It's time to adapt - and quickly - if we're to survive in the user-

We live in a world where the power of the World Wide Web has shifted from the producer to the audience. At the World Economic Forum in January this year (www.weforum.org) the "explosion of user- generated information, entertainment and services" was highlighted as critically impacting on "everything from corporate communications to elections, from the way companies conduct R&D to the social behaviour and privacy of individuals".

From Amazon.com (where much of the value comes from millions of customer reviews) to MySpace (owned by Intermix Media, which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580m), some of the most successful web companies are building business models partly or largely based on user- generated content. MySpace is one of the most visited sites in America and has taken marketing into totally new territory. YouTube outstrips the lot and, in a year and a half, sold itself to Google for $1.65bn! YouTube and MySpace are only two of the many sites driven entirely by the users themselves, enthusiastic individuals who prompted Time magazine to name them, collectively, as the people of the year for 2006 for "seizing the reins of the global media... and beating the pros at their own game".

To thrive in this world, higher education institutions will have to embrace and facilitate innovation - and do so swiftly and continuously. The Economist has called peer production one of the most powerful industrial forces of our time and we will have to ask ourselves tough questions about our courses, how up-to-date they might be, and how relevant in a world where the exchange and access to information is so swift that it is entirely possible that a diligent student could get to know more about parts of the syllabus than his or her teacher. Not only that, but in this world the use of technology is expected - and expected at a high level. Why would a student forgive a lecturer a pedestrian lecture and coverage of content when that student can get a much better service on the internet?

We also have to ask ourselves how we can best deliver "customer service" and student support in this new world, and harness this gift culture to enhance student support with peer-to-peer mentoring and collaborative learning models; how we deal with the shifting boundaries between formal and informal learning; how we harness the content that is being created on the internet.

Last year Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame launched Wikiversity (strapline: because knowledge should be free) and put us on notice that the world of education will be challenged by this new world where lectures are turned into conversations among people formerly known as the audience - and collaborative learning and peer mentoring can be a valued educational model. I believe Wikiversity might just be a challenge to us all. We might argue as individual institutions that our brands are strong - but then so is theirs, for different reasons, in a new marketplace. I still believe that there are sufficient people who want some kind of formal accreditation - and we have an advantage here - but the market is a strange beast, and we are all beginners in this new game.

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