‘You looking at me?’ Why higher education needs to discover product discovery

In higher education, we define student engagement variously as something like ‘the mental state students are in while learning’ or ‘the time and effort students dedicate‘ to it.

That’s right: we define and measure engagement in terms of learners’ engagement with us, and not ours with them.

In this sense, higher education is still where the software industry was in the 1980s and 90s, before the agile manifesto. In institutions developing new online programmes, we continue to see a heavy emphasis on ‘delivery’ (creating more and more stuff), and little focus on ‘discovery’ (or figuring out the right stuff to create based on evidence of what learners really need, want and value). With predictably poor results.

Too often, decisions about new online courses and programmes are made in meeting rooms by the highest-paid people based on opinion, anecdote, own interests, research commissioned episodically from third-party agencies, and HE’s irresistible tendency to be a sucker for the something-something latest thing, and to follow, sheep-like, what peer institutions are doing. Again, with predictably bad results.

Seldom are these decisions made with learners, or through continuous interviewing and research, testing and validation; and still less often by co-creating with learners.

‘Engagement’ needs to be redefined, with institutions as the subject, not learners.

We need to engage, not them.

Engagement with learners has never been more important. Just look at our record: 10 plus years of fads (MOOCs), hallucinations (microcredentials), triviality (badges) and repeated failure to bring meaningful, credible, sustainable new products and experiences that meet learners’ needs in this challenging contemporary world.

Without real learner-centred innovation and value creation, the sector invites more of the competition from commercial players that it still (just about) enjoys the luxury of loving to hate. And it deserves that society start to question the consent it enjoys to operate.

Higher education needs a product mindset restart, and fast. It starts by changing how we define and enact engagement. Not ‘learner engagement’ measured once in a (long) while, but discovery-based ‘engagement with learners’ practised habitually and methodically.

I’ll be reading and writing more on this theme in the coming months, as I reflect on ‘where did we go wrong’, and how to do better by centring modern product management approaches in HE online learning.