Toward a Paradigm Shift in Learning

Traditionally, universities have been seen as institutions that offer a specific kind of service—education—to their students. In addition to this core service, they of-fer degree certificates, which are a traditional proof of one’s knowledge and skill.

The third big task for universities is to conduct research, of which both the public and private sectors can benefit from. Essentially, universities are providers of services that are meant to benefit our societies.

The IHIP definition of services [7] establishes that services are intangible, heterogeneous, inseparable, and perishable. Services are intangible; that is, they cannot be physically interacted with. They are heterogeneous because they are comprised of complex and packaged activities. Services can only exist in the mo-ment they are produced and consumed; they cannot be owned. For this reason,

services are considered to be inseparable. Finally, even though services can be objects of capacity management and demand management, they cannot be stored. In other words, they are perishable.

Traditional education services have been widely studied, and they are generally compliant with the IHIP definition of services. Maringe and Gibbs (2009) define education as “the service by which past and current wisdom is passed to future generations through instruction designed by teachers. Gener-ally the teachers prepare the students with all possible knowledge for the life after school” [8]. The education services often combine tangible elements, such as material or space, and intangible elements, such as experiences or processes [9]. Nevertheless, education itself is a pure intangible service [10]. At the same time, the combination of experiences and material bundled into a process make education heterogeneous. Conventional education is an inseparable service because it can only happen within a space where students meet to be instructed by teachers, and for this reason, it cannot be stored in order to be used on demand; it is perishable. In essence, these factors form the boundaries for education services.

One of the main functions of universities is to provide knowledge and abili-ties that allow students to be ready for work life. Upon closer analysis, we can identify that university-level education is essentially a unidirectional service (Figure 2), in which higher education institutions provide education services to their students. The nature of this interaction can be characterized as uni-directional because universities rarely attain substantial benefits from the work of students. Instances of value co-creation may be perceived only when students get involved in research activities. However, the impact of the jointly produced result is typically low for both parties, at least at the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels.

The unidirectionality of higher education services can be explained as the result of the current horizontal integration structure. In this model of organiz-ing, there is a lack of intercommunication between the actors involved in higher education. Essentially, universities and their students comprise one side of this linear structure. In this side, universities provide a service to the society by giv-ing education to the students. Interaction between students and industry first takes place after the students graduate and start their working lives. There is little interaction between the two far end sides—that is, no interaction between the university, which prepares students for their working lives, and the industry, which in turn hires such students. As a result, the service provider has a very limited awareness of the needs of the demand side. This notion is illustrated in Figure 2.

Fig. 2. The traditional unidirectional model of how universities have operated.

For the past 15 years, digitalization has been reshaping the structure of modern services, and education is not an exception. Higher education has experienced a dramatic change enabled by its integration with information and communica-tion technologies. Since the world economic crisis in 2008, our system of higher education has experienced a lot of stress due to constant budget cuts. As a conse-quence, universities have been constantly reducing the size of their research and teaching staff. Universities have started using digital education material in order to maintain the quality of education services while saving costs. Digitalization allows universities not only to reduce teaching-related costs, but also to increase the reachability and customization of education.

Reducing the cost of education services is very important for universities. In the United States alone, student loan debts surpass $1.2 trillion and have become the second largest form of consumer debt [11], dragging down economic devel-opment and even forcing many students to drop their higher education studies.

Furthermore, by increasing the reachability of education through easily distrib-utable digital material, education can be delivered faster to a greater number of people. Digital learning material is not constrained by physical spaces. Finally, customization of education means that everyone can build his or her own educa-tional package according to his or her interest.

Productization is the process that aims at concretizing service offerings and professional expertise using more systematic processes and methods so that services are more product-like and are easier to buy and sell [12]. Productization is the key for a successful market entry [13]. The main output of productization is bundling offerings and deliveries together in well-defined packages so that the expectations of customers are better fulfilled [14].

The impact of productization of higher education services was studied by Aapoja et al. (2012) [14]. In this work, the authors argue: “The strength of uni-versities lies in the wide variety of services they can offer and productize; dif-ferent kinds of business-to-business (B2B) services e.g. consultations, research

projects and public services like education. University-industry cooperation can be enhanced through productization” [14].

The productization of education services that universities provide bring a big opportunity to increase and improve cooperation between higher educa-tion institueduca-tions and the industry. This enhanced cooperaeduca-tion translates into benefits for universities, students, and industry. For universities, having closer cooperation with industries will mean the possibility to know them better and understand their current problems. This could reflect on better and more con-crete curriculums that address the needs of firms. This also benefits the students because they are exposed to real-life cases that help them acquire skills that are up-to-date and actually required by their future employers. For the industry, the benefits are even more obvious; having a better labor force can potentiate their growth and development—a firm is only as good as its employees.

Closer university–industry cooperation enhances other key aspects as well:

research support, knowledge transfer, technology transfer, and collaborative re-search [15]. Tightening the cooperation in these aspects can have a huge positive impact on the quality of educational services that universities provide.

In essence, the university–society–industry entity is a symbiotic platform that brings mutualism to everyone within the system and benefits all parties.

However, there are certain caveats that must be acknowledged. Even if a tighter university–industry cooperation can improve the quality of university curricu-lums, theses must not respond to the interests of the industry alone. Universities with better education services could be training better professionals, but they also have the duty of shaping the society by educating the future citizens. There-fore, independent research will be needed in the future as well.