How Technology is Reshaping Higher Education and Preparing Future Workforce (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So technology is shaping our organization, or I should say reshaping our organization in a lot of ways. If you think about in the past, a workstation where you had a desktop and you were tied to that desktop all day and the work you did was there. We know that's not the modern workplace and we know that's not how people work most effectively and unofficially in their day-to-day tasks. So technology is really helping us rethink what the day-to-day activities are. We're moving to a complete wireless experience for our faculty, staff, and students, which includes things like wireless printing, wireless projecting, mobile technologies, laptops instead of desktops. So really not just transforming what the work is we do, but how we do the work. Technology is important in higher education because it really permeates everything we do. I think if we look into the future, you know, and close your eyes, there's way more technology than less. And we're in this time where we're making a transition in our society to these new type of jobs. And if we believe the statistics, you know, the jobs that we're preparing our students for aren't created yet. So what our students are going to do in 2030, we don't know. Those jobs aren't there. But we know that technology is going to play a component. I think in higher education, it's our role to prepare students for that future workforce and that future environment of work. And it's not just about technology in education. It's about using technology to solve problems in a new and interesting way. And whether that's helping a farmer grow crops more efficiently or more effectively, whether that's figuring out a new cure for a disease, whether that's a new public policy or how our government works, all of those things, I think, will have a technology component as we go forward. And what we're doing here at Ohio State is preparing our students for that new workforce. So here at Ohio State, we have a lot of big initiatives to help us transform to meet these new modern work environments. One is our enterprise project, our conversion of our ERP system from PeopleSoft to Workday. And this is going to do a couple of things. One is, I always like to say, the democratization of data, make data readily available to all people at the university so that they can make better decisions faster, quicker. And then two, make us more efficient as a university through a more mobile-friendly experience, whether that's an easier travel portal or how you do your time and leave. All of those things will be wrapped up in that product that will take Ohio State into this new future workforce. The second and I really think most exciting thing we're doing at the university is the digital flagship initiative. Digital flagship is a student experience initiative where our students are receiving technology, an iPad, case, cover, pencil, keyboard, and the care of that device and the management of that device from the university. They're receiving coding curriculum and they're learning how to live and work in this app economy. And we see the app economy as the sort of center of all this, the center of the future growth in jobs, the center for our future developmental needs, and preparing students to do that when they leave here and be able to engage in that space is the primary goal of those projects.