Teaching and learning best practices and strategies: Trends in higher education 

Higher education is undergoing tremendous changes. Educators and administrators everywhere are reevaluating the role of the mission of higher education and how best to serve both their host communities and the students who have become customers. This change has been fueled by technology’s impact on teaching and learning, the rise of competition for students in the form of distance education and for-profit universities, changing student demographics, and the evolving role of community outreach. 

At the request of North Carolina A&T University, Siemens Enterprise Networks has created this document by researching best practices and strategies from the web sites of ten institutions in the U.S. as well as Mannheim University in Germany. Additional statistical data comes from the websites of EDUCAUSE, the news media, and selected higher education publications. 

Here are some of the overall findings from the research.  The results selected are focused around technological use and application.  Best practices in the use of technology serve to target perspectives on the future of higher education. 

• All surveyed universities regard technology as a key strategic delivery tool in implementing their goals to provide a relevant, accessible 21st century education and attract highly qualified students.  

• Technology plays an important role in reducing administrative costs and increases funding.  By leveraging lessons learned in providing technology to teaching and learning areas and applying them to administrative processes, it had the benefit of streamlining and reducing administrative costs.   

• Technology facilitates community partnerships and outreach. Technological access and network connectivity from the campus promotes partnerships and outreach.   

• Most universities have master plan information on strategies and campus building to add facilities, dormitories, and renovate existing buildings. In all cases, technology access is a clear driver.   

• Campus use of technology helps to attract and retain students and remain competitive. In many cases, the use of technology is to help solve and institutional problems.  All schools surveyed indicated the creation and implementation of an integrated education experience is leveraged by technology.   

• Distance education is a focal point at most of the schools and is positioned to be a clear differentiator. The smaller, regional universities are moving aggressively to retain and protect their geographical base as well as offer programs where they have developed a unique area of expertise. Long distance education can become revenue-generating tool that enables higher education to extend beyond local boundaries. A low risk off-campus strategy is to offer distance education to alumni.  

• Technology and network access can help remove cultural and administrative barriers to interdisciplinary learning.  Several examples practiced by universities in the study included leveraging technology on campus and apply it to all phases of campus life. Use technology to leverage relationships with nearby research facilities.   

• Royalties from technology transfer and patents play an important role at some campuses to help make up the difference between available funding and education costs. Public institutions are aggressively seeking funding in addition to the monies they receive from state budgets. 

• Most of the universities have implemented a wide variety of web-enabled student services as well as administrative services to provide 24/7 access to information, reduce the costs, and support issues of face-to-face contact. 

A portion of the study's conclusion is cited: 

Higher education has changed dramatically in the last few years. Campuses face new challenges to change the traditional education model, embrace technology as a teaching and learning delivery mechanism, educate students of all ages, and respond to competitive challenges wrought by the concept of distance learning. Technology is an enabler that will help attract and retain students, encourage interdisciplinary learning, foster community outreach, and provide the delivery mechanism to streamline administrative processes and help reduce costs. 

At a minimum universities are establishing the network infrastructure to support today’s and tomorrow’s technological innovations. Existing campuses are renovating buildings and looking for connectivity and access alternatives such as wireless communications or converged systems that support voice, data, and video…  Campuses are moving towards establishing and hosting complex campus web sites that support web enabled student services, streaming video, e-commerce, and new protocols that support peer- to-peer messaging and “chat”.

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