Utrecht, Georgetown, Manchester

I’ve been poking around a lot of university websites from around the globe recently – mainly but not exclusively because I’m putting the finishing touches to The World of Higher Education – Year in Review (due out December 4^th and it’s going to be great). And, in the course of all this poking around, I have found a few little gems of institutional initiatives which I found particularly intriguing.  The kinds of things that make you wonder: why don’t more universities do this?

And so, without further ado:

Utrecht University’s Educational Model

Utrecht University in the Netherlands is arguably the top research universities in the Netherlands, and one of the top ten in Europe. Its research intensity is on a par with places like McGill and the University of British Columbia. But what makes Utrecht interesting is that within that category of big globally-competitive research multiversities, it’s arguably the one that is most teaching-focused.

Thirty years ago, Utrecht was the first university in the Netherlands to require all its faculty to hold some kind of teaching credential, and the university set up its own unit to help deliver the coursework to faculty (all other universities in the country eventually followed suit and mutually recognized each other’s teaching credentials). Later, in 2001, the University launched what it called “the Utrecht Educational Model” which outlines the ten competencies the university wants all of its graduates to have, based on a coherent, cross-institutional Educational Vision.

There’s nothing especially mind-blowing about any one specific competency or piece of the vision.  It’s just really interesting and heartening that a university – particularly one which is ostensibly highly-focused on research – might think it worthwhile to not only spell out what it wants to achieve in teaching, regardless of field of study, but also to have ongoing, permanent conversations about graduate attributes. Utrecht actively thinks and acts collectively about pedagogy. And it does so while expressing pedagogy in terms of outputs. 

It’s so simple, so foundational. And yet almost no one does it. Why not?

Georgetown University’s Innovation Network

A couple of months ago, Georgetown University launched something called “The Academic Innovation Network” (AIN). This network is described as “a new hub to drive academic innovation and explore human-AI interaction” and consists of three units internal to the university. These units are:

• Red House, which is a hub for educational research and design,
• The Centre for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, which is the university’s centre for Teaching and Learning (but with perhaps more of a focus on technology than most Canadian units with that name), and,
• The Emerging Studies Institute, which is an incubator for interdisciplinary studies programs. 

Put these three together and you have something incredibly cool: a unit that helps faculty develop curriculum for new programs, a unit that helps faculty improve their teaching skills, and a unit that can measure the impact of educational changes, all – in theory at least – working together to drive educational innovation. I realize, of course, that there is nothing less Canadian than measuring impacts and acting on the results, but come on. How cool is this? Not necessarily having three separate units (that might be a bit expensive for most), but simply to have these kind of specialized but coordinated services driving educational activity? 

Why is this the exception rather than the norm?

The University of Manchester’s New Strategic Plan

Last month, the University of Manchester released a new strategic plan, called From Manchester to the World. Its previous plan, Our Future, was somewhat disappointing, one of those standard three-bucket plans (research, teaching, social responsibility) that one sees everywhere. But this new one is different. It contains a few annoying buzzwords (e.g. “North Star”), which is kind of par for the course, but what is intriguing is the way it is organized around five “big leaps”. Two of the five are pretty standard (“research excellence to impact”, “a powerhouse of innovation”) and can mostly be ignored. But the other three leaps – they’re interesting.

One of them is called “Digital Inside and Out”, and it’s fascinating. The plan proclaims the desire to make University of Manchester Education a global powerhouse in online education, which is not something you see that often from a major research university (the strategy suggests they will get to 50% online by 2035 – only Arizona State University is currently at that level among big research institutions). It includes references to the use of AI in both teaching and administration (which is pretty de rigeur in strat plans around the world this year), but it also references significant new investments in digital education and – more uniquely – investing in ensuring both that staff have the capabilities to maximize online investments and to embed digital skills into the curriculum.

Another is “The University to Partner With”. I think this is interesting because while lots of universities claim they are eager to partner with everyone and their dog, not many elevate it to a central strategic priority.  It’s the difference between saying, “we’re great, come partner with us” and actually investing in the resources and capabilities to be effective partners. I’m not sure all the tactics support the goal as effectively as they might, but the fact that Manchester recognizes that partnerships aren’t something that just happen on their own is important.

And the third is “Flexible, personalized and digitally-enable learning”. Now, personally, I don’t think all the objectives in this section are directionally correct. But it doesn’t matter: the ambition in this section is astonishing. The big commitment is to embed credit-bearing work-study opportunities into every student pathway (including those studying online), making Manchester the UK institution of choice for what they call partner-enabled learning and we would call work-integrated learning. But the smaller commitments around use of technology in classrooms, curriculum re-design, and re-thinking student assessment (amazing if it happens). 

This is a lot.  And again, like Utrecht, it’s a big research university which is starting to put big bets on the importance of curriculum and pedagogy. And so, to my mind, this is the most interesting strategic plan to appear anywhere in the world.

– – –

Now, you might think that Utrecht, Georgetown, and Manchester don’t have much to teach Canadian universities. Too exotic, too far-flung, and, at least to some extent, too rich to matter. Wrong. Folks, these examples are exactly what ambition looks like. This is the stuff the public and politicians want to see: universities acting with unified purpose (rather than as a sack of unrelated professorial research agendas), to update curriculum and pedagogy, and stop treating undergraduates like cattle. 

There’s nothing to stop any Canadian institution from going down this winning pathway. We just have to move beyond the status quo ante nostalgia and get on with it.