Coaldrake warns students expect the experience to match the “sticker price”

Higher education providers responded “nimbly to the “profoundly difficult and urgent challenges” of COVID 19. They will need to keep responding as there will be no “snap-back” Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Chief Commissioner Peter Coaldrake, told the agency conference, Thursday.

Professor Coaldrake warned HE faces continuing problems with pedagogy and people.

Shifts to on-line, blended and hybrid learning mean, “notions of time, place and space are being up-ended” and student expectations must be met, both in terms of experiences that meet the “sticker price” and also in their expectation that they are “partners in learning.”

HE providers also face the impact of educational and operational skill shortages. Professor Coaldrake pointed to a loss of “significant corporate knowledge” in “engine room functions” in some institutions, which will be “hard and costly to replace.”

And he warned departures of junior academic and professional staff will have “downstream impacts” in “capability, succession and progression.”

In particular, he points to, learning and teaching “where the roles of academic and professional staff naturally overlap or complement.”