Name: Learning Analytics Futures: Bryan Alexander – Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-03-03T11:53:57.000Z
Duration: 26 min 1 s
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Brian Alexander is our guest interviewee today.

I have with me Rebecca Ferguson and Kristi Kitto.

And we will be talking with Brian today about the future of learning analytics.

We'd like to ask you who you are and, and

why you think we are talking with you today.

Well, I don't know if I can help you with the second part, but

That means that I help people think more creatively and strategically about the future.

My specific focus is the future of higher education.

I write scholarly books like here's one, my most recent one, over my shoulder.

I teach classes at Georgetown University and get into all kinds of trouble.

The impacting future, the future of higher education.

And some of them include learning analytics, everything from big data to AI.

So that, that last part may be why you invited me here.

That is in fact why we why we invited you.

So when you think about education, the education field, and

I know in particular you have interest in higher education, but

you know, learning analytics crosses both higher ed and k12.

So please feel free to speak to both if you wish.

But where do you see education heading in 10 years overall or focusing on learning analytics?

Depending on how we do things, higher education in the United States may shrink a bit.

That is, we may have overbuilt our academic institutions for the demand that we will actually experience.

And that demand may shrink as a result of demographics.

It may shrink as a result of changing public attitudes towards higher education.

And it may also be the impact of artificial intelligence in terms of demographics.

I mean, it's pretty clear right now that the human race is moving to a position where we have fewer and fewer kids and we live longer and longer lives.

A lot of higher education is still aimed at the traditional age 18 to 22 year old.

Now if the pronatalists like Orban in Hungary and Vance in the US suddenly waved magic wands and women just suddenly, just became pregnant tomorrow, that wouldn't have an impact on higher education for 19 years.

So I think for the next 10 years, that's one thing we have to bear in mind.

That is, higher education is increasingly unpopular.

People are increasingly skeptical of it for a wide range of reasons.

So in we have the Republican party and conservatives who think that higher education is a hotbed of fill in the blank, you know, Bolshevism, transgenderism, etc.

But also there's a lot of nervousness about student debt.

There's a sense that higher education is snooty or looks down at people.

And there's a sense that the labor market, higher education might not be the best guide to the labor market in terms of AI.

It's quite possible that AI will simply make higher education look bad.

That as AI improves in quality, that people may feel they can get a better and better experience from AI without having to go into debt.

At the same time, since we have zero ability to control cheating in higher education due to AI, that it's possible that people will just start perceiving degrees to be of lower quality.

So I think with all those, I think we're heading to perhaps a shrunken sector.

By shrunken I mean fewer students, fewer staff and faculty working there, perhaps fewer institutions as well.

I don't mean to be so grim and ominous sounding.

I mean, I think there are a lot more going on.

But in terms of the big picture, I think that's there now.

That's if we do things, if we do things wrong, if on the other hand, if we double down on creative work in higher education, if we do more student centered work, if we take advantage of the technology, it's like, oh, I'll just pick one.

If we can improve the higher education experience, then that may improve our reputation and improve our ability to keep going and doing what we're doing.

Yeah, so I have a question about that because on the one hand I think that that's definitely a possibility in the Australian context and maybe in the American context, maybe, you know, generally.

But actually, do you think those attitudes are prevailing globally?

Well, I phrase this pretty precisely to speak to the US in part because I'm finishing up a book on the subject right now.

But I work globally and I work with schools everywhere from Scandinavia to Australia to Singapore to Russia.

And I think it really varies from country to country.

The US really pushed the boundaries on student debt were way beyond anybody else.

But Britain is also starting to experience both a decline in revenue for their institutions, including Russell Group schools, and

they're also suffering from declining enrollment, partly the self inflicted wound of Brexit.

Canada, for example, is now suffering a huge reduction in enrollment because the federal government there decided to drastically reduce international enrollment.

Canadian higher education really depended on international enrollment.

And so they are looking at program cuts across the country, especially in Ontario, now Australia.

You guys also depend heavily on international enrollment, especially from Asia, especially from China.

Depend on quite a few things, including geopolitics.

If Trump heightens Cold War 2.0 and China decides to punish aukus nations for participating, we might see fewer students flow that way.

But also all these countries, you know, Australia, Britain, all of Europe, I mean, anywhere that has gone through development has gone through the demographic transition.

The minute you give a society improved healthcare, improved public health, greater wealth, and

especially once you give women more access to education, more access to the labor market, greater control over reproduction.

Once you do that, childbirth falls off a cliff in almost every single society.

I mean, you can find a couple of exceptions.

Israel, there are a few communities in the west bank which are still producing kids.

In the United States, there are some very, very conservative people in Utah that are still producing kids at scale otherwise.

Which is why China, for example, is so terrified, because their, because their population is going through this massive transformation right now, which is why they are now no longer the most populous nation on earth.

And you can see this happening throughout Scandinavia.

Definitely in Russia, there's an argument which says that Putin made the huge attack on Ukraine because pretty soon they're just basically going to run out of young people to staff the army.

I mean this, this transition is absolutely huge.

But, but of course, every nation has different, you know, politics.

The minute we talk about, say France, the politics are out the window.

Some countries have very strong national higher education ecosystems.

We don't have a national higher education ecosystem.

You look at Latin America, you've got a long tradition of both combination of state funded and Catholic universities.

Just as a sideline in the U.S. i'm not sure about this globally, but in the U.S.

catholic universities have been suffering a great deal, primarily because of the double whammy of childhood sex abuse scandals and decreasing religious belief in the United States.

So a lot of Catholic universities I've talked to have said that they are instead focusing on social justice, which is part of their tradition.

But it's different from saying they're Catholic universities.

So I'd like to bring us to a discussion of data and algorithms and how that, you know, learning analytics is really, you know, reliant on data and algorithms and in terms of trying to improve educational outcomes.

So how do you think the use of data and algorithms in education is going to change in the next 10 years?

Well, there are, there are some things that look pretty stable and durable and some things that look pretty chaotic.

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