The potential for growth and new markets for universities in the 21st century, through utilising technology to lower costs and enhance the quality and experience of education, has been extensively addressed.

Some useful reads include Game Changers (EDUCAUSE 2012), Going the Distance (US Government 2011), Collaborate to Compete (UK Government 2011) and Transforming Australia's Higher Education System (Commonwealth Government 2009) and Higher Education to 2030 (OECD 2009).

I was a member of the panel for Technology Outlook > Australian Tertiary Education 2012-2017. This report has just been published and I would recommend reading it.

But transformation of learning, including the revision of organisational and business models and especially the development of academic staff, continues to be very challenging for most institutions.

Only a small number of initiatives have changed any university's practice or outlook - and even fewer have become embedded as the new norm.

The multi-facetted emergence of digital technologies during the past 20 years has been a great shock to the legacy beliefs, systems and behaviours in universities. Especially hard to shift are learning, teaching and assessment practices and the effective and efficient implementation to benefit learning through technology-enabled innovation. 

Neither millions of words of 'advice' nor the 'training' of faculty results in effective harnessing and exploitation of newer technologies to visibly benefit the learners' experiences.

Fast progress has been made in what might be called the 'harder' areas of connectivity for learning - infrastructure and networks - but much less in what changing staff and students actually do.

The typical outcome of this phenomenon is that familiar models of teaching become translated to online and blend with sub-optimal results for learners.

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