Major changes in higher education are on the way which will affect the structure of courses, according to Navitas CEO Rod Jones.
"The traditional [learning] model of sitting in classrooms has gone," he said on Monday in advance of his keynote address to the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Summit.
Mr Jones, who built Australia's largest education company mainly through close partnerships with universities to deliver courses, said he did not think "education as we understand it" would disappear.
But he said digital savvy students now had different expectations about how their education was structured and delivered, and there was a rapid evolution in the nature of work.
"Do we need three-year degrees? How do you structure the learning they need to get into the workforce? I think we'll see more development of shorter courses," Mr Jones said.
He said there were three major challenges facing higher education providers.
Future needs
Firstly, the current system is not meeting the needs of the future workforce. Secondly, it is not meeting the needs and expectations of learners. And finally it is not sustainable for government to continue to be the major funder of universities.
In his speech to the summit on Tuesday Mr Jones will launch a new global study by his company's innovation arm, Navitas Ventures, which surveyed 26 university leaders, 100 recent graduates, and 42 founders of education start-ups.
The report, Digital Transformation in Higher Education, found that over half the respondents believed the traditional university model would be disrupted by 2025.
Students and education technology entrepreneurs expected the timeframe to be shorter than university leaders, with about one in four expecting disruption in the next two to three years.
Although university leaders thought major changes would take longer, nine out of 10 of them believed the current model would drastically change by 2030. About three-quarters of university leaders are planning to partly digitise their current operations, but very few are planning a radical overhaul of their institution.
Quick boost
Most university leaders saw technology as offering a quick "boost" to student engagement and the overall learning experience, the report said.
Mr Jones said that Navitas – which offers pathway courses and degree courses in partnership with universities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada – would not move ahead of the universities in introducing change.
But in the vocational courses offered by its careers and industry division, which are not linked to university partnerships, Navitas had "more flexibility to be agile and adaptive," he said
The new report found that most graduates believed universities would be able to prepare students for jobs in the coming five-10 years. However entrepreneurs were far more pessimistic, with only about one-fifth believing universities could succeed in this task.
Over three quarters of the graduates believed that the "digital savviness" of a university was important in a decision about where to study.
All groups in the survey expected a range of new technologies to have a high impact on education. The highest impact technology was artificial intelligence and machine learning, but a high impact rating was also found for the internet of things, virtual and augmented reality, chat bots and virtual assistants, robotics and blockchain.
