Positioning IT as a strategic partner on campus — from Academic Impressions, May 27, 2010

At a time when institutions of higher education are increasingly looking for technological solutions to strategic challenges, recent downgrades in the rank of the chief information officer at institutions such as MIT and the University of Chicago has sparked alarm in some quarters and a series of debates over whether the CIO may start to disappear from university cabinets at other institutions.

While there isn’t any conclusive data to suggest that the CIO role is shrinking, the concerns over that possibility do serve to direct increased attention to one of IT’s pressing challenges: that is, how to position the CIO, and the broader IT organization, as a strategic partner within the institution.

From DSC:

I can not stress this strongly enough:

  • IT must be empowered with solid, strong seats at the top decision-making tables throughout higher ed.
  • For those institutions who allow their CIO’s to have a seat at the table — and who put visionary, tech-savvy, experienced, competent leadership in such positions — they will thrive (assuming that the culture of their organizations can withstand the change that’s becoming necessary to play in this game).
  • For those institutions who devalue the role of IT and the CIO…such organizations will continue down the road of cost cutting and their enrollments will continue to decline.
  • I’ll say it again, the status quo must go; and there are few who understand the need to change as much as someone within or (recently) from the tech side of the house. I say this because even those who are in tech struggle to keep up with the pace of technological change these days — so someone outside of the tech area will have an even tougher time keeping up, understanding the trends at hand/play, understanding the threats and potential benefits of various technologies — and thus being able to make the appropriate strategic decisions.
  • Technology will continue to have a highly-disruptive effect on the world of higher education — so one had better have some leadership on board the board that understands and can anticipate such disruption and make plans to respond to as many different scenarios of disruption as possible.
  • (Think Blockbuster here, as to an example of an organization who failed to properly appreciate/value technology and it’s disruptive impact enough.)
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Video: Future of Higher Education Conference at IE University

U of California resuscitates the Master Plan — from huffingtonpost.com by Anya Kamenetz

Yesterday the University of California made a groundbreaking announcement that has the potential to break the tuition cost crisis and finally deliver the crucial benefits of higher education to millions of Americans and to tens of millions who demand it and deserve it around the world. They are putting $5 to $6 million into a pilot project to create online versions of courses with an eye toward eventually creating completely online degree programs.

More than one in four US college students already take at least one online class. So why is this an important announcement?

Because a public university system is declaring that it will innovate its way out of recession, and even more importantly, that it will not cede the banner of innovation to the for-profit sector that is encroaching more and more on public higher education’s territory (emphasis DSC).

And it’s not just any public university system that’s doing this, but the largest public university system in the country and the global template for mass higher education for over fifty years. Clark Kerr’s Master Plan in 1960 introduced the idea that higher education would be a massive, state-run, open and democratic, publicly accessible resource for all.

Also see:

U. of California Considers Online Classes, or Even Degrees — from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Josh Keller and Marc Parry
Proposal for virtual courses challenges beliefs about what an elite university is—and isn’t

(Oakland, Calif.) Online education is booming, but not at elite universities—at least not when it comes to courses for credit.

Leaders at the University of California want to break that mold. This fall they hope to put $5-million to $6-million into a pilot project that could clear the way for the system to offer online undergraduate degrees and push distance learning further into the mainstream.

The vision is UC’s most ambitious—and controversial—effort to reshape itself after cuts in public financial support have left the esteemed system in crisis (emphasis DSC).

Supporters of the plan believe online degrees will make money, expand the number of California students who can enroll, and re-establish the system’s reputation as an innovator.

“Somebody is going to figure out how to deliver online education for credit and for degrees in the quality sector—i.e., in the elite sector,” said Christopher Edley Jr., dean at Berkeley’s law school and the plan’s most prominent advocate. “I think it ought to be us—not MIT, not Columbia, not Caltech, certainly not Stanford.”

Albion College’s Board makes controversial cut to faculty — from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Peter Schmidt

The Albion College Board of Trustees has agreed to reduce its faculty by the equivalent of 15 full-time positions, despite objections from the American Association of University Professors over how the college has handled the move.

From DSC:
Unless we innovate, be creative, and provide a variety of pricing models/alternatives in the future, I’ll bet we’ll continue to see the cutting block coming out in many institutions of higher education.

Albion College’s Board makes controversial cut to faculty — from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Peter Schmidt

10 innovative digital media & learning projects win $1.7M — from DMLcentral.net

The results of the MacArthur Foundation’s 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition are in, and the 10 winning projects can’t help but to inspire anyone even remotely interested in understanding the potential of the Internet and digital technology to transform learning and knowledge creation.

From DSC:
The article provides a link to:

DML 2010 Learning Labs winning applications

GVSU approves charter for web-intensive K-12 school

MacLearning.org and Apple -- AcademiX 2010

Learning in an open-access world.
Join colleagues from across the country in exploring how open access is transforming learning in higher education. Apple and MacLearning.org invite you to AcademiX 2010 for a look at open access, the new teaching methods that are evolving with it, and the Apple technologies that help make it all simple. Six 20-minute talks will expose you to successful approaches, and jump-start a provocative conversation between participants and presenters.

You’ll see how leading educators are finding it easy to produce, distribute, and access academic content using Apple products and open standards. You’ll also learn how students are using Apple tools outside of the traditional lecture environment for research, collaboration, and problem solving.

Fees
The AcademiX 2010 conference is offered free of charge.

One Event, Multiple Ways to Participate
The presentations will take place simultaneously at MIT and Northwestern University, with audiences at more than a dozen other campuses joining in a live video conference. An open microphone will be available at each campus so the presenters and audiences can hear your questions or ideas. If you’d like to attend one of the in-person events, you can register at this site.

If you can’t attend in person, please register on this page to watch the live webcast and interact online with the presenters and your peers.

An integral part of AcademiX 2010 is the Conference Connect online conference system. The ConferenceConnect system is available to all AcademiX 2010 participants, whether attending at an in-person event or via the web. ConferenceConnect will provide a detailed multi-day agenda, a participant directory, participant response surveys, session-based back channel chat rooms, online evaluations, local area information, open resource links and much more. The software’s “mobile learning space” is complementary to the AcademiX conference, and is used before, during, and after the conference.

Presentations
Confirmed topics and speakers for the AcademiX 2010 conference include:

This is How We Think: Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift
Paul Hammond, Ph.D. Director of Digital Initiatives, Dept. of English, Rutgers University
Richard Miller, Ph.D. Executive Director, Plangere Writing Center, Rutgers University

“This is How We Think” continues the line of thinking begun in Miller and Hammond’s YouTube piece, “This is How We Dream.” In a world where information abounds, where reading and research have moved from the library to the laptop, and where the act of learning itself is now making its way out of the shadows into the public eye, how must the work of education change? In this collaborative presentation, Professors Miller and Hammond will discuss their efforts to invent new media teaching practices that encourage students to engage with the most pressing problems of our time.

Commons-Based Licensing and Scholarship: The Next Layer of the Network
John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons

Knowledge products have been generated as text for hundreds of years, and scientific and scholarly results have been locked into text-based technology since the mid 1660’s. But journal articles are a compressed version of what happened in the research. The form and function of a journal article was settled long before we could effortlessly transmit data, or incrementally store and edit vast amounts of text, or store and forward research tools in repositories. There is no reason, other than technical lock-in by the printing press, why we should think of the article as a natural unit of knowledge transmission in science. Researchers and teachers make data, text, research tools, inventions, pictures, sounds, videos, and more. But almost none of them et measured other than the article. We now have the capacity to measure the quality of a scientist across multiple dimensions, not just the article. This talk will examine the increasing importance of disaggregated, multivariate knowledge in scholarly communications, and the impacts both good and bad of the coming shift away from the journal as the core form of knowledge transmission.

Innovation and Open Access in Scholarly Journal Publishing
Jason Baird Jackson, Ph.D. Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Dept Chair, Indiana University

Drawing upon wider lessons learned while editing a toll access journal published by a scholarly society and later establishing an open access journal published in partnership with a research university library, I will describe a range of motivations underpinning the movement for building an open access scholarly communication system. Beyond characterizing the many “whys” of the open access movement, I will offer a picture of where open access journal publishing (as distinct from open access repository use) is now and where it appears to be going. Themes include the opening up of legacy journal content, the circumstances of scholarly societies as publishers, the role of libraries as publishers, author’s rights questions, tenure and promotion issues, and the impact of open access publishing for students, communities of concern, and for the careers of individual scholars.

New channels for learning: podcasting opportunities for a distance university
Ben Hawkridge, iTunes U Project Officer, Open University, UK

The Open University is a UK based international distance institution with around 200,000 students, many actively learning in online channels. The University produces rich media courses, via a structured authoring process, in which student interactions (with media; with others; and with teachers) are ‘designed in’ from scratch. In this talk I will focus on one specific new channel opportunity – institutional podcasting, and in particular the experience of the Open University on iTunes U. Our ‘best practice sharing’ project STEEPLE shows how RSS provides a powerful technical key to managing these varied new channels. However, real success lies in creating value in these channels that matches up with the new needs of the web 2.0 student!

Education for a Mobile Generation
Kurt Squire, Assoc. Professor, Edu Comm & Tech, Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Assoc Dir. of Edu Research and Development, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery

For years, educators struggled with how to wire classrooms for the Internet. With the arrival of mobile media devices, soon every student will come to school with a broadband enabled, multimedia device in their pocket. How do we design educational experiences in an era in which we must assume that students can — and will — access whatever information and social network they want at a moments notice? This presentation describes the forms of participation enabled by such devices, how youth are using mobile devices such as iPhones to accelerate learning, and what a cutting-edge curriculum that leverages such devices looks like. These new approaches not only offer, but require educators to break down the walls of the classroom.

The Digital Natives Are Getting Restless: the Student Voice of the Open Access Movement
Nick Shockey, Director, Right to Research Coalition, Director of Student Advocacy, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

Students today are digital natives. We’ve grown up in a world of unfettered access to digital information, instant gratification in the best possible sense. Yet when we need access to scholarly journals, we’re suddenly locked out. Though our education literally depends on them, we’re often cut off from journals crucial to our research, our papers, and our understanding of both details and the larger picture. However, students, in addition to numerous other stakeholders, are quickly realizing that access barriers to journals are as unnecessary as they are harmful. We’re working to reform the current academic publishing system into one that is open and equitably serves the interests of all who depend on it, not just those who can afford the often high cost of access.

Who Should Attend?
AcademiX 2010 is offered to individuals engaged in the production, distribution, and use of scholarly communications who are either employed by, or attend, institutions of Higher Education. The intended audiences are faculty, administrators, instructional technologists, developers, librarians and students.

See:

Press Release: CK-12, Leading Non-Profit Provider of Digital Textbooks to Schools, Makes the Grade with California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative — eSchoolNews.com

CK-12 FlexBooks:

CK-12's flexbooks

CK Foundation

ck12.org

Key Benefits

Access to free textbooks
High quality educational content created by educators
Content customized to reflect “today” and the different needs of students
Quality ensured by CK-12’s Community of Educational Practitioners
Increased pedagogic choice for all teachers, aligned to state standards as well as developmentally correct content
Supported by publishing tools that facilitate quick and easy content creation and distribution
Collaborative learning via a community where authors, teachers, and students create, access, share, rate, recommend, and publish

Disappearing Departments — from InsideHigherEd.com

Kean University department chairs have spent a year on the endangered species list, and now they appear headed for all-but-certain extinction.

A rough plan to eliminate chairs took shape last May amid heavy protest, and administrators now have a draft proposal they say could be carried out as early as July. The plan, which would replace departments with schools headed by presidentially-appointed “executive directors,” has been met with renewed furor from faculty, who view it as a power grab that leaves the future of many disciplines uncertain. The university has already moved to eliminate such departments as philosophy and social work, but this plan would kill even large departments like English and biology, dividing faculty members into new organizational structures they played no role in creating.

“The university has become a battlefield, [where administrators] do as they see fit, when they see fit without any academic justification,” said Bryan Lees, a chemistry professor (emphasis DSC).

From DSC:
And what would you do if you were in the administration’s position? Funds are running short…budgets are tightening big time…and we’re getting down to the bone in many institutions of higher education (if you doubt this, check out one of Ray Schroeder’s blogs).

Like it or not, institutions of higher education are businesses — most often with excellent, noble goals that better our societies around the world. But they are businesses; and, like so many other types of organizations out there, it comes down to funding and sound business models.

To survive and thrive today, we all must come to the table to help initiate change where it is necessary to do so. Let’s be proactive, and creative in our thinking — being willing to make changes — before it’s too late. If we do not, administration may have no choice (in many situations out there) but to make some tough decisions and you and I might find ourselves on the short end of the stick. The ax may have to come out.

Did we sit back and watch this situation unfold? What steps did we take to stop this bubble from getting any bigger? Regardless…the key question now is:

How can we survive and thrive during this period of change?

  1. To me, the first and foremost answer to that question is that we become willing to change.
  2. Secondly, we realize that we are on the same team; it should not be administration vs. everyone else.
  3. We be creative and responsive in our thinking. Let’s not get broadsided. Keep an eye on the trends out there and be responsive to them.
  4. Develop new types of cross-disciplinary degrees, especially ones that allow for students to be creative, and to identify and follow their passions.
  5. Then see my other suggestions at: http://danielschristian.com/



The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer) — by Seth Godin

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I’m afraid that’s about to crash and burn. Here’s how I’m looking at it…

From DSC:
Seth’s perspectives on this are similar to what I’ve been saying — and warning would happen — for years now.

My take on the future of higher education is that someone will get it right and will be able to offer team-created and delivered content 24 x 7 x 365 that is mind-blowing by today’s standards and will be able to package and deliver that content and learning experience at discounts of 50%+ off of today’s prices. Yeah, yeah, yeah I hear ya say. Right Daniel…I’ve heard it all before.. your talk about disruption…about technology, etc. etc. etc.

You might have heard it, but you haven’t seen it in higher ed……....yet! My take on this is that you will see this happen. Massive change. The great commoditization of higher education as we know it today. The bubble is about to burst.

After all, the same publishers are selling the same textbooks to many institutions of higher education. In fact, I’m surprised that some publisher hasn’t yet taken a right turn and started offering degrees.They have access to subject matter experts (SME’s), teams of talented instructional designers, programmers, project managers, interface designers, legal/copyright experts, etc.  What they lack is accreditation.

More and more I think societies will become increasingly interested in what you can DO and not where you attended school. Sure, there will still be those companies who want to hire only from ____ , ____, or _____; but that type of hiring perspective may not hold up if that organization is being outperformed by others. Also, who knows if corporations are even going to be around in 20 years. It’s turning into a situation where everyone is their own brand, their own company. Project teams come together, do the project, and then disband.

If students are paying a premium today, they should be paying that premium to go to an institution of higher education that:

  • Has excellent faculty members — knowledgeable, passionate teachers who know their material cold and know how to teach that material; they are adaptable and are open to changing pedagogy and the use of various kinds of technologies
  • Emphasizes and rewards teachingnot necessarily research
  • Provides small class sizes and/or the ability to meet frequently with their professors (not a TA, not a grad student, and not a faculty member who might be a skilled researcher but who doesn’t know how to teach very well)

The thing all of us in higher ed need to be on guard about and the question we need to constantly be asking ourselves is, “How do we keep from becoming a commodity? What value do we bring to the table? Why should someone pay X when they are about to be able to pay 0.25 X elsewhere?”

Future of Education (video)

Future of Education (video) -- from the Higher Education Management Group

…and ends with, “Are you?”

Managing Higher Education Technology: An Interview with Dr. Tony Bates — from the Higher Education Management Group

However, how that mission is delivered must and will change, if universities and colleges are to survive (or rather, if independent, publicly funded educational institutions are to survive). In particular, we have to move away from the idea of the classroom as the default model for teaching and learning, to looking it as just one of many tools we have for teaching and learning. If over half the population needs not only post-secondary education, but also ongoing lifelong learning, and the main means of communication are technological, we cannot effectively provide higher education in a factory-like structure organized like a factory, with everyone at the same place at the same time. So it is in the delivery and organization of teaching and learning where fundamental change is needed.

Managing Higher Education Technology: An Interview with Dr. Tony Bates

About the Reinventing Higher Education Conference
A conference organized by IE University, Segovia (Spain), 4th May 2010.

The field of Higher Education is experiencing one of the most fascinating and challenging transformations since the foundation of the first universities eight centuries ago (emphasis here and below by DSC):

New actors are entering and are supplementing the traditional role of the State and other grand institutions in setting the agenda of education institutions.

New technologies are reshaping the way knowledge is generated and distributed, including the learning methodologies, the forms of delivery and even the role of professors.

A new profile of students is entering higher education. The web generation brings new skills and attitudes into class. At the same time, continuous education is becoming a fast-growing segment for many universities.

The internationalization of education stakeholders and cross-border mobility are key features of the new higher education environment.

Transnational accreditation and ranking systems may play key role in constructing and signaling the quality of the diverse institutions

The governance and funding of higher education centers will vary and universities and governments may seek alternative sources of income.

Universities may become catalysts of innovation and more accountable to society in a number of ways: how research is applied in development and innovation, the connections between university departments and companies as well as the relevance of education for graduates’ careers.

  

This second graphic is a very similar design as my cover/entry graphic — a picture of a learning ecosystem.

  

  

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