Technology is increasingly serving higher education by enabling student-centred learning and concerted social learning, extended reach to content anytime and everywhere, insights for educators into progress tracking and learning trends, and cross-institutional academic collaboration. At the same time, technology is providing evidence of negative disruption to the core purpose of education, which is human development and individual preparation for the future. Technology is gradually diminishing the capacity of individuals to critically think and reason, to expand into unfamiliar knowledge domains, and to exploit the learning experience to fulfil the market needs after graduation. In this paper, a review is presented on how technology is disrupting higher education, both positively and negatively. Some recommendations are given with respect to these disruption

Aloudat , Anas

English

Solent Electronic Archive

Serving Higher Education with Technology – 
Disrupting Higher Education with Technology 
 
 
 
Anas Aloudat 
 
 
American University in the Emirates, 
Dubai, UAE 
Anas.aloudat@aue.ae 
 
 
 
Abstract 
 
Technology is increasingly serving higher education by enabling 
student-centred learning and concerted social learning, extended 
reach to content anytime and everywhere, insights for educators into 
progress tracking and learning trends, and cross-institutional 
academic collaboration. At the same time, technology is providing 
evidence of negative disruption to the core purpose of education, 
which is human development and individual preparation for the 
future. Technology is gradually diminishing the capacity of 
individuals to critically think and reason, to expand into unfamiliar 
knowledge domains, and to exploit the learning experience to fulfil 
the market needs after graduation. In this paper, a review is 
presented on how technology is disrupting higher education, both 
positively and negatively. Some recommendations are given with 
respect to these disruptions.  
 
Keywords: Disruptive Technology, Higher Education, Online 
Collaboration, Social Media Learning Paradigm 
 
 
1.0 Introduction 
Just as in many aspects of life, technology today is becoming a trendsetter to the 
way higher education is designed, evaluated and delivered. Universities around the 
world are depending more on technology to fulfil its core functions in fostering 
creativity, and in acquiring, processing and disseminating knowledge [1]. While 
utilising technology in education is not a new trend we, nonetheless, are witnessing 
an unprecedented proliferation in the use of newer, smarter technologies that has 
started to cause a shift in the traditional paradigms of education. This shift is 
mainly driven by the exponential growth of knowledge, the need for more quality 
education, and also due to a changing tendency to depend on technology within the 
new student generation [2]. Adaptive learning systems, machine-learning 
algorithms, smart mobile apps, online virtual labs, electronic interactive books, and 
social media are just a few technology examples universities are rapidly seeking to 
employ to server higher education.  
 
Technology does provide the right set of tools through which a personalised 
learning experience of individual students can be created. Technology enables 
knowledge to be shared; that concerning student-learning trends and needs. 
Technology also provides insights and decision support for educators to enhance 
the overall educational outcomes.  
 
Anyone can then truly argue the immense benefits of utilising technology in higher 
education. Indeed, through technology learning outcomes can be targeted more 
intelligently, issues of teaching can be solved rather informedly, and student-
learning experience can be evaluated quite effectively. These benefits are rather 
overwhelming and cannot be denied. While there might be a consensus agreement 
on the aforementioned argument to some extent, technology, nevertheless, has 
introduced some negative disruptions on education that should not be neglected or 
disregarded when a decision is made to embed a technology within the fabric of 
education.  
 
In this article, a review is presented on how technology is positively serving higher 
education through the introduction of welcomed disruptions to traditional 
educational paradigms. In the interim, a discussion is also made on how same 
technology is gradually weakening the competencies of many students to be 
creative, to be able to evaluate and to expand on gained knowledge applied to real 
life issues after graduation.  
 
The discussion is structured as follows: In Section 2, a review is provided about the 
significant positive role of technology in facilitating the interactive environment of 
education for students and educators. Through Section 3, a discussion is give about 
the negative disruptions of utilising technology in higher education. Section 4 
concludes this article and provides some recommendations for educators and 
decision makers on what to consider when a technology is put into used for 
educational purposes.  
2.0 Positive Disruptions of Technology in Education 
Previous studies in the literature extensively discussed the role of technology in 
positively enhancing education and enabling better learning environments. These 
positive disruptions are summarised as follows: 
2.1 Personalised Learning Experience 
Technology enables a true personalised learning experience for individual students. 
Instead of following one unified learning model with all students, technology helps 
to adapt a flexible evaluation model for each student. Machine-learning algorithms 
are now able to collect and analyse individual student data to detect learning 
difficulties and, accordingly, personalise the learning curve of the educational 
content to better address these difficulties [3]. For instance, based on the academic 
achievements in a specific subject the student is given a customised set of 
questions and practice tests. This set, which specifically matches the aptitude 
profile of the student, can provide an accurate evaluation on what the student is 
successfully learning and what learning objectives are needed to be reinforced [4]. 
Since it is most likely that every student may possess a different trend of learning, 
educators can rely on technology in creating a non-repetitive pattern of assessment 
to each individual student that most matches the needs and abilities of the student.  
2.2 Online Collaboration between Students and amongst 
Educators 
Collaboration between students becomes truly feasible inside and outside the 
classroom by using online technologies. Technology enables students to share and 
track subject requirements, to follow the progress of assignments within their 
groups, and to track their achievements using portals and digital dashboards. 
Educators on the other hand can easily create and organise requirements, track 
changes and submissions, view and discuss comments with students, and 
communicate results with students and management. By utilising technology, 
productivity can also be increased through collaboration between educators from 
different academic departments. Online resources, such as reports, templates, 
libraries, lessons learned and best practises can be shared, and general success 
trends can also be transferred and adopted [5].     
2.3 The Social Media Learning Paradigm 
Education is gradually shifting towards encompassing the concepts of social 
learning driven by the fact that more students are going into higher education with 
preferences about learning they have acquired throughout their daily use of social 
media [6]. Most of the students today are digital natives, who are quite proficient 
with technology. In response to this natural tendency of students to learn via 
technology an increasing number of educators are starting to post teaching videos 
and lectures into online channels, such as Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, 
TED-Ed, or even Facebook and YouTube [7]. Indeed, these channels are becoming 
a social learning stream for many leaners around the world, with no bounds by 
classes or that of time constraints [4, 8]. In this sense, education is taking the form 
of a socially shared paradigm in which educators can even exploit social media to 
assign different learning challenges to students, to enrich discussions amongst 
students themselves, and to support student self-regulated learning approach within 
different educational contexts [9, 10].  
2.4 Better Insights into Academic Progress 
Technology makes it easier for educators to design customised tests, deliver them 
through different devices like PCs, tablets or mobile phones, scan test scores with a 
mobile phone’s camera, and export scores to a third party application, e.g., 
Microsoft Excel, if needed [11]. Solutions, such as BubbleScore, Knewton or 
Google Classroom provide powerful analytical tools to help educators to analyse 
and evaluate the dataset of each student, detect patterns of difficulties and to map 
results to predefined thresholds. It is true that students do not have comparable 
types of intelligence. Therefore, learning objectives cannot be achieved based on 
the “average student” model. As a result, the individual evaluation of each student 
permits better insights into the learning path of the student in which difficulties of 
learning can be detected early and a course of customised actions can then be 
planned and taken to address them [12].  
3.0 Negative Disruptions of Technology in Education 
Since technology is supposedly offering quality educational opportunities to 
students, promising better alternatives to tackle traditional learning issues, and also 
due to the fact that almost all students in this digital age are increasingly relying on 
whatever technology at their disposal, it is reasonable to say that universities will 
keep investing heavily in technology for higher education. However, the key to 
enhance education cannot be achieved just by adding another technology, but 
rather by understanding how the technology should be controlled and utilised. 
Although the advancements in technological solutions in education are truly 
astounding, the researcher believes that total reliance on technology alone hinders 
the core purpose of education, which is to prepare the educated generation who is 
capable of thinking critically, evaluating and reasoning real-life issues without the 
use of any technology.  
 
In a survey on technology-related research that was conducted by Pew Research 
Center in 2012 [13],  the researchers found that technology is altering how students 
learn. There was a mounting indirect evidence that technology can affect the 
behaviour of the student because of its continuous stimulation and rapid shifts on 
attention. The results also found that technology created “an easily distracted 
generation with short attention spans” where students could not write, 
communicate face to face, or critically think without the aid of technology [13]. 
Many students, for example, heavily rely on the AutoCorrect function of Microsoft 
Word to fix typing mistakes in their reports and assignments. This would only 
eliminate the necessity for the student to know the correct spelling of words, hence 
his or her ability to write in a correct style when the technology is absent.  
Another issue that was reported in the survey is that students developed an almost 
total dependency on online search engines and informative websites, such as 
Wikipedia, in which students became so accustomed to getting quick answers to 
the point they would stop searching when no easy answer appeared [13]. Indeed, 
there are concerns related to creativity since finding easy answers with technology 
nearly negates the need for students to think for themselves, to better learn and 
remember information, or to originate new ideas from existing ones [14]. 
 
Another point of argument is that knowledge acquisition that is transferred from 
educators to students is partially due to the student’s attention to the nonverbal 
behaviour of the lecturer. Face-to-face human interaction and mutual direct 
conversations are extremely vital to the delivery of a quality education, and to the 
development and acquisition of knowledge-based interpersonal skills. As explained 
by Brockbank and McGill [15], over 50 percent of the message is usually 
communicated through facial expression or body language, while about 30 percent 
travels through the tone, volume or pitch of the voice. People tend to pay attention 
to the speaker’s voice or body language to deepen their understanding of the 
conveyed topic. Technology certainly has the ability to remove the nonverbal 
communication once used in an educational environment.  The second important 
attribute in nonverbal communication is the educator’s awareness of the individual 
needs of students. Educators are usually attentive to the subtle signs and reactions 
of students in the class, where educators usually elaborate more on issues when the 
perception that more explanation is needed. This attentiveness almost disappear 
when technology is used to communicate the educational material [16]. 
 
Finally, technology can also enforce inequality amongst students. Tests and 
assessments that are customised according to each student’s learning curve, using 
learning-machine algorithms or any other technology, can still favour some 
students over others. A student who is reasonably aware of how technology works 
can deliberately intend to produce a mediocre result at one point to adjust the 
difficulty of later tests and assessments. Another point of view is that students who 
are quite comfortable with technology can be expected to produce better results 
from those who are not. This would only introduce a digital divide in an 
environment where digital solutions are used only to avoid it.  
4.0 Conclusion 
Disrupting the traditional ways of education by introducing a new technology 
cannot be guarantee in enabling better educational environment with proven 
outcomes that focus on preparing individuals with positive impact on society after 
graduation. It is true that technology is an absolute necessity in higher education 
nowadays, but what is more important is how technology is put into use and 
exploited. Technology is just an enabling tool for learning. It should not be 
perceived more than that. Technology can, and should, help teachers to monitor 
how students are progressing, and what difficulties in learning student are facing, 
but no machine-learning algorithm can replace a human in bringing creativity and 
problem-solving insights and experience to the classroom, physically or virtually. 
In addition, relying solely on technology to evaluate the learning experience of a 
student can be rather risky. As contended by Bernard Bull, technology should not 
drive the decisions instead of serving as a diverse collection of tools to help 
achieve the planned goals of education [17]. 
 
Another point on the same level of importance is that we have to be very clear in 
differentiating between information access and education. Students do need to 
access information using whatever tools under their disposal. Indeed, online 
databases and search engines can speed the process of looking up, matching and 
connecting information, but how information is assessed, digested and relayed 
within the educational context is what really matters. Students have to learn it the 
hard way; the old traditional way of digging up information and sifting through 
hard copies of reference books or libraries should accompany the use of any 
technology. Such manual searching skills can only be mastered by experience, 
eventually to draw the potential of the student to relate and summarise notes using 
pen and paper, to compare and contrast ideas, and to expand on additional related 
references. 
 
In conclusion, technology in higher education is here to stay, but when a decision 
is made to rely on a technology that technology should be always scrutinised, 
totally controlled and restricted to its intended role only, taking into account its 
limitations and defects. To close this discussion the researcher quotes the following 
statement from a book titled “The End of Education” by Neil Postman [18]: “All 
technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology 
offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage” [p. 192]. The statement really 
serves the argument of this research on the need to ever judge technology and 
always evaluate the consequences of utilising it in higher education. 
5.0 References 
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2   L. Rajasingham, "Will Mobile Learning Bring a Paradigm Shift in Higher 
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3   C. Romero and S. Ventura, "Educational Data Mining: A Review of the State of 
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4   J. Bolluyt. "5 Ways Technology Is Disrupting Education".  September 12, 2014  
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5   C. Christensen, C.W. Johnson, and M.B. Horn, "Disrupting Class: How 
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6   C. Dede, "Social Media and Challenges to Traditional Models of Education", in 
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Serving higher education with technology – 

disrupting higher education with technology

http://ssudl.solent.ac.uk/3581/1/INSPIRE%200%20Keynote%20Aloudat.pdf

Serving higher education with technology – disrupting higher education with technology

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