AAHESGIT 215: 3 years of Change

Today is the third anniversary of the birth event for the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable (TLTR) Program. In the fall of 1994 I suggested that we wanted to convene a meeting of a dozen or two people to shape a new program. Almost one hundred friends and colleagues from a variety of educational institutions and industry showed up to work together for one day on November 11 -- questioning, challenging, and planning. The result was the beginning of the TLTR program. I thought it might be interesting to mention some changes I've observed in education and technology since then, and to invite you to add your own. I'll begin with: Passing the Point of No Return -- Email, Constant Re-adjustment, Support Service Crisis, STAs, Four Swinging Pendulums, and Distance Education.

I'll mention ways in which our current work seems relevant, but try to keep the "commercials" to a minimum. I'll put them in <angle brackets> for easy removal.)

Steve Gilbert

PASSING THE POINT OF NO RETURN -- EMAIL
With respect to integrating information technology into teaching and learning, most colleges and universities have now passed the point of no return -- but they don't know where they're going.

In the last 12 to 18 months I've been hearing a new message from college presidents and board members. Most of them are now convinced that their institutions MUST move ahead more vigorously to apply information technology to teaching and learning. They believe that active educational use of technology is an essential element in competition among post- secondary institutions for students, faculty, and even some grants. Consequently, they are supporting major institutional investments in technology.

Unfortunately, most of these academic leaders have no great confidence that their investments will result in short term measurable educational gains, and it isn't obvious where the necessary funding can be found. Unlike investments in intercollegiate athletics, discipline-specific research, or parking facilities, most presidents and board members have little experience or intuition to rely on for guidance when making these major technology resource allocation decisions. Their own careers and training have included little contact with academic uses of technology. They don't really know whose judgment they can trust or how to hire someone to take over this whole collection of headaches. Finally, there seem to be no tools readily available to assess the educational impact of technology -- timely, reliably, and credibly. <Fortunately, Steve Ehrmann's Flashlight Project is about to provide a partial solution to this problem.>

The good news is that there is a rapidly growing mountain of anecdotal evidence that faculty and students can use computers, telecommunications, and video to improve teaching and learning. Instruction-related uses of electronic mail, presentation graphics, and the World Wide Web are being widely adopted and adapted by faculty members. Casey Green's recently released survey data suggest that about one-third of all faculty had already begun to use these applications in conjunction with their teaching last year. Green's data and my own campus observations confirm that DURING THE PAST 3 YEARS EDUCATIONAL USES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY HAVE MOVED BEYOND THE "PIONEERS" AND INTO THE "MAINSTREAM" FACULTY!

I believe that faculty and student use of Email is adding a new dimension to academic communication and is the basis for a pedagogical shift of great significance. When students and faculty spend more time exchanging text messages about academic work, education is very likely to improve in accessibility, quality, and quantity.

CONSTANT READJUSTMENT
Things change fast in the computer and telecommunications industries. In the web browser war, product life cycles are being cut down to a few months. New companies emerge quickly and either begin to flourish or die in a year or two. Older companies can undergo major trauma and major restructuring in a few years.

Educational institutions considered as part of a worldwide system have evolved over centuries. One of their characteristics (strengths?) is the ability for some of them to rapidly experiment with new ideas and techniques, enabling others to embrace specific changes in curriculum, pedagogy, and organization more slowly. Fundamental change in institutional structure happens glacially. When so many other aspects of our lives seem subject to almost whimsical change, the underlying structural conservatism of schools, colleges, and universities may be an important cultural asset.

Perhaps five or ten years ago, most faculty members were rightfully confident that within a few days or weeks they could assemble all relevant materials for updating an old course or building a new one. They could identify, find, evaluate, and select from the full range of relevant instructional materials. They knew they could rely on a few key publishers, colleagues, and professional societies to help them find what was needed, and that nothing significant would be overlooked. For most faculty, that is no longer true. There are simply too many things in too many media available from too many sources. The World Wide Web alone is too rich, complex, and disorganized a source of potentially valuable academic contributions.

Even those in industry or academia who are professionally responsible for knowing the applications of technology that might be academically useful within a particular discipline cannot keep up.

Industry provides ample evidence that for the foreseeable future new educationally attractive applications of technology will continue to arrive faster than any individual can keep up with.

Schools, colleges, and universities need new ways of organizing, new practices, and new cultures that enable faculty, students, staff, and administrators to collaborate more effectively and to live comfortably with constant change. <Local TLT Roundtables are designed to help with this process.>

SUPPORT SERVICE CRISIS
Nothing really new here, it's just worse than ever and not limited to education. More individuals, departments, and institutions are making (or requiring or recommending) computers and Internet access more widely, reliably, and comfortably available. Faculty and student expectations for what can and should be done with educational uses of information technology are growing at an accelerating pace. Yet most institutions have not increased the size of support staff.

As faculty expectations rise, the need for technical support increases -- more people are needed who can install, maintain, and provide training in the operations of hardware and software. Since many of the more attractive new uses of technology depend on managing information resources available from the World Wide Web, the need for librarians also increases. Since most faculty members have never tried or observed instructional uses of technology, the need for faculty development professionals also increases. Since many students have little formal training and are quite unsophisticated in the academic uses of technology, the need for student support professionals also increases.

The gap is widening between expectations for what should be done with technology in academia and what can be supported effectively on most campuses. The evidence is abundant and varied. Technical support staff members are over-worked, stressed-out, haggard and harassed -- until they accept jobs in industry at much higher salaries for shorter hours. Many educational institutions have finally managed to budget realistic salaries for such people, and then discover that they still have trouble finding, hiring, and keeping them.

I was told on one campus that the computer support hotline now has an unlisted number.

[Another piece of bad news: It seems that many companies are experiencing a similar shortage of technical support personnel, and a similarly painful gap between expectations for what can be done with technology and the ability to provide the support services needed to meet those expectations. But maybe this shared shortage can be translated into some effective partnerships between industry and education. Isn't this an area where the training expertise and training materials from industry could be helpful to colleges and universities in preparing students? Preparing both students who want technology-related careers and students who seek careers where computers are only tools for achieving other goals?]

Only one cost-effective response to the "Support Service Crisis" has emerged.

STUDENT TECHNOLOGY ASSISTANTS
Most colleges and universities (and many schools) are already using students to help in public-access computer labs, etc. A few institutions have taken this idea and extended it far beyond that valuable service. Students are can be used to recruit, train, supervise, and manage other students. The loss of experienced Student Technology Assistants to part- time jobs in nearby industry (where the students can get much greater part-time salaries) is turned into a recruiting asset. In some cases, alliances with local companies are formed in which the Student Technology Assistant program is subsidized in some ways by the companies in exchange for an orderly supply of trained, experience, part-time technical support student workers. Before they leave for the local jobs, these students perform valuable support services for the educational institution at affordable prices. In some cases, course credit and internships replace salaries for this student work.

All involved with such programs emphasize the need for professional staff and/or faculty supervision, especially during vacation and exam periods. However, the overall cost- benefit analysis looks very good from the institutions' perspective. Perhaps even more important, rather than feeling exploited, many students report that their participation in these programs is invaluable for their careers and provides some of the most educationally valuable experiences of their lives. Most of these programs invite and include the participation of many students who are NOT majoring in computer science or related fields.

<We are working with Phil Long to develop workshops and related materials to help institutions launch these more advanced Student Technology Assistant programs. We're still looking for a few pilot institutions that might want to work with us to develop training materials and services and some form of certification process that would help students provide potential employers with evidence of their skills and experience in such work.>

FOUR SWINGING PENDULUMS
I suppose it isn't limited to higher education, but it seems especially characteristic here... We recognize that the current situation has gotten out of balance. We re-adjust by over-compensating and moving things too far in the opposite direction. The cycle repeats. Endlessly. Here are four current examples.

1. Uniting or Separating Academic and Administrative Computing
   A few years ago, many felt that at least on the administrative side of education they knew what they were doing with computing. After all, the functions weren't very different from those in most other industries. Payroll is payroll. Some real gains in cost-effectiveness were achieved by transferring practices from other industries to educational institutions.

   Academic applications of technology have always been less obviously "productive," and they cannot be copied or adapted from other industries.

   Many institutions began with administrative uses of computing and then tried to add some academic ones -- hoping that the same group of people could support both kinds. As the academic applications became more important, this unified effort became problematic. There could never really be a balancing of priorities when one of the tasks was getting out the payroll punctually and accurately. For this and other reasons, administrative and academic computing were often separated. Given academia's anti-collaborative culture, it is hardly surprising that the academic and administrative computing groups didn't work together very often or very well.

   Enter distributed computing, the Internet, "intranets", etc. and the desirability of having a standardized way of accessing tools and information. Student records have long been part of administrative computing, but recent technological developments on many campuses make that information more POTENTIALLY accessible. Advising students about course selections and navigating academic programs has been an academic function -- a responsibility of faculty and student services professionals. It now seems obvious that faculty and students would want to have easy access through "the network" to student information for such purposes. Now we have the basis for integrating academic and administrative computing and related activities. [We also have the basis for a new set of concerns about privacy, confidentiality, and data integrity.]

2. Uniting or Separating the Library and Computing (and Faculty Development?)
   As the Web and telecommunications become important academic tools, it seems that information management becomes a central task for those using information technology in education (and elsewhere!). Librarians have a long and rich tradition of developing skills, providing services, and helping others learn how to manage information resources. Shouldn't computing activities be brought under the library umbrella?

   Meanwhile, libraries are becoming more dependent on telecommunications and computing for all their work, for managing all their resources, and for replacing [some] books with electronic services. Many librarians' training and experience was not focused on technology. Many librarians are not temperamentally suited to deal with the rapidly changing nature of computers and telecommunications services. Many librarians chose their careers because they value the orderly preservation of knowledge -- not the excitement of the speed of calculations or of being the first person to try a new tool. Shouldn't libraries be brought under the computing umbrella?

   There is a fascinating history of universities' that have merged library and computing (and telecommunications?) services for a few years and then separated them again. Usually, too little attention was paid to the cultural and lifestyle differences between those who select careers as librarians and those who end up in careers as "technologists" (there really isn't even a title as comparably well-defined as "librarian"). [Further, there is the major problem of finding an individual who is capable of being a credible and effective leader for both kinds of professionals. See below.]

   As the use of computing, video, and telecommunications become more important for teaching and learning throughout the curriculum, more faculty need help in re-thinking how they organize their courses, how they teach, and how they help students learn. Consequently, faculty development professionals (again, no widely accepted title like "librarian" exists) become more important. "Centers for Teaching Excellence" and "Centers for Teaching and Learning" are becoming somewhat more common. Some of these centers are usefully linking the resources and skills of libraries, librarians, computing centers, technology professionals, and faculty development professionals. [See especially the work of Philip Tompkins at IUPUI.] I suppose these combinations also raise the possibility that the library and computing services should be put "under" a leader in faculty development; however, I have not heard of that happening yet. Perhaps this pendulum can't swing in a third direction!.

3. Centralizing or Decentralizing Technology Support Services
   The model for providing technical support services often seems to reflect the dominant "architecture" for computing resources. Until the 1980s that model was a big machine to which people would travel to do their computing. Support services had to live in and near the central machine. Then we had "personal" computers; it appeared that support services could be anywhere, and that any department could go its own way and hire and manage its own technical staff (this often didn't work out in practice as happily as the theory suggested). Now we have networked computers and telecommunications in which some functions run primarily on local machines while other run primarily on a "central" machine ("server") or elsewhere on the Internet.

   The current trend -- at institutions large enough and wealthy enough to support this pattern -- is to have a mixture of centralized and decentralized services. Some technical support services are offered from a centralized organization (e.g., training on the basic uses of utility applications; establishing some institution-wide standards for operating system and software selection). Other support services are provided within departments or divisions (e.g., assigning a support person to the English dept. or to the engineering school).

   The competing forces are the desirability and cost- effectiveness of uniformity and standards vs. the need for combinations of software, hardware, and teaching approaches that may be idiosyncratic to a particular department or course. If the institution can afford and find someone to lead and coordinate both centralized and decentralized services, such combinations may be optimal. But who are these leaders and coordinators, what are their characteristics, and where can they be found?

4. Creating or Demoting a Chief Information Officer ("Computing Czar")
   As I've described above, many college and university presidents find themselves faced with an array of puzzling decisions about information technology. It would be comforting to be able to create a new organizational structure that could handle those decisions, and to find a person who could shape and lead that structure. As the role of technology seems to become more central and significant to the institution -- especially to the curriculum, it seems reasonable to create a position analogous to that of the Chief Academic Officer (CAO) or the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). So, many institutions [how many?] have brought together some of the groups mentioned above (computing, telecommunications, library, media, ...) and appointed someone as the CIO -- Chief Information Officer. The CIO is expected to oversee those functions and to participate as a peer with the CAO, CFO, and others as part of the leadership team for the institution.

   Unfortunately, it is not yet clear which functions really belong under the CIO, nor is it clear what sort of experience and training such a person needs. There is no graduate program well-designed and widely respected as preparing such individuals. At first glance it seems that some combination of computer science, library science, and an MBA would be ideal -- along with a lot of practical experience as an academic administrator. Doesn't this person also need some direct knowledge of the rapidly changing technology industry and new products and services emerging from it? And what about credibility with the faculty? Perhaps we should add teaching experience and an "earned doctorate" to the qualifications as well.

   I don't know anyone with all these qualifications. Instead, mere mortals are hired to be CIOs and their lack of the full complement of skills and preparation described above may have painful consequences. I'm beginning to hear reports that at some institutions the CIO position was created and filled at the vice presidential level for a few years, then allowed to "sink" to become something like an associate vice president or associate provost for information technology or academic technology. The president discovered that the person acting as CIO couldn't keep up with the rapidly shifting responsibilities within the "information" and "technology" area and simultaneously contribute as a peer with the other vice presidents and provost in deliberations requiring an institution-wide perspective.

   I imagine this problematic situation will improve as more administrators spend some time earlier in their careers gaining some experience within one or more of the information technology fields on a campus. Perhaps professional graduate level training will also be offered to prepare and certify CIOs. Finally, as institutions develop more stable overall structures for coping with the constant change associated with increasing reliance on academic uses of technology, the role of CIO will become more stable and feasible -- or be eliminated. <A local TLT Roundtable can foster the supporting communication and collaboration needed to make the CIO's job more feasible, as long as the CIO doesn't see the Roundtable as a threat.>

DISTANCE EDUCATION
Finally, I need to at least touch on "distance education" -- the single hottest technology-related issue on most post- secondary campuses for the last couple of years. Dealing thoroughly with distance education is well beyond the scope of this document. <However, Steve Ehrmann and some colleagues have been developing a workshop and related materials/services on this topic.>

Fortunately, the number of academic leaders who unrealistically see "distance education" as a quick fix for their growing financial problems is dwindling. We are clearly past the time when any one institution can expect a big financial gain from a rapid entry into the market for students who want courses available primarily through some form of electronic telecommunications. Too many colleges, universities, and commercial organizations have already begun competing for these students. The new "virtual universities" are just beginning to emerge and may provide new ways of promoting, delivering, assessing, and giving credit for courses offered by many colleges and universities.

A couple of caveats: Always ask what someone means when he or she begins talking about "distance education"; for some institutions this refers to two-way interactive video, while on others it means that faculty members drive to remote sites once or twice a week. When someone says that his/her institution is already doing some distance education, ask

1. What's the average number of students per site per course? and
2. What's the geographical area served? Don't believe anyone who says that teaching and learning via video, audio, and Internet is just like traditional classroom teaching/learning. It requires more organization, preparation, and different faculty skills. It requires more self-discipline and independence of the students.

Finally, notice that a lot of "accidental distance education" is now underway on the Web. As institutions make it easy for faculty to put information on the Web and for students to get information from the Web, both begin to do so more frequently. When a faculty member simply puts a syllabus and some readings or other information on the Web for students in a single course, millions of others immediately have access to that material. Fortunately (or unfortunately!) most of those millions will never notice or care... but they could.

Some faculty are intentionally engaging other people via the Internet in their courses. Other learners and other faculty might begin to participate via the Web. The course can be substantially enriched by what these additional participants contribute. But who is responsible for the quality of such participation? Who will "certify" or give credit? Who will pay tuition -- to whom? And what is the student/faculty ratio?

I look forward to the day when it will make no sense to talk about "distance education" because ALL education will include telecommunications options. Teachers and learners will make informed choices and assemble combinations of face-to-face meetings, telecommunications, independent work using digital and print materials, etc. -- depending on the needs and abilities of all those participating. Different ways of teaching and different ways of learning will be fitted together with different mixtures of instructional materials and media to serve the unique abilities and needs of each unique group of teachers and learners. Retired faculty, alumni, adjuncts, young students, and older students will find ways of teaching and learning together. "Lifelong Teaching and Lifelong Learning" will be a description of what we do, no longer just a "Vision Worth Working Toward." But that's another story...

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