What EDUCAUSE’s 2022 Top 10 IT Issues Mean for Libraries

What EDUCAUSE’s 2022 Top 10 IT Issues Mean for Libraries

Last month, EDUCAUSE published its
Top 10 IT Issues for 2022
with the subtitle «The Higher Education We Deserve».
To reach the top 10, EDUCAUSE members were asked to prioritize 17 issues identified by the EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel members.
The members of the Issue Panel then broke up into groups to write essays on the 10 topics.
This report starts with a 1,500-word summary of the common themes in the pieces, followed by the essays themselves.
There is significant overlap in the essays to wade through with this publication style, but some valuable thoughts and observations are also there.
Here are my highlights.
In a number of places below, I will refer to sections of the EDUCAUSE article using Hypothes.is annotation links.
If you’d like to see more or carry on a conversation, see the
Hypothes.is-enabled version
of the page.
Side note before we start:
Psst. EDUCAUSE. Over here.
First, kudos for publishing this as an HTML page and not some excessively designed PDF file.
But why in the world did you publish what must be a 15,000 word HTML article with
no
table-of-contents anchors?
It sure would be nice to refer to specific essays and sub-parts within each essay.
The Big Picture
At the top of the article, the EDUCAUSE editors put a rosy hue on the opportunities for higher education coming out of the pandemic that can be enabled by educational technology.
The EDUCAUSE 2022 Top 10 IT Issues take an optimistic view of how technology can help make the higher education we deserve—through a shared transformational vision and strategy for the institution, a recognition of the need to place students’ success at the center, and a sustainable business model that has redefined «the campus.»
At least they are admitting upfront that it is an optimistic view.
If I were to write it, I’d say something like:
The EDUCAUSE 2022 Top 10 IT Issues describe a watershed moment in higher education at a time when there isn’t much water behind the dam. Faculty and staff are tired (several essays acknowledge this), and students are anxious. Calls for digital transformation mean that old ways of doing things must be replicated in two new ways: in-person/online hybrid and entirely online. And the transformation must be done at or below current budget levels. By the way: if we screw this up, our institution might die on the vine.
I’m not naturally a pessimistic person, but all this talk of Digital Transformation—that phrase is used so often in the article that the writers shorten it to a new buzzword: «Dx»—has me somewhat concerned.
There are some profound implications here, and I’m unsure where the capacity to carry out the vision described in these 10 issues will come from.
The 10 Issues
Cyber Everywhere! Are We Prepared?: Developing processes and controls, institutional infrastructure, and institutional workforce skills to protect and secure data and supply-chain integrity
Evolve or Become Extinct: Acceleratin…