Higher Education Expo shows changing ideas about students

Dropped into Higher Education Expo today.

From the sessions, I sense the big noise in HE is around the end of the dominance of the 3-year residential model. This is now marginal to most institutions. The energy is now around part-time, professional, mature student and corporate learning, with distance technology, personalisation, mobile, BYOD, asynchronous etc the key functions for any platform.

Also struck by the buzz around Student partnerships. This now is the top concept in learning design. Boss of HEA Philippa Levy said: uplifts in student engagement, success, satisfaction etc have not been well delivered by any toolset (bad news for platform makers Blackboard D2L etc...) or by any institutional reforms (bad for University managers. But impact is being driven by giving students a place as partners in designing the learning experiences.