The New Reality: Volume 11 in the UBSS publications series

‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one’...Albert EinsteinWe now live in mankind’s fifth technological era - the digital era. Compared with the earlier eras (but probably not with those yet to come), it is an era on steroids. And a major crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic – has occurred during the era. We no longer have to speculate about the impact of crises on technology adoption, mores, and ways of behaving. Since early 2020, we have been living future history on the subject.The ongoing COVID crisis has had only a moderate impact in some industries, such as essential services like nursing and policing, where traditional practices have had to be maintained and little new technology needed to be adopted. In some other industries, its impact has been disruptive. And none more so than the higher education industry, where beliefs, practices, and timetables were formed during the now-distant farming era and that has been among the most successful of all industries in resisting change.The pandemic forced owners, managers, administrators, academics, and students to face immediate and major challenges if they were to remain in the industry. The direct challenges concerned mainly unit delivery, unit assessment, and student management. Related challenges included installing new digital hardware and software in both the provider institutions and the homes of staff and students and making substantial progress in mastering new digital technologies within a time frame of only a few weeks. Together and separately, they dwarfed any earlier work-based challenges most participants in the industry had ever faced.This book, The New Reality, has been written by academics, administrators, and managers who had worked in the slow-moving higher education industry for decades and then had to experience and try to meet the urgent and substantial challenges posed by the need to move all key services off-site, immediately. The book has been edited by Emeritus Professor Greg Whateley, Deputy Vice Chancellor of a leading business school in Sydney and Professor Ian Bofinger, Executive Dean of the Australian Academy of Music and Performing Arts. Other contributors include Emeritus Professor Jim Mienczakowski, a former a former vice chancellor and campus president as well as experienced lecturers and managers in the industry. These experienced professionals describe their personal experiences in meeting the immediate challenges of the crisis. They also discuss the impact on their attitudes toward and progress in adopting new digital technology (some admit that the pandemic changed them from reluctant digital convicts to enthusiastic digital converts), practices and approaches that have been adopted during the crisis and should be maintained and others that should be discarded, new opportunities going forward, and remaining barriers to progress.This book is essential reading for those working in the higher education industry as well as others interested in the efficiency and productivity of society’s use of scarce resources. The chapters are short, are written in an engaging (non-academic) style, and make for easy and enjoyable reading while on buses and trains or over a coffee. The New Reality is both a valuable investment product and a very enjoyable consumer good.Emeritus Professor Angus HookeDirector, UBSS Centre for Scholarship and Research Read more