Leave the digital transformation of teaching behind you!

 As I wrote in an earlier post, shortening "digital transformation of the university" to "digital transformation of teaching" seems to me to fall short. And for that, you don't have to resort to the Humboldtian ideal, but simply look at what members of a university spend most of their time doing -- at many universities, it's research.

Sure, professors go into the lecture hall at least once a day (in pre-Corona times), staff members prepare slides and supervise seminar papers, and the secretary's office sells lecture notes and accepts applications for recognition of exchange. These activities do not change, from semester to semester, from day to day a similar procedure. Hundreds of such operations in a month in a department, thousands in a faculty, hundreds of thousands in a university. So you might get the idea that these (repetitive) activities are the reason the university exists -- and you couldn't be more wrong.

Because researchers are actually driven by the search for the creative, the innovative, the insight. The next discovery, the lab result, the scientific discussion, the publication is the means to get ahead.

If we see digital transformation only as a means of doing what we do more efficiently: if we supplement our own face-to-face lectures with digital videos, store research data in a national cloud instead of on our University servers, offer MBA courses globally in English -- where is the strategy there? It's a digital extension of the same, a step into an international arena whose rules of the game we need to understand before we can make sense of it.

Digital transformation is changing a lot of things -- including university strategy. Universities with excellent, high-profile basic research can monetize education and training in these areas. Universities with impressive campuses create a sense of belonging that inspires alumni decades later. Much research and teaching content transports itself over the Internet -- depending on whether a university transports itself as a sender or receiver of this content, its own strategy must adapt.

You can spend a lot of money on digital transformation of universities; but it should be spent strategically in the right place. I doubt that this money is well spent on digital teaching.

Translated with DeepL