Reimagining Minnesota State is a strategic visioning process that includes a series of five topical forum sessions focused on how Minnesota State can accelerate and scale innovation occurring at its 30 colleges and seven universities. The process also aims to identify new approaches that will better serve students, and, in turn, the citizens and employers of Minnesota in an environment of rapid and widespread change. This is the second in a series of commentaries that will follow Reimagining Minnesota State forum sessions.
This session, held on Jan. 14 at St. Cloud State University, focused on the impact data and technology are having on industries and sectors across the U.S. and the world. A briefing paper is available at the Minnesota State website: www.minnstate.edu/board/reimagining/
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Rapid changes in data and technology are disrupting industries around the globe. Advances in predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, automation, augmented reality, and information communications technologies are allowing organizations to improve the customer experience, provide new products and services, and reduce costs. But these technologies also are disrupting existing business models as organizations are challenged to respond to the changing needs and expectations of consumers. Higher education is no exception — the challenge in this case is coming from students and families.
For higher education, integrating advanced technologies into our programs and operations holds tremendous potential to make progress on what some have called “the iron triangle” of higher education — our need to simultaneously expand access to more students, increase the quality and relevance of our credentials, and reduce cost in order to improve affordability.
The U.S. Department of Education is calling for the development of an advanced digital infrastructure to support an ecosystem of higher education that delivers high-quality, personalized, life-long learning to a diversity of learners with a multitude of programmatic and support needs. However, they acknowledge that creating this ecosystem and advanced digital infrastructure will be beyond the resources of any single institution, and instead will require collaboration among institutions and with external partners. This, of course, is a key strength of Minnesota State and our system of 30 colleges and seven universities.
But how might Minnesota State reimagine educational and service delivery through strategic innovation in the areas of technology and data analytics?
That was the question of our second Forum on Reimagining Minnesota State on Jan. 14 at St. Cloud State University. During the session “The Digital Age: The Impact and Future Possibilities Offered by Data and Technology,” we engaged in discussions of the emerging trends in data and technology and how institutions across the country are responding to these powerful forces of change.
Our discussions touched upon a number of recurring themes.
Greater access.
Improvements in technology are expanding the educational options available to students and freeing them of constraints imposed by time or place. This is especially important to the colleges and universities of Minnesota State because ensuring access to all Minnesotans is so central to who we are.
Enhanced teaching and personalized learning.
Technology can create opportunities for new approaches to teaching by creating personalized or immersive learning experiences and can help faculty continuously improve teaching practices by generating more real-time data on how students are learning.
Enhanced student services.
Technology has a critical role to play outside the classroom. For example, just as businesses use the technology of predictive analytics to attract and retain customers, predictive analytics can be used in higher education to identify students who are at-risk and offer interventions that improve retention and increase student success.
Preparation for emerging careers.
Careers in data and technology are the fastest growing fields today and are predicted to continue to grow at an exponential rate. In the future, developing technology and data literacy will be an important component of a post-secondary education for all students, even for those students not pursuing technology careers.
These are important themes that we must consider as we map the future of Minnesota State. They are not entirely new concepts to our system, but there is much more we can do.
For example, we should expand our use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) as a way to reduce the often considerable cost of textbooks for students.
We should continue to expand online course offerings and degrees to provide career development opportunities to students across our state and region.
We need to do more with predictive analytics to identify students who are at risk for not returning and provide targeted intervention strategies to improve their chances for completion.
We should provide faculty with greater access to computer-enhanced simulations to create immersive learning experiences for our students.
We have developed programs in cyber-security, software engineering, digital humanities, data analytics, robotics, and other emerging data and technology fields to grow Minnesota’s workforce. We are partnering with businesses to develop new technology applications to serve the needs of our industries and communities, such as the advanced 911 and drone technology used at U.S. Bank Stadium. And we are investing in NextGen to create a forward-looking data backbone that will create efficiencies in our operations and provide an advanced platform upon which to expand our technology strategy and infrastructure.
Many of these initiatives are already underway and are showing great promise. What we heard at the second Forum session reinforced the overarching theme of Reimagining Minnesota State: to build the capacity to scale across our entire system the promising innovations that are being developed at our colleges and universities and to engage in ongoing strategic innovation that supports the life-long success of our students and the economic vitality of Minnesota’s communities.
Michael Vekich is chair of the Board of Trustees of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Devinder Malhotra serves as chancellor. Minnesota State includes 30 community and technical colleges and seven state universities serving approximately 375,000 students.
Coming next
Forum 3, coming Feb. 4, is “The Nature of Work: Changing Careers, Competencies and Credentials in the Future” at Normandale Community College. For more information, go to the Reimagining Minnesota State website.
