As I finish my twenty-second year in higher education, at the coal face, it can sometimes feel like a high-speed treadmill moving backwards. There is a recurring theme that in this short blog post I will reflect on, the “Catch-22” of transformation, largely from a UK higher education perspective.

The constant rhetoric is that universities must change to survive, yet the very structures designed to safeguard academic integrity and institutional stability often prevent the radical shifts required for that survival. As we continue to grapple with financial instability due to the neoliberal policies of successive governments, incompetent leadership, the rise of generative artificial intelligence, and a crisis of public trust due to a lack of opportunities for graduates entering the world of work, the paradox has never been more visible.

2004–2026: What’s Stuck, Faded and Transformed

Since I started my career in 2004, higher education has been through several distinct “waves” of innovation. Looking back, we can categorise these shifts into those that defined our progress and those that served as a distraction.

Digital Integration (2004–2010)

In the early 2000s, the “innovation” was simply the digitisation of the status quo. The introduction of Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) such as WebCT, Blackboard or Moodle was revolutionary at the time, promising to take the physical classroom online.

  • What stuck: The LMS/VLE. It has become part of the furniture of higher education, though it often becomes a glorified content repository.
  • What faded: Early attempts at “e-learning” that were little more than digitised PDF textbooks, something I used to refer to as “e-reading”.
  • What transformed: An acceptance that digital education is here to stay, even if the form is still evolving.

We went to the office 5 days a week, and had phones on our desks to call others, along with very large desktop PCs with heavy monitors. There were no smartphones, so the commute to work was spent reading a paper or something on an early Kindle or listening to music on an iPod or similar device.

Unlike others around the world, in the UK, at this time, the phrase ‘instructional design’ or ‘learning design’ was not as culturally accepted as it is today, as this 2018 M25 Learning Technology Group presentation from Leonard Houx explains.

MOOC Mania (2012–2015)

The early 2010s were defined by the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) phenomenon. Coursera and edX arrived with the promise of democratising education and rendering traditional universities obsolete.

  • What stuck: The realisation that short, stackable content has value (the Unbundled University, led by Professor Neil Morris).
  • What faded: The idea that the University would disappear and that content was all you needed.
  • What transformed: The dream of “free for all” evolved into the “micro-credential” economy we see today – a pragmatic pivot from disruption to professional upskilling. Innovations are like concept cars, features of which filter into the sector.

Pandemic Catalyst (2020–2022)

COVID-19 forced a decade of digital transformation into a single semester. We moved beyond “emergency remote teaching” to a realisation that hybridity isn’t an add-on; it is an expectation.

  • What stuck: Hybrid teaching models and the normalisation of remote professional interaction – Microsoft Teams meeting anyone?
  • What faded: The illusion that physical proximity is the only valid form of academic engagement, although companies have made some pivots back to in-person.
  • What transformed: Everyone got a taster of online “emergency remote teaching”, which made the idea of instructional/learning design and learning theories summarised there by Thomas Hanley more acceptable.

We now go to the office a few times a week, often to do tasks we can’t do at home. A level of hybrid working is available for many higher education staff. We have laptops, often we hot-desk, and everything is done via Teams and email. We have smartphones that we are glued to on the commute to and from work, in the evenings and on weekends.

The Catch-22: “Things Must Change So Everything Can Stay the Same”

We are under pressure from regulators to demonstrate quality and maintain traditional standards. Yet, we are simultaneously forced to innovate at the speed of AI to stay relevant to the labour market.

The Catch-22 of Higher Education is this:

To be considered a “legitimate” provider, an institution must adhere to deeply traditional, often bureaucratic structures of quality assurance and curriculum design. Yet, those same structures are precisely what prevent the institution from being agile enough to adopt the AI-driven, learner-centred models that students now demand.

If you don’t innovate, you become irrelevant. If you innovate too aggressively, you risk losing the regulatory and social accreditation. This “Paradox of Transformation”, as recently noted by a Higher Education Policy Institute blog post from Professor Lee Sanders, is the central tension of higher education. We are constantly restructuring, rebranding, and reinvesting, all in an exhausting effort to go where, to improve what, for whom?

Navigating the Future: AI and a New Pedagogy

The rise of AI is the ultimate test of our resilience. Institutions are racing to create “AI-resilient” assessments, often by doubling down on in-person, proctored exams, which, in my opinion, is the wrong solution. This is a classic reaction to technological disruption, the desire to control the environment rather than evolve the pedagogy. It’s better to design an assessment to assess along the way and by doing so, make it more authentic and accessible.

The way forward is not to fight the digital tools, but to integrate them. Often, these tools are not built for education and therefore not inherently fit for purpose. True innovation is no longer about technology; if it ever was, and this is a central lesson we must all take from this period of transformation, the technology industry has sold such a false dream, and they still are. We need to think more about neuro-inclusive pedagogy. Recognising that a student with ADHD or a neurodivergent profile doesn’t just need a “digital version” of a lecture, they need a curriculum that supports different cognitive ways of learning. This is where concepts such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles are effective.

The Purpose of Higher Education 

My journey so far has taught me that the “bricks and mortar” are less important than the mission of an institution. Multimillion pound flagship buildings, then sold for a fraction of the cost, contributing to the financial crisis, is incompetent leadership. We have spent two decades obsessed with delivery, a new flagship building, a new LMS/VLE, a new MOOC, and even delivering a programme or course, while losing sight of the inquiry. We seem to have turned academia into a “how-versity”, instead of also being a “why-veristy”. The central skill is critical thinking, along with imagination and inquiry, which we must continue to build, in whatever form education plays. This relates to Professor Ron Barnett’s concept of the ecological university. Our students must learn to understand themselves and others, as well as understand and apply their field of study. Transformation, therefore, must be rooted in purpose and value, not just necessity.

If we are to break the Catch-22, we must stop viewing transformation as a threat to our identity. We must accept that “staying the same” is no longer an option. Building a mission and a coalition of the willing in any educational institution is something I have discovered is critical, through building relationships and common understanding, because of the nature of educational institutions and the values and purpose of academia. The future of higher education isn’t in a tech-stack; it is in our ability to foster critical, human-centred thought in an age where the machine does the rote work. The question is where to decide to use these tools, and where to say no to using them, to critically assess the output of these tools; otherwise, we lose the ability to think and be more human.

Looking to the future, my goal remains simple: to build opportunities for staff and students to develop themselves and their identities, to make a difference in their classrooms, societies and workplaces. My pandemic “Friday Night Project”, the Talking Higher Education podcast, TalkingHE, continues. It’s a privilege to be able to interview my guests, contributing to my understanding of the sector and, as the mission of the podcast has been from day one, “improving dialogue between and beyond the sector, to make education better”.