called a “competing interest” space where higher education struggles for resources against health and compulsory education. Meanwhile, students increasingly question whether their investment yields genuine value. “Students are being taught how to meet learning objectives, but they’re not being taught how to transfer the skills that they get during their time at university, or sometimes it feels like they’re not even being taught the skills that they need just by meeting the learning objectives,” one student representative observed.

    Principal fellows echoed some of this anxiety: “Students, particularly those from a widening participation background, can put generational money into getting an education which then doesn’t give them a job.” When the compact between investment and outcome seems to break down, trust may fracture, not just between students and institutions but also between society and the higher education project.

    Socially, traditional higher education campus communities are under pressure, with students increasingly time-poor, working to afford their studies, and many commuting rather than living on campus. Participants observed that many students approach higher education more transactionally – not necessarily because they’re mercenary, but possibly because they’re exhausted. As one principal fellow observed, “student” seems to have shifted from being a core identity to something people do alongside other things.

    Meanwhile, technology raises a host of strategic questions, not only in mustering the “right” response to generative AI but also in confronting how the pace of technological change reshapes the collective imaginary of how humans and machines interact in physical and digital spaces. This has implications for curriculum and pedagogy, equity and inclusion, and infrastructure and resources.

    Staff communities appear to have fractured, too. Professional services are “somewhere else in the university,” quick informal conversations have disappeared, and academics feel “fed up and tired and exhausted.” One principal fellow described what they saw as a vicious cycle: “We do not have communities in our universities anymore, and that then impacts the students as well…we don’t have engagement from the students. But also we don’t have engagement from the academics, because they’re in a mood all the time.”

    This fragmentation has strategic implications. When communities fragment, institutions may lose the collective capacity to sense problems, develop solutions, and sustain change. Everyone risks becoming reactive rather than proactive, protective rather than collaborative.

    Change as a capability

    Rather than seeking solutions or silver bullets, our conversations explored the institutional capabilities required to navigate these complex tensions and map out a sustainable way forward.

    One key insight emerging was about the diversity and richness of knowledge and expertise held within institutions that may not be routinely accessed in efforts to think about the future. Small executive teams may struggle to retain a grip on every aspect of the changing landscape or simply become bogged down in maintaining the day-to-day flow of decisions that keep institutions running. Under this kind of pressure, it might not be surprising that, as one principal fellow put it, “Leaders often talk too much and listen too little.”

    The report suggests leaders need to become curators of inclusive processes rather than authorities on every challenge. This would require the confidence to admit when situations are difficult and to seek help – a cultural shift that, if modelled from the top, could potentially reduce pressure on others to hide their struggles.

    Student representatives echoed this sense that efforts to consult or engage, if not well conceived, can sometimes be more alienating than empowering. One student leader suggested involving students in shaping the collective understanding of problems from the beginning, at which their experience and knowledge are most likely to make a meaningful contribution, rather than asking student representatives to comment on pre-developed expert solutions. The same principle could apply to higher education staff and stakeholders.

    There were also clear themes of the need for authenticity when professing an appetite for change and a pragmatic approach to resourcing it. Participants noted that institutions advertise for “innovators” and “change agents” but may not truly want them, or don’t adequately support them when they arrive. Change might require investment: stable contracts, professional development, and time for pedagogic innovation. “You can’t shift pedagogy if you don’t create time,” observed one principal fellow.

    In the technological domain, where there may be a belief that the issues are fundamentally about resourcing and retaining technical expertise, part of the question has to be about how technology reshapes staff and student experience and sustains or fragments human connection. One principal fellow observed that higher education’s “killer service” might be personal connection, not consumer-grade content production in an attention economy. However, delivering that would require investing in people, not just platforms.

    A question of purpose

    Among education leaders, there was a real recognition that higher education staff are “the most precious resource,” as one put it. Yet the changing landscape for higher education seems to be broadening the range of possible purposes for higher education, along with the range of stakeholders who feel entitled to a view about what educational excellence looks like.

    It is not hard to see how this changing dynamic can alienate academics working in disciplines who may perceive some of their core “knowledge stewardship” values and purposes as being under threat from political, economic, social, and technological changes in the external landscape driving different expectations of higher education.

    With an unknowable future, the answer is less about seeking certainties to cling to as about finding collective ways to navigate uncertainty. That might open up some uncomfortable propositions: that higher education’s purpose itself may need rearticulating; that trade-offs between competing goods must be explicitly managed; that excellent pedagogy might require resource investment even when budgets are tight; and that sustainable change may emerge more from dialogue than from executive decision-making.

    The full report repays careful reading, not just for its PEST analysis framework, which could help guide your own institutional conversations about change, but for the candour of participants grappling with genuine complexity. Higher education may face a “pivot point” – though the sector’s breadth, diversity, and expertise remain a considerable strength. Weathering the changes here right now and those on the horizon will depend to no small degree on institutional leadership capability to draw on that expertise to build a shared and collectively owned sense of educational excellence.

    This article is published in association with Advance HE. You can read and download the full Securing educational excellence at a time of change report here.

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  • UNL Proposes Cutting Educational Administration Department

    UNL Proposes Cutting Educational Administration Department

    In an effort to address a deep deficit caused by rising costs, declining international enrollment and flat state funding, University of Nebraska–Lincoln officials have proposed merging or cutting a slew of programs. But one proposal has sparked particular outrage—within the university and beyond: the plan to ax the educational administration department.

    If the plan goes through, faculty members and students worry the state will be left without a key pipeline to fill leadership roles at local schools and colleges, particularly in rural areas. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is the only university in the state that offers a Ph.D. program in educational leadership or higher education, which has a distinct scholarly focus, while Ed.D. programs and master’s degrees to train education leaders can be found elsewhere.

    “It’s hard for me to imagine the flagship university in a state does not offer a program to prepare future principals, future superintendents, future leaders of colleges and universities,” said Crystal Garcia, an associate professor and Ph.D. coordinator in the department. Eliminating the department would be “really doing a disservice to education as a whole in the state of Nebraska.” She noted the department is “incredibly impactful,” serving 316 current and incoming graduate students.

    Administrators have proposed nixing five other academic programs as well: community and regional planning; earth and atmospheric sciences; landscape architecture; statistics; and textiles, merchandising and fashion design. The plan would potentially retain the master’s degree program in educational administration but rehouse it elsewhere.

    Through these cuts, the university aims to reduce the budget by $27.5 million, in part by eliminating 58 roles—17 from the educational administration department, including tenured and tenure-track positions. University officials also proposed two department mergers and budget cuts to the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences, amid other cuts to administrative and staff expenses.

    The proposal will now be considered by the Academic Planning Committee, a group of faculty, staff and students. Members of affected programs can make their case before the committee in live-streamed hearings, and the public can weigh in through a feedback form. Then, the APC will come out with recommendations the chancellor can take or leave. If the chancellor decides to move forward with the proposed cuts, the issue will come before the Board of Regents in December.

    Elizabeth Niehaus, a professor in the educational administration department, said faculty were stunned by the news and are preparing to defend the department to the committee—and the Board of Regents if need be. She and other faculty members believe the department is thriving.

    The proposed cut was “quite honestly shocking, because we are a strong department with great students, great faculty, with a national reputation, folks who have been winning awards for teaching and research,” Niehaus said. “So, we did not see that coming.”

    The Decision-Making Process

    The university’s executive team undertook “a strategic, data-informed and holistic review of all academic programs,” said Mark Button, UNL’s executive vice chancellor.

    The review weighed a variety of metrics, he said, including student success outcomes—such as retention rates and degree-completion rates over a five-year period—the ratio of student enrollments to faculty members, and demand for programs as measured in student credit hours and students joining majors.

    Administrators also drew on metrics for research success used by the Association of American Universities; the university is seeking to regain membership in the organization, which it lost in 2011. Those measures include book publications, research citations and awards and fellowships. Administrators also compared programs to similar programs at other public AAU institutions, Button said, and considered more qualitative factors, like whether a program was distinctive in the state. The metrics were shared with college deans and then department chairs in May.

    Button said the metrics used to review the academic programs reflected priorities already in the university’s strategic plan and the criteria used for past budget reductions. Education administration was among the departments that “didn’t perform as well,” he said.

    Faculty members argue the process lacked transparency; they didn’t know until a day before the proposal came out that the department was on the chopping block. They say their specific questions have gone unanswered, including which particular measures caused them to fall short and whether the pandemic years were contextualized in the data.

    “We were reduced to a single number that definitely does not reflect the depth and breadth of what we do and our contributions to the field, to the university, to the state,” Niehaus said of the scoring process.

    The decision felt so at odds with how the department sees itself that associate professor Sarah Zuckerman said she wondered if it was being targeted for its outspoken faculty members. Zuckerman, who serves as president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said other members of the department are also active in the organization, as well as in Advocating for Inclusion, Respect and Equity, a faculty coalition focused on diversity issues.

    “It gives me a little bit of a nauseous feeling,” Zuckerman said.

    Button argued it’s “definitively not true” that the proposed cuts target outspoken departments. He said the proposal involved “very painful decisions.”

    “I probably can’t underscore enough just how difficult this budget-reduction process is for our entire university community and for everyone who’s committed to an outstanding land-grant, flagship, Big Ten university here in Nebraska,” Button said. “I share the sense of pain and grief that everyone on our campus is going through now.”

    If the cuts become a reality, tenured and tenure-track professors will have a year’s notice of their termination and the university has promised to develop teach-out plans for students. But students don’t have the details of those plans, and some said the uncertainty makes them ill at ease.

    Korrine Fagenstrom, who is participating in the online Ph.D. program focused on higher ed administration from Montana, said she doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

    Four years into her program, she doesn’t want to leave, she said, but “I don’t know what it would look like to stay—I don’t know that anybody does.”

    “The idea of the program getting eliminated at my final hour is terrifying,” said Kathryn Duvall, a third-year student in the Ed.D. program. “I have made sacrifices to my family. I have made sacrifices to my own personal life and dedicated years to getting my education. And this program has spent years pouring into me and developing me as a researcher, as a writer, as an educator, as a leader.”

    She also worries on a “macro level” that education in the state will suffer without the leadership training UNL provides.

    “Eliminating a program like this is eliminating foundational training that produces equitable educational opportunities in our society,” Duvall said.

    The Bigger Picture

    University officials argue that other offerings in the state, such as Ed.D. programs at University of Nebraska–Omaha or small private universities, can fill the same needs as UNL’s educational administration programs.

    But K–12 superintendents, who generally have doctorates, need more—not less—access to the affordable, high-caliber training public institutions like UNL historically provide, said Mónica Byrne-Jiménez, executive director of the University Council for Educational Administration. The proposal to cut the department has garnered national attention, because it’s an unusual move for a flagship campus or a university with a Research-1 Carnegie classification, she added.

    “It’s nothing I’ve seen before,” Byrne-Jiménez said, noting most R-1 universities boast strong K–12 and higher ed leadership programs. “We don’t want it to become a national trend.”

    Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said that while UNL is a “unique case,” she has seen a growing number of education schools or colleges merge with other programs over the last decade. The Iowa Board of Regents also approved plans last week to end the University of Iowa’s graduate and doctoral programs in elementary education, secondary education, special education and science education.

    She worries that federal funding cuts, particularly to teacher training grants and Institute of Education Sciences contracts, is going to thrust more universities into positions where they consider taking such actions.

    Byrne-Jiménez said such programs may be extra vulnerable at a time when Americans are questioning the value of higher education and schools are “hyperscrutinized.” Educational administration programs also tend to attract smaller cohorts, she said, because a select few want to go into education leadership roles. She fears their size, combined with national skepticism, makes them susceptible to budget cuts. But she believes these programs have an outsize effect on the long-term success of state residents that needs to be considered.

    “From an external perspective, it looks like these are small, sort of niche programs that might not be generating a lot of money for the university,” she said. But “the impact is great.” At UNL, “those 300 students are going to go out to 300 schools and 300 communities.”

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  • Educational Technology Guy: September is National Preparedness Month

    Educational Technology Guy: September is National Preparedness Month

      

    September is National Preparedness Month, which serves as a reminder that we all must take action to prepare, now and throughout the year, for the types of emergencies that could affect us where we live, work, and visit.

    The 2025 Theme: Preparedness Starts at Home.

    Each household, business, and school should have an emergency plan, emergency kits and people trained in emergency preparedness and response.

    I started my training in emergency preparedness while on my trail to Eagle Scout. Emergency Preparedness is a required merit badge and the Boy Scouts emphasize emergency preparedness among the scouts. I am a retired Paramedic, Special Operations Paramedic and FEMA trained in Emergency Preparedness and Emergency Management. I’ve responded to many disasters including 9/11 in NYC, hurricanes, blizzards, and mass casualty events and been incident command or staff at many of them.

    Here are some of my favorite resources for learning about Emergency Preparedness.

    Take time to learn lifesaving skills − such as CPR and first aid, check your insurance policies and coverage for the hazards you may face, such as flood, earthquakes, and tornado’s. Make sure to consider the costs associated with disasters and save for an emergency. Also, know how to take practical safety steps like shutting off water and gas.

    The devastating hurricanes and wildfires of the last few years reminded the nation of the importance of preparing for disasters. Often, we will be the first ones in our communities to take action after a disaster strikes and before first responders arrive, so it is important to prepare in advance to help yourself and your community.

    It is important to consider three scenarios when planning for an emergency: 1) an escape route and meeting point if everyone is in the house; 2) what to do during a school day; and 3) how to handle an emergency during the weekend, when family members might be scattered.

    Although many people are familiar with the concept of developing a family plan for emergencies, most fail to take the time to sit down and actually come up with one. One great resource is the FEMA-sponsored website: http://www.ready.gov/. Check out their kids section too: http://www.ready.gov/kids

    Schools need to be prepared themselves, as well as teach their staff and students how to be prepared. (more info for schools below)

    Is your school district prepared for a natural disaster?

    Emergency Management Institute Logo

    FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
    Emergency Management Insitute
    The FEMA EMI offers free, online courses for anyone to take. The courses are well done and there are plenty of downloadable materials to help you. If you pass the test at the end, you even get a certificate.
    Here are a list of the courses that I think all educators should take: (I’ve taken these, and more)

    IS-36 Multihazard Planning for Childcare
    IS-100.c Introduction to the Incident Command System
    IS-362.a Multi-Hazard Emergency Planning for Schools

    Education Administrators should also be involved in community emergency planning because schools are on the top of the list as emergency shelters and field hospitals and the building administrators know their buildings.

    Here is another great resource for schools from the US Dept of Ed – REMS – Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools. This site includes materials, resources and training (including free, on-site training) to help schools start assessing the safety, security, accessibility, and emergency preparedness of their  buildings and grounds.

    REMS has an Emergency Management Virtual Toolkit to help schools build capacity in Emergency Management and Preparedness.

    Ready.Gov also has Materials for Educators – Emergency preparedness curriculum for grades 1-12 that teach kids what to do before, during, and after an emergency while fostering critical 21st-century skills such as problem solving, teamwork, creativity, leadership, and communication.
    Youth Emergency Preparedness Curriculum (4 PDFs)

    American Medical Response, the EMS agency I worked for as a paramedic, also has some great resources for safety and preparedness, including bike safety, cold weather, hurricane, winter driving and much more.

    Ready.gov is the US Government’s web site for information and resources on emergency preparedness and response. There are resources for making a plan, an emergency kit, and how to stay informed. Information is included for individuals and businesses.

    The Boy Scouts of America, who train all their Scouts and Adults in Emergency Preparedness, has partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to provide resources for the public on getting prepared. The site has planning resources, how to make an emergency kit, and other resources.

    CERT teams practice life saving skills

    You can even join your local Community Emergency Response Team. These are teams of citizens that are specially trained to help out in major emergencies, sort of like the reserves. Find out more here. Here is a list of CERT’s by State: http://www.citizencorps.gov/cc/CertIndex.do?submitByState

    Emergency Preparedness is everyone’s responsibility.  Share these resources with your students, colleagues, and family.

    More Emergency Preparedness resources.

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  • Counting what counts: a multi-dimensional approach to educational gain 

    Counting what counts: a multi-dimensional approach to educational gain 

    This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Professor Billy Wong, Director of Research and Evaluation (Access & Participation) at the University of Reading. Billy has recently written the paper Rethinking educational gain in higher education: Beyond metrics to a multi-dimensional model, and blogs his thoughts on this below.  

    With the next iteration of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) under redevelopment, and confirmation that it will look vastly different to TEF 2023, we have an opportunity to rethink the notion of educational gain – if it is to continue as a core assessment. 

    From learning gain to educational gain, the concept is appealing for its emphasis on understanding how students grow and develop over time, and the extent to which higher education institutions can make robust claims about their roles and contributions. 

    However, the Office for Students (OfS) left the definition and measurement of educational gain to individual providers to decide for themselves, which left the sector with a multitude of definitions. In the absence of a clear, shared definition of and approach to educational gain, the sector has tended to default to what is most easily measured.  

    Yet, an over reliance on student outcome metrics (such as the National Student Survey, continuation/completion or Graduate Outcome data) reduces the indicators of student development into just numbers. More concerningly, this approach meant student groups with small numbers may be lumped together or even excluded in various statistical analyses. When we focus on lived experience as headline statistics, the nuances are swept away. 

    Sector conversation 

    Recent sector work has explored the complexities of educational gain, from Fung’s (2024) analysis of Gold-rated TEF institutions to Quality Assurance Agency’s Collaborative Enhancement Project, which found diverse, developing but disparate approaches. 

    For individual institutions, a context-specific relevant approach makes sense, reflecting their own goals, priorities and practical considerations. But as a sector, including for the OfS, such freedom makes national comparison difficult if not impossible, and we revert to readily accessible and available outcome data. 

    Yet, educational gain must not only capture cognitive progress, but also the broader and holistic developments such as confidence and belonging. 

    The sector would benefit from a shared but flexible frame of reference for educational gain, which advocates for a diverse approach to evidence student growth over time. 

    A multi-dimensional approach to educational gain 

    Informed by the foundations of learning gain, this new paper proposes a multi-dimensional model of educational gain through three interrelated domains: cognitive and metacognitive, personal and affective, and social and cultural. Drawing on educational, psychological and sociological perspectives, these domains recognise the different aspects of student development, which also foregrounds the importance of longitudinal data from both qualitative and quantitative methods. 

    A multi-dimensional approach appreciates the student experience across the agency-structure spectrum. It provides an overarching frame of reference that enables institutions to tailor the specific approach as appropriate for their contexts. There will be differences across the sector in how institutions apply these in practice, but if the three domains (cognitive and metacognitive, personal and affective, and social and cultural) are broadly shared and operated as a thematic proxy across the sector, then we are at least in a position to explore how different institutions have collectively explored those dimensions. 

    For example, for cognitive and metacognitive development, it is conceivable that TASO’s Access and Success Questionnaire (ASQ) is adopted nationally to provide sector-wide comparable data with use value within and across institutions. In parallel, it is also conceivable to run a longitudinal qualitative study that unpacks how students articulate, reflect on and discuss their cognitive and metacognitive development. 

    Similarly, quantitative and qualitative methods can explore the extent to which students grow in confidence, resilience and self-efficacy, or whether they expand their social capital, sense of belonging or broader development as global citizens. 

    A multi-dimensional approach offers a unified lens for understanding educational gain that recognises sector benchmarks as well as local narratives. Without such a multi-dimensional view, the sector risks defaulting to established metrics that do not capture the full breadth of gains students achieve during their higher education. 

    What institutions can do 

    Short, funded pilot projects – supported by modest capacity-building grants – would give staff the space to test these methods before it is rolled out more widely. Contextually relevant reflective tasks could be strengthened and encouraged across programmes to encourage students to engage more critically with their own development. Crucially, it is important to ensure that any evidence gathered is conceptually robust and grounded in relevant theories of student progress and gains, for example: cognitive and metacognitive development, personal and affective growth, and social and cultural development. National-level benchmarks can be used effectively alongside the richness of context-specific data and evidence collected over time at the institutional level – reconciling national comparability with institutional distinctiveness. 

    What next? 

    If educational gain – and variations of it – is part of any next assessments, then the OfS should really be more explicit about what it expects from institutions. The ‘test’ from TEF 2023 to give providers the freedom to set their own criteria may be well-intended, but it served limited value for the sector, and presumably for the regulators themselves. A broad, flexible guiding principle or framework might provide the necessary coherence, preferably one that invites theoretical and methodological foundations in addition to the practical and pragmatic. 

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  • AI Companies Roll Out Educational Tools

    AI Companies Roll Out Educational Tools

    Fall semesters are just beginning, and the companies offering three leading AI models—Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI—have rolled out tools to facilitate AI-enhanced learning. Here’s a comparison and how to get them.

    Each of the three leading AI providers has taken a somewhat different approach to providing an array of educational tools and support for students, faculty and administrators. We can expect these tools to improve, proliferate and become a competitive battleground among the three. At stake is, at least in part, the future marketplace for their products. To the extent educators utilize, administrators support and students become comfortable with one of the proprietary products, that provider will be at an advantage when those students rise to positions that allow them to specify use of a provider in educational institutions, companies and corporations across the country.

    Anthropic, the company that makes the series of Claude applications, announced on Aug. 21 “two initiatives for AI in education to help navigate these critical decisions: a Higher Education Advisory Board to guide Claude’s development for education, and three AI Fluency courses co-created with educators that can help teachers and students build practical, responsible AI skills.”

    The board is chaired by Rick Levin, former president of Yale and more recently at Coursera. Anthropic notes in the announcement, “At Coursera, he built one of the world’s largest platforms for online learning, bringing high-quality education to millions worldwide.” The board itself is populated with former and current leading administrators at Rice University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin and Stanford, as well as Yolanda Watson Spiva, who is president of Complete College America. Anthropic says the board will “help guide how Claude serves teaching, learning, and research in higher education.”

    The three AI Fluency courses that Anthropic co-created with educators are designed to help create thoughtful practical frameworks for AI integration:

    “AI Fluency for Educators helps faculty integrate AI into their teaching practice, from creating materials and assessments to enhancing classroom discussions. Built on experience from early adopters, it shows what works in real classrooms. AI Fluency for Students teaches responsible AI collaboration for coursework and career planning. Students learn to work with AI while developing their own critical thinking skills, and write their own personal commitment to responsible AI use. Teaching AI Fluency supports educators who want to bring AI literacy to their campuses and classrooms. It includes frameworks for instruction and assessment, plus curriculum considerations for preparing students for a more AI-enhanced world.”

    The courses and more are freely available at the Anthropic Learning Academy.

    Earlier last month, Google unveiled Guided Learning in Gemini: From Answers to Understanding: “Guided Learning encourages participation through probing and open-ended questions that spark a discussion and provide an opportunity to dive deeper into a subject. The aim is to help you build a deep understanding instead of just getting answers. Guided Learning breaks down problems step-by-step and adapts explanations to your needs—all to help you build knowledge and skills.”

    The Google Guided Learning project offers additional support to faculty. “We worked with educators to design Guided Learning to be a partner in their teaching, built on the core principle that real learning is an active, constructive process. It encourages students to move beyond answers and develop their own thinking by guiding them with questions that foster critical thought. To make it simple to bring this approach into their classrooms, we created a dedicated link that educators can post directly in Google Classroom or share with students.”

    Google announced an array of additional tools for the coming year:

    “We’re offering students in the U.S. as well as Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Brazil a free one-year subscription to Google’s AI Pro plan to help make the most of AI’s power for their studies. Sign-up for the free AI Pro Plan offer.

    Try new learning features in Gemini including Guided Learning, Flashcards and Study Guides. And students and universities around the world can get a free one-year subscription to a Google AI Pro plan.

    AI Mode in Google Search now features tools like Canvas, Search Live with video and PDF uploads.

    NotebookLM is introducing Featured Notebooks, Video Overviews and a new study panel; it’s also now available to users under 18.

    And to help students get the most out of all these new features, we’ve announced Google AI for Education Accelerator, an initiative to offer free AI training and Google Career Certificates to every college student in America. Over 100 public universities have already signed up. We’re also committing $1 billion in new funding to education in the United States over the next three years.”

    That brings us to OpenAI, which announced ChatGPT Study Mode on July 29, 2025. Noting ChatGPT’s overall leadership and success, OpenAI added, “But its use in education has also raised an important question: how do we ensure it is used to support real learning, and doesn’t just offer solutions without helping students make sense of them? We’ve built study mode to help answer this question. When students engage with study mode, they’re met with guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding. Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something.”

    The Study Mode function is available now in the Free, Plus, Pro and Team versions of GPT products providing an array of features:

    “Interactive prompts: Combines Socratic questioning, hints, and self-reflection prompts to guide understanding and promote active learning, instead of providing answers outright. Scaffolded responses: Information is organized into easy-to-follow sections that highlight the key connections between topics, keeping information engaging with just the right amount of context and reducing overwhelm for complex topics. Personalized support: Lessons are tailored to the right level for the user, based on questions that assess skill level and memory from previous chats. Knowledge checks: Quizzes and open-ended questions, along with personalized feedback to track progress, support knowledge retention and the ability to apply that knowledge in new contexts. Flexibility: Easily toggle study mode on and off during a conversation, giving you the flexibility to adapt to your learning goals in each conversation.”

    I encourage readers to visit each of the sites linked above to become familiar with the different ways Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are approaching providing support to educational institutions and individual instructors and learners. This is an opportunity to become more familiar with each of the leading AI providers and their apps. Now is the time to become experienced in using these tools that collectively have become the foundation of innovation and efficiency in 2025.

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