 Welcome to this expert panel on future-proofing higher education at the First Jobs Reset Summit organised by the World Economic Forum. I'm Phil Beattie, Chief Knowledge Officer at the Global Higher Education Data and Insights Specialist Times Higher Education, so I'm particularly excited about today's summit sessions which all focus on education, skills and lifelong learning. In this session we're looking at how to future-proof higher education. By this we mean how we can deliver more inclusive and universal opportunities in the context of the significant financial constraints that the pandemic has placed upon universities. The constraints are significant. The University of Michigan anticipates a pandemic-induced loss of up to $1 billion by the end of 2020. Harvard University is projecting a $750 million revenue shortfall for next year. UK universities collectively face a shortfall of at least 2.5 billion pounds, that's three billion US dollars in the next year because of the projected drops in student enrollments and particularly international student enrollments according to the UK consulting firm London Economics. Australian universities could shed up to 21,000 full-time jobs this year, including 7,000 in research according to government estimates in May. Universities all across the world have been forced to put their programs online almost overnight in many cases and to slowly create digital physical hybrid models in response to the pandemic in order to retain students and maintain access to learning. At the same time, shifts in labour market demands have put a spotlight on lifelong learning with many turning to online learning platforms to learn new skills that will help them remain employable in the changing economic context. The World Economic Forum has just released its future of work report on screen now. I hope you can see a list of the top 10 skills that are required for 2025. It's really interesting to see that the research identified really most of the skills under the category of problem solving, skills like analytical thinking, creativity, originality and critical thinking. So is there an opportunity for universities to future-proof their models, embedding greater inclusion, rethinking core graduate attributes and reimagining who the learner of the future will be? We're going to begin with around half an hour of discussion and I'm very excited to hear the visions for the future of our expert panelists. And at about half past three here in London, we'll end the public live stream and we'll invite those who are joining the session from top link to stay online for a more intimate discussion for another 15 minutes or so. So without further ado, I'm absolutely thrilled to introduce our invited speakers. Suzanne Fortier is Principal and Vice Chancellor of McGill University in Canada. She's Chair of the Forum's Global University Leaders Forum and Co-Chair of the Forum's Global Future Council on the New Agenda for Education Skills. Annamarie Kausay is President of the University of Washington in the US. I hope she is joining us from the Pacific Northwest very early in the morning there. I hope she's about to join us very shortly. Anat Agawal is joining us from Boston. He's the Chief Executive Officer of edX, one of the foremost and most prestigious providers of MOOCs, massive open online courses and that also contributes to the Forum's re-skilling revolution platform and skills consortium initiatives. Finally, we have Carl Johann, CJ Westring. He's joining us from Rwanda and he is the President of Customized Solutions at Education First Limited, an international education company that specializes in language training, educational travel, academic degree programs and cultural exchange. So we're incredibly lucky to have a phenomenally expert experience panel. Without further ado, perhaps I will turn first to Suzanne. Suzanne, you run a large prestigious institution. Can you tell us what was the biggest adaptation that you had to make at McGill? And also I think perhaps you could reflect on what is the most powerful thing you've learned from this experience or that you believe that universities have done or certainly could and should do to address concerns about social inclusion in the great reset. Thank you, Phil. It's great to be joining this panel. Well, the biggest transformation of course is one that you've already mentioned, moving overnight from in-person to remote teaching, great agility was demonstrated, great flexibility, but I think the one transformation that is the most useful for us in terms of learning and thinking about social inclusion is moving from what we had hoped was a sprint to now what we know is a marathon. Emergency situations are exceptional and you change things very fast for what you think is a short period of time, so you do things very differently and then you return to the normal way. Now we're forced to think about a new norm and I think this is what we're learning a lot from in terms of social inclusion. Of course, we've learned that there are many different people wanting to have higher education and we see that in the 18 to 25 court they want a full campus experience and they're ready to get back to that single online mode is not what they want, but of course we have other people. You mentioned them also, the people who want to upskill or reskill for the workforce, they're very happy that we are more agile and flexible and here I would say also that I'm talking about people who are in fairly convenient situation. We're learning also about those who can't even think about joining our university. They're in situations that are very very difficult, they're in our own cities and they are in other places all over the world and for those people we really have to think outside our normal boxes I would say. I think it's very clear to us that we have to have more modes of learning for people. We have learned also that we can do it. The pandemic I think has really shown the academic world that we are much more able to adapt to a new situation with much more agile. It's opened our minds I think to different ways of thinking about the academic pathways, different and diverse learning platforms, rethinking our models of collaboration and partnership and also we have to think about new business model and I'll share one example about rethinking how we collaborate. I'm working with another university right now and hopefully many more on creating a study abroad virtual model. So this is bringing people from different places together to learn together focusing in this pilot project on the UN 17SGG. So these are people who will have the experience of being in another place with other people. Of course it is for a short period but it is very useful and it made us all think about how of course it's great to do study abroad, go to another country, eat different food, all of this is wonderful and you learn a lot from it but this is something that is really restricted to a very privileged group of people. Many people can't even dream about that so what can we do to at least give a taste to all our young people out there of what being with other people might look like. I'll end with one thing here that we've heard over and over in the many discussions we've had since the pandemic at the World Economic Forum with the Global University leaders forum. I think the one word that came that was cited most often is collaboration and I think this is something that we are focusing on now. How can we better collaborate among each other all of the universities and also with other sectors because it is becoming I think extremely clear to us that this is very important as we face the situation but more importantly as we think about social inclusion. Thank you yes I certainly we all talk about the new normal it certainly seems there's no going back the Times Higher Education University leaders survey 200 leaders from universities across the world they've all said they will not be returning back to the old ways there is going to be a hybrid blended future and it's awful this crisis has highlighted terrible inequalities in the world but I think it also has forced people to innovate and to innovate in a way that can really open up access to higher education access to international collaborations and inclusion. So on the technological side I'll turn now to Anand. Anand could you tell us how edX obviously a famous provider of these MOOCs these mass open access courses how have you been collaborating with universities excuse me I am I am here oh Anamari it's fantastic to see you we're going to come to you we've just put you towards the end because we weren't sure where you're able to join so absolutely you are very much still will be part of this thank you but yeah sorry Anand perhaps we'll turn to you and then we'll speak to Anamari very soon but can you tell us how edX is collaborating with universities and particularly what you think is the most transformative thing that institutions can do to open up access during the great reset. First of all thank you for this great panel from Phil also thank you to Carl Anamari and Suzanne from University of Washington and McGill both of whom are great edX partners. When the pandemic hit we saw let me first talk about some observations and then talk about how we are collaborating with universities so in the month of April when the pandemic really took off we saw a 10x increase in people coming to edX to learn online. Five million students came to edX from all over the world and and we asked them the simple question why are you coming to edX to learn at this time and we saw two major two major major reasons one is that they were lifelong learners people in jobs or people who'd been let go from their jobs of furlough they were coming to edX to upskill using short programs and courses second there were university students and high school students who were coming to edX to learn to make up for the time they were losing in campuses two big reasons so we have two solutions that we work in partnership with universities one is we offer a number of micro credentials like micro bachelor's programs micro masters programs to learners all over the world who are looking to upskill they are not able to go to a campus or they're not able to spend a whole year or two years getting a degree they're looking to get skills fast in things like soft skills for example critical thinking or data science or computer science or things like philosophy and others so that's one big area short credentialing programs and many of these credentials can also stack up leading to full degrees that is one the second is I'll take a phrase from Suzanne collaboration we were finding that as learners and universities wanted to learn and universities came to us as well saying that hey we don't have the content how do we turn on a dime and move to fully digital learning and go from zero to 60 miles per hour within seconds it was very hard for them so we launched in collaboration with our university partners edX online campus so edX online campus is a way it's a platform for universities to collaborate so we are used to a culture where everybody does their own thing where every university creates all of their own courses we have our own campus everything is siloed they're just not not a lot of sharing going on and Suzanne said the key thing I'm really delighted that gulf is talking about collaboration across universities so the edX online campus platform universities offer courses on the platform and we work with universities all over the world we made edX online campus available for free to any university in the world until July of this year and we had 500 universities around the world including all of our edX partners using it for their campus students so they could enroll their campus students and a faculty member on their campus could facilitate the work on the platform the beauty of that is different universities could now collaborate and share content and we also found credit networks where universities were giving credit for courses from other universities so the one example NYU has launched a micro bachelor's on edX in computer science a number of other universities like Thomas Edison State University and others are giving credit for this program so students can take it up skill and also accumulate credit the University of Iceland for example what they've done is that they use these edX courses from edX online campus and they've created their own bundle and credential they give their campus students so I think these are the two major things we're doing one is helping universities create micro credentialing programs short programs for people who want to up skill for lifelong learning and the second is edX online campus to help universities get content and make available content for their students to learn online campus thank you yes there's certainly some extraordinary opportunities to really rethink the degree in some respects and turn it into a lifelong exercise I know some universities have sort of changed the whole graduate package and say you're never really an alum you're actually becoming a permanent learner with us so there's some really interesting credit transfer which really do open up opportunities Annamarie sorry we jiggled the order a little bit because we were concerned about the technology but thank you so much for joining us from the Pacific Northwest it's great to see you perhaps we could turn to you now what's the biggest change adaptation you've had to make at UW and again what do you think the most powerful thing we can achieve and universities can do to really open up access and and you know widen participation in higher education yeah well just you know kind of you know very similar to to what we've seen in universities you know quite frankly around the world was you know universities have this reputation for changing at a glacial speed and that we're very conservative and we do think slowly and yet you know basically on a dime we put 700 courses online you know we we obviously from the fact that we have a large continuum college that's online so that you know we had the infrastructure ready a couple of years ago we'd had a big snowstorm so you know we'd really been working with our faculty to be able to put courses online for a couple of days but the entire courses went online and it wasn't just a matter of holding classes on zoom I think that part of what this did is it unleashed an amazing amount of innovation so for example you know our law school is used to having internships and their students go on internships for a full quarter but hey all of a sudden that wasn't possible it wasn't possible to travel you know law firms weren't meeting in person and so they came up with a series of shorter kind of you know many internships that with different law firms where students could you know work with non-profits they could work with a law firm all online we had for example our field trips that couldn't be done we had some faculty in the college of the environment that put go-pros on their bicycle and they took students out to the intertidal or the mountaintops it was just absolutely amazing what people did in the classroom some of our music professors had their students playing instruments next to each other in cars so that you could do a full quartet and everyone was safely distance you know underneath an overhang the kind of creativity that we saw in the classroom was pretty amazing we are concerned though about as you said equity one of our alums and yet you know our alums are just lifelong learners you know talked about and he works at a pediatric clinic with low-income students a low-income you know young people and he talks about what we need is an equity recovery that we don't want to go back to the normal because the normal didn't work for a lot of people and that's something that's important too I mean one of the things also where we saw innovation was in terms of research so for example we have a very large hospital system and they were very concerned in the early days and were concerned about it again about hospital space so they went to our institute for health metrics and they started to do some analysis for us and for our hospital about you know what was expected in terms of prevalence well now they're doing that data all over the world and so part of the equity was as well you know our university actually found the first case of COVID that came into the US it did that because it was doing the Seattle flu study through that we've been collaborating with the city to set up testing sites around the city including in low-income areas and I think it is absolutely critical when you know we did go online and we were the first US university to go online we did it you know we went right away so that we could do it in a planful way so that our low-income students could stay in dorms because they didn't have the same kind of access at home we sent you know hundreds of laptops to students homes you know we set up you know hotspots so it really is important you know right now on campus you know our financial aid office had to change in a moment because all of a sudden you know people who didn't need financial aid a parent was now out of work so we sent stimulus checks home to many of our low-income students and we've been doing a lot more work with food banks for our students so you know it really is absolutely essential that as we move forward to an equity recovery that we put equity right in the middle of things thank you I hope that word becomes a famous phrase equity recovery I think that really does typify that there's not there's not a recovery per se it has to be not back to the old ways that's a great great word you mentioned how the the reputation of universities moving at glacial pace I always like the phrase that says that universities can change the course of history with their research discoveries but they can't change a history course and I think that the the response of faculty across the world these sorts of examples of innovation innovation these examples of people going above and beyond to to transform the educational experiences during a pandemic is wonderful actually before lockdown I the last thing I did was visited UW in Seattle just in February and I've been incredibly impressed by how you combine world-class excellence you know top 30 in the Times Higher World rankings with a public commitment to access an opener so that's a great great story I'm now going to turn to CJ CJ you obviously are working at EF you collaborate with the universities a lot you're coming in to from to us from Rwanda right now and how have you been working with universities in the pandemic and again what's your view on what are the game-changing elements that can really really help open up access to higher education thank you Phil and first of all it's a privilege to be on this panel with so many distinguished colleagues from around the world we could spend hours on this topic allow me just in a minute to give you a strategic context for higher education because I think we have a shared responsibility not just to provide solutions to help the world rebound post the pandemic but more long-term if you zoom out I believe fundamentally that reskilling and upskilling of the masses is a shared responsibility and we're talking a lot about climate change I have a fellow Swede traveling around the world Greta Thunberg highlighting the importance of pooling resources knowledge transfer and also funds to help find climate change but I think we as a world community have to do the same thing when it comes to upskilling and reskilling because if we don't we will face consequences that are much more severe and much sooner than the effects of climate change so that's the context that I think and it's a gigantic task but the lesson learned is we have to work together in public-private partnerships to move the needle as as was said previously now a few observations on the on pivots during the pandemic as Susanne started out saying and Anna Murray said on a dime turned everything online that happened that's true in most places but there were also lots of painful discoveries around the world I mean mind you some countries that I have been advising actively um you know did not even have the opportunity to go online they have been broadcasting on radio and TV because you cannot put an entire country in high entire kind of student population in higher education online even in northern Europe where I'm from and in Germany it was a painful discovery that students do not have access to hardware governments had to distribute hardware for students to be able to attend on the online classes so I agree with Susanne it's a marathon it's not a sprint performing arts and other higher education training that has historically not been online at all it's very hard to convert into online so there's a lot of innovation going on which is fantastic so the pandemic has really pushed higher education onwards at a at a rapid pace that we haven't seen before um as I said one of the realizations is public-private partnerships you have to to work together private companies higher education institutions and private businesses all have to join forces in order to come up with sustainable solutions um on our side in our group our affiliate ashridge executive education is working very closely with both governments and corporates to find solutions and hold international business school is is our affiliate and they're certainly working very closely um with businesses so if I finally just may say a couple of words about the future outlook I think blended is really what we're going to see um as Anant was uh was referring to all modalities we refer to it as limitless learning by halt in the pandemic we've been able to offer um blended solutions for students that cannot travel to campus so they start to study in their home location we can reduce costs massively by that so our master's program can be 50 percent or even cheaper in that type of blended model so that is becoming a more affordable solution to get that degree and also more inclusive I also think the future holds a lot of co-creations between higher education and corporates and also government we have lots of examples in our portfolio with both ashridge and and halt recently the chairman and the ceo of e y announced the first ever in corporate training um company wide 284 000 staff at e y will be able to earn a customized tech mba delivered by halt co-created with e y so it's a stackable back to an ounce point it's a stackable degree with courses and I think that's really what we're going to see more um in the future thank you thank you so we're very close to transitioning to the the closed session it's such a fascinating conversation I just wondered if we could quickly return to those top skills that that the forum identified yesterday they seem so heavily focused on quite intangible things creativity problem solving I wondered perhaps Anna Murray could we go back to you and say this seems to speak to a very broad liberal arts type education where you're mixing humanities with science with social science do you think that can be delivered fully virtually or do you think there's still a really important place for that for campus-based face-to-face education well you know I don't think it's a question of can it be done fully virtually but is that the best and you know what what actually you know some some of you know I'm an adolescent psychologist and so uh you know what we find is that for adult learners and for learners who know exactly what they want online works extremely well so it's a great place to get you know those um you know job skills those you know very clear packets of information those stackable skills we do a lot of work online and we'll continue to but we find that colleges are also places where young people um you know and I'm and I'm talking here about you know folks 18 to you know 25 or so it's a place where they also grow up they discover themselves they make you know they make context and it's not the same um to do that virtually uh it's not the same you don't have the same kinds of discussions it doesn't mean that you can't do things more in a hybrid mode for example uh you know even before the pandemic most of our language classes students did online work in terms of getting all the grammar etc but then did the conversational work in person our biology class um they did flip the classroom for the basic um content but then went in to do labs and discussion sections so I don't think it's a question of either or in the same way that I don't think it's a question of is it um general education liberal arts or is it vocational it's a question of you really do need both in most cases thank you so just in a in a couple of seconds we're transitioning uh out of the live stream into a separate part of the session but perhaps I could just ask an answer to come back quickly if you've got a sort of 30 second sort of um point to there we can leave the audience with before we transition to the uh to the the offline version of this conversation you know I think very quickly uh you know as we talk about the great reset uh I like to talk about the new normal as part of it where I believe the new normal for learning within universities or beyond is going to be blended where you're going to combine online learning with in-person learning because both have benefits to it and any number of studies show that the blended model where you learn partly online partly in person and interleave the learning in various ways is simply better than pure online or pure in person so the future of learning on campuses is going to be blended and the pandemic has simply accelerated that trend towards blended learning in an unprecedented manner thank you thank you well we have to wrap up now in the the live stream section so thank you to the public for joining this session but thank you in particular to the speakers for for sharing that that expertise these issues are and the challenges it's raised you know could not be more important not just for the future of our economy but for the future of our society so thank you very much indeed for your contributions we'll now transition to a different section thank you for those watching on the live stream