Chief Information Officer at Tampere University

1. In your experience as a CIO, how has the Education Tech space evolved over the years?

For decades, EdTech has been in a secondary role in most HE institutions. It was an auxiliary tool for traditional teaching and learning, and only a small minority was using EdTech to its full potential. For example, most VLEs were just repositories for ppt slides and online assessment tools were used as digital paper in traditional exams. This long history is not necessarily a bad thing – during those years suppliers have been able to develop mature products and a lot of interesting tools. In the last two or three years we have seen a huge change in EdTech. It has entered into the mainstream in a big way. This change was accelerated by the pandemic but it actually started a bit earlier due to the change of the higher education landscape, such as the introduction of high-quality online offering and the increased global competition. We are now seeing a rapid introduction of new teaching practices that are heavily dependent EdTech and wouldn’t be feasible without tech savvy staff and students.

2. What are some of the advantages of the current technological evolution?

• Higher quality in teaching

• Better learning efficiency through continuous feedback

• Change towards continuous assessment

• Better support for lifelong learning

• Flexibility in the use of time and location

3. What according to you are some of the challenges plaguing the Education Tech landscape and how can they be effectively mitigated?

• Lack of suitable standards (mitigation: develop a proper reference architecture and encourage standards bodies, such as IMS Global, to address the gaps)

• Fear of losing jobs in teaching (mitigation: move staff from basic teaching activities into more advanced activities to improve teaching effectiveness and quality)

• Technology generation gap between students and staff (mitigation: develop technology competencies especially with staff)

4. What are a few technological trends influencing the Education Tech industry today?

• “Hybrid everything”: combining traditional and digital approaches in everything

• “Digital first”: all new practices and processes are implemented digitally by default

• “Cloud first”: if possible, everything will be implemented in the cloud or “as a service”

• “Interoperability”: technology change cycle is accelerating, and the only way to manage this is better interoperability with old and new

5. What are some of the best practices educational institutes should adopt today to steer ahead of competitors?

• A good way to succeed in digital transformation is to decompose it into smaller projects and targeting them into selected parts of the business. Traditional IT project have attempted to create solutions for the entire organization and, consequently, implementation projects have been long and challenging. ERP implementation projects provide an obvious example of this. Small projects with limited scope allow institutions to be more agile and increase competitiveness in those areas that matter. For achieving the desired effect for the business, there is of course a need to have a proper strategy where the important target areas have been identified.

6. Do you have any advice for industry veterans or budding entrepreneurs in the Education Tech space?

• Look around first; there are so many excellent tools available already. This will not only prevent you from reinventing the wheel but it will also allow you to find ways to improve your own product or service.