14 Technology Predictions for Higher Education in 2023
"The student experience — a journey beginning prior to admission and continuing through graduation — will remain a high priority and focus of all universities. This journey requires continual improvements in support of students' academic goals. Advances in artificial intelligence will play a more integral part in ensuring student and university success. AI technology has evolved, providing even more data, insight, and agility. The ability to process audio, visual, and language data in relation to each other through multi-modal AI will enable universities to seamlessly blend automated and assisted experiences. Predictive AI will enable systems to adapt to individual student needs while connecting across any channel. Conversational AI solutions can provide human-like responses via text and voice modalities, which will increase students' satisfaction with university support. The influx of agile solutions into the market have demonstrated the need to truly support students by not just answering questions with known responses, but fashioning individual replies based on recent interaction data in a frictionless manner. Universities are positioned to provide a more natural, conversational, and engaging way to deliver immediate, personalized, and exceptional student support experiences 24/7." — Julie Johnston, executive education vertical director, Avaya
"Providing a more personalized experience and meeting the students where they are in their higher ed journey is becoming increasingly important. In our current tech environment, humans expect results in real-time — and so do our learners. That is why it is imperative to use new technology innovations for a modernized experience. Possible examples may include predictive analytics so enrollment coaches can better serve, as well as automated transcript tools backed by AI to speed up processing times, where manual efforts may take weeks or more to complete." — Matt Rhoton, CTO, EdPlus at Arizona State University
"So-called 'nontraditional' learners have made up the majority of higher education's student population for years, and 2023 will be the year that institutions finally learn how to engage them. Leaders in admissions, enrollment, and student success will look to emerging technologies like AI to lead with listening and scale their advisers' capacity for empathy. By listening at scale, advisers can better understand the challenges students face and deliver deep student support, while AI handles the more repetitive work to drive student success." — Drew Magliozzi, CEO, Mainstay
3) AI will also impact teaching and learning — but it doesn't have to be the enemy.
"The emergence of ChatGPT has scared educators nationwide and left them wondering if writing assignments are no longer relevant in a world where an AI chatbot can spit a decent essay out in a matter of seconds from a simple prompt. But as AI becomes increasingly prevalent in the classroom, 2023 will be the year that educators start to further differentiate 'process' from 'product' — and recognize the ways that AI can be supportive, rather than threatening, in the learning process. AI doesn't have to be an adversary to educators. Savvy educators are already using instructional AI tools in their classroom to help coach students dynamically on their process of writing, helping them learn how to improve their work (and reducing the incentive to cheat). That trend will only continue in the year to come. — Jessica Tenuta, co-founder and chief product officer, Packback
"What does embracing ChatGPT look like? Let's start with what it doesn't look like: It's not banning ChatGPT, firewalling it or forcing students to write in short, finite amounts of time in the artificial and distracting environment of a classroom. What it doesn't look like is a commitment to obsolescence and a refusal to accept what's only years away. A few short years from now, we (people, humans) will not be doing most of the writing of society. News stories, scientific papers, opinion pieces, fiction … most of it will be written by AI. Weird, right? But, true. I like to write and so, selfishly, I'm not too happy about ChatGPT and all it portends. But the future is here, like it or not, and AI just became a much better writer than most of us." — Thomas Mennella, associate professor of biology, Western New England University, and senior fellow, Academy for Active Learning Arts and Sciences