The term “productivity” is one that we associate with 5.00am starts, cold plunges, inbox to zero hacks and LinkedIn brags.

It’s not a concept that sits comfortably in an education space. Students are not widgets and learning is not a linear process that can readily be optimised.

But underneath the performative hustle is a serious question that the sector is currently confronting. The resources that go into education provision, including staff time, energy and attention, are finite and under pressure. The intended results – student learning, engagement, success – have a complex relationship with those inputs. Simple hacks won’t change that relationship, but it warrants close attention and reflection so as to create as good a chance as possible that educators are able to focus on what matters most to students.

At a recent episode of Education Espresso, our regular Wonkhe x Adobe online shot of pedagogical inspiration, which is available to watch back here, we explored some institution-level opportunities to streamline, share, and grow capacity, with some important stand-out lessons.

Start with the problem, not the intended efficiency

For Mark Simpson, vice chancellor at Teesside University, the cost pressure is real and the sector is being asked to do more with less. But if you start by talking about efficiency, he argues, you miss the point. “Where we always start is: what’s the student feedback saying? Where have we got issues?”

At Teesside, organisation and management was a long-standing weak spot in the National Student Survey. Most university timetables are built for a perfect day in which every member of staff turns up and every room works as intended, leaving no space for sickness, technology failure or miscommunications. Beginning to look at the timetable challenge, the team realised that a parallel core issue was too many modules overall – in Mark’s words, “We had a problem with the machine, and we were also throwing too much into the machine.” Part of the fix was better technology for timetabling and communication. But the deeper change was fewer modules, designed with more choice built in and taught by teams instead of lone experts, to produce a more resilient system.

Jacques Marais, digital skills developer at the University of Hertfordshire, added that starting with product or technology solutions often misses the bigger picture. Starting with a question like “where are colleagues losing time?” allows for more meaningful diagnosis of the source of the issue and what kind of solution will be most effective in addressing it. “Sometimes,” he says, “productivity isn’t about a new tool. It’s about making existing tools easier to discover and use.” To that end Jacques has produced an interactive technology map for teaching staff, showing the various applications of different tools and platforms.

AI that builds capacity, not volume

For academic staff, AI assistance can help streamline the creation of lesson plans and structure discussion prompts. Where student services teams need to review large volumes of text – such as in the case of reviewing students’ first draft of a CV – AI assistance can both offer initial feedback directly to the student, and support staff to pull out key areas for development for in-depth discussion. And AI can help any member of university staff who needs to summarise, retrieve and translate information, or cross-reference different data sources, including researchers.

Jacques suggested thinking of productivity as capacity: identifying what can be simplified, shared or redesigned so that staff have more time and attention for the work that matters most to students. AI tools can be a help or hindrance to productivity; if anyone can, in principle, create content at the touch of a button, then the default becomes individual responsibility for content. But if AI just increases the sheer volume of content that staff and students have to process, nobody has gained anything. In Jacques’ words, AI needs to be firmly established as the “passenger”, not the “driver”, being utilised in the service of programme teams.

It applies to professional services as well. At Teesside, there is a project to deploy AI with learner engagement analytic data to more quickly flag students at risk, and allow staff more time to follow up with those students directly. A new “compassionate communication” agent, nicknamed Coco, redrafts letters and emails to students into clearer, kinder language with practical next steps, but a professional still reviews every output. Mark Simpson added that where there are efficiency gains of this sort, the benefit should be measured in enhanced support to students not bottom-line savings.

Much of the sector’s direction of travel is towards making learning seamless, flexible and available wherever students are. But learning also needs friction: moments where students pause, question themselves and resist the pull of cognitive offloading. Ultimately, students’ thinking is the most productive activity, so efforts towards productivity should be focused on promoting thought, not bypassing it. For professional practice, as Jacques put it: “Reuse should not mean reproducing the same teaching indefinitely. It should mean reducing unnecessary reconstruction so that more time can go into meaningful adaptation.”

Productivity is collective

The dominant cultural model is of individual productivity, but in higher education the biggest gains can be realised through sharing. While many educators value their distinctive content and resources, most also want to learn from and deploy examples of best practice. The middle way is to create resources that are designed for rapid adaptation and remixing. At Hertfordshire, that includes remixable templates that give students a structured starting point while leaving room for creativity, five-minute bite-sized learning for time-poor staff, and hands-on AI labs where colleagues practise prompting side by side.

For marketing and communications teams, the opportunity is to gain greater consistency in brand presence and adoption of best practice across university communications. The volume of communications requested typically overwhelms the design capacity of central teams. One solution is templates, created with Adobe Creative Cloud, with locked down brand elements such as logos and colour palettes, covering a suite of standard communications needs such as event promotions, official notices, or timetables, uploaded with usage guidance to a central hub. This allows staff to communicate their messages in emails, social posts and signage while maintaining the university’s look and feel – and the digital and creative team can stay focused on higher-priority work.

There’s a valuable role for peer support and mentoring in enabling productivity as well. At Hertfordshire, student tech mentors, employed part time and highly visible in their blue hoodies, help peers overcome digital barriers before they become academic ones. Mark Simpson added that Teesside has steered away from the idea of staff as “digital champions” as the right people to be supporting peers – because these people are so frequently the early adopters and enthusiasts, sharing exemplary practice that is time and labour intensive, they can knock others’ confidence rather than build it up.

Know your toolbox

Mark Simpson observed that institutions are adopting multiple AI tools, each with its own quirks, and staff are upskilling on different ones. Students can end up receiving a confused story about what is expected of them. Many are as anxious about AI as staff are, and fear for the impact on their current study and future careers. Many general-purpose AI tools were also designed for workplace productivity, with an experienced user in mind who can judge the output, whereas in education that judgement is the very thing educators are trying to develop.

A defined suite of tools, such as Adobe Acrobat Studio and Creative Cloud, accessible to all and understood by all will assist in clarifying an institutional pedagogical position on AI in education, and underpin the collective, sharing approach to educational productivity.

Productivity shouldn’t be something that educators shy away from or reject out of hand. Deployed thoughtfully it can assist with identifying key areas where streamlining could free up capacity, developing a sharing pedagogical culture within programmes and disciplines, deciding on the right toolkit to underpin it, and free up time for staff to focus on building learning activities that engage and challenge students. No 5.00am wakeup time required.

This article is published as part of a partnership with Adobe. Learn more about how Adobe tools like Adobe Acrobat Studio help boost institution-wide productivity here.