With technology disrupting industries and revolutionising how we work, education institutions across the Asia Pacific region face big changes and challenges. How do they ensure students are prepared for future jobs and can meet the evolving demands of employers? How do institutions provide the digital experiences that students expect? How do they deal with the intense competition for local and overseas students and research funding?
Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and data analytics are key technologies driving disruption. While this change presents challenges, these technologies also offer immensely powerful tools to help institutions provide the capabilities they need to compete more effectively.
At the Digital Summit held at Cisco Live 2019 in Melbourne, education leaders and technology experts from across the Asia Pacific region and beyond discussed how digital technologies are transforming the education sector. They explored how work is changing and how institutions are evolving what and how they teach to cater for this change. The speakers also explained how institutions are applying new technologies to meet high student expectations and even change campus design.
This summary report, jointly produced by KPMG and Cisco, captures five key insights from the summit into how institutions are transforming. Speakers discussed how institutions are:
Transforming education for the future of work with innovative training solutions that can help ensure students are job-ready and capable of navigating the changing workplace of the future.
Forging partnerships with industry and other third parties to gain the capabilities and additional resources that institutions need to support new teaching and learning models.
Transforming operations and education with data to improve institutions’ services, and equip students with the data literacy and other skills needed for future jobs.
Mitigating cyber and other threats—such as the increasing theft of intellectual property (IP) from research institutions—with advanced cybersecurity tools and by addressing human-related risks.
Integrating digital and traditional physical infrastructure so that networks, servers, storage, and communications platforms support evolving education models and provide the services that staff and students expect.
But how do these transformations work in practice? Institution leaders at the Digital Summit provided real-life examples of how they are driving change with digital technologies.