EAS, the owners of the Essential EA platform, facilitates a regular Higher Education User Group which is hosted by the EAs from New York University and the University of Sydney. The user group allows EAs from across the global education community to meet to discuss ideas and collaborate.
Last month’s meeting was a focused discussion on the current issues facing the education environment, the challenges these present to EA Teams, and a discussion on how these are being/could be addressed.
The discussion was wide ranging, but a few key themes for universities emerged:
- AI is arguably having a bigger impact on education, due in part to the dual impacts on the organisations as well as the student population
- Funding, geopolitical factors, financial pressures and managing global campuses continue to present big challenges to most
- Privacy is a concern across the board, and the discussion touched in how to classify and secure information and the different requirements across different geographic regions
- For many a long-term plan to address these issues, including centralised application and asset management to simply the landscape and cut costs was a necessity to get in place
A wider discussion around AI followed, which touched on governance and whether the current situation represented a “wild-west” scenario, with decentralised implementations and fragmented adoption leading to inefficiencies and duplicated effort. Many of the universities in attendance advised that they did have AI governance in place, although this was a mix of home-grown policies as well as adoption of some country wide policies.
The group also discussed the use of HERM (Higher Education Reference Models). In collaboration with CAUDIT, Essential has made the HERM freely available in Essential. Many of the group use the models either in their entirety or incorporate aspects of them into models and highlighted the benefits they got from adopting the models. We’ll be making an online version available to all for reference soon
Jeff Kennedy, EA at Auckland University, and a key member of the CAUDIT team focused on Enterprise Architecture, provided links to a couple of useful resources in support of the discussions, which are well worth a read:
- AI in EDU – paper contributed by Joe Sabado (via EDUCAUSE) using AI tools to imagine using the Higher Education Reference Models – https://joesabado.com/2023/03/the-many-applications-of-generative-ai-beyond-student-learning-and-teaching/
- “So, You Run a University?” series (essential reading!) from the RMIT Blockchain Lab – https://soyourunauniversity.substack.com/
If you’re interested in using the HERM you can find more details here – https://enterprise-architecture.org/herm-higher-education-reference-models-in-essential/
If you’d like a demo of HERM in Essential, or to join the Higher Education User Group, contact us here – https://enterprise-architecture.org/contact/