By Marwa Kotb.

Many of us have watched educational institutes turning to be more businesslike, courses are outcome, and students and their parents are customers. While educational institutes worked hard to expand their buildings, upgrade their technology, be part of online market, provide the best athletic programs, better accommodation and services, they forgot that these are not the core of an educational institute. The result is that graduates qualifications didn’t meet the needs of the “revolution” in labor markets and technology (The Economist, 2014, June 28). Yet  many higher education institutes could recover easily if they set their main goal again “to educate”, their primary outcome is critical and enlightened thinkers, and their “campuses are platforms for lifelong learning” (Selingo, 2014, September 22).
A major change must take place in higher education, that would involve administrators, educators, and students. Administrators must work to utilize new financial models to reduce educational cost in order to make institutions more accessible, they must create mechanisms to help faculty develop team-taught courses, and be willing to give educators time to create innovative curricula, alter the rigid learning unit, we all learn in different ways at different speeds, so why not adjust teaching to the individual needs of the student and not the average student in the classroom, they can consider experimenting the adaptive learning approach which customizes learning much in the same way that Amazon or Netflix do, this approach could help to reduce the cost in higher education by reducing the time to a degree (Selingo, 2014, September 22). Educators must be able utilize face to face interaction in campuses more efficiently to outperform online learning ,that can be done if they are well trained to utilize active learning and educational technology efficiently in campuses. Educators should use new pedagogies such as hybrid approach as it was found to be more effective than purely face-to-face instruction and online courses (U.S. Department of Education, 2010) as cited in (Walden& Smith), they should be willing to learn, abandon their old approaches, and take the risk to use the new methods. Students must be self-directed learners and be able to decide when, where, and how they learn, many will face some troubles when they are responsible for their own learning, they must be supported until they achieve that, they should never be blamed as they were spoon fed for almost two decades in earlier stages. “The world is changing at seemingly breakneck speed” (Stewart, 2015), and each sector of a higher education has a duty to accomplish for their institutes to strive.
References
Selingo J. (2014, September 22). 3 Ways the Students of Tomorrow Will Change Higher Education. Retrieved from http://blogs.workday.com/3-ways-the-students-of-tomorrow-will-change-higher-education/
Stewart, V. (2015, September 13). Assessing 21st-Century Skills and Competencies around the World. Asia Society. Retrieved from http://asiasociety.org/global-cities-education-network/assessing-21st-century-skills-and-competencies-around-world

The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21605906-cost-crisis-changing-labour-markets-and-new-technology-will-turn-old-institution-its

Waldman, J., & Smith, C. E. (2013). Hybrid Learning in a Canadian College Environment. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. Retrieved from http://www.heqco.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/Sheridan_Hybrid_College_Programs.pdf