If you are looking for the slides from my presentation at EduTECH2015 they are available here. The full video of this presentation will be available again soon.
Course Design First
Before we focus too much on technology I’d like to tell a story. In the late 90's I completed a 100% online master’s degree that won an award for the best program in its discipline in the world. It was delivered on the now antiquated Web CT system, and it was the most effective, efficient and enjoyable learning experience I’ve ever had, and far superior to my face to face undergrad degree and far superior to most of the online courses I see even today, simply through thoughtful course design. It was very engaging and interactive, exposing me to discussions with students all over the world, all with decade old off-the-shelf technology. So before we invest too much in “innovation”, perhaps we can invest in instructor support and training to use the tools already available.
Strategy and Governance
It makes a difference if you know where you’re going. The decisions you make on technologies will be different if you have a pure online strategy versus an enhanced classroom strategy. Encourage leadership to decide and articulate their strategy. Education is on IT time now. Decisions and restructures can’t take years any more.
Add Missing Mature Technologies
Organisations don’t need to take risks with bleeding edge ideas any more when there is so much value in simply catching up with the many mature technologies available. While there is always a place for bespoke development, vendors have woken up to the fact that higher education is a large global market ripe for change in a way that better leverages technology for genuine benefit. The biggest issue by far is that organisations have been very slow to leverage what is available. Its natural to worry about where its all going, which emerging technology to we need to embrace, but put I it to you that any organisation that consistently and fully leverages the available mature technologies will be a stand-out leader. By contrast if you asked most organisations for a list of proven effective learning technologies they would not have one because it requires governance and resources to actively scan and evaluate the market. Organisations need only educate themselves about what is already available and has already been successfully used around the world, with a focus on proven mature capabilities.
Focus on Mature technologies - not fake innovations
When are looking for technologies adopt be careful to filter out 'innovations' that people are playing with and spruiking for marketing or research gain. Institutions and researchers can be loath to admit their innovation is not working out or was ill conceived. Many of these tools are not ready and suitable for broad adoption and may ultimately fail. In the new global market, for nearly any new technology idea you can think of, someone else has tried it before. Its always perplexed me that literature reviews are a standard part of research papers, but market reviews are allowed to be completely inadequate for nearly all internally funded development proposals. One need only search using “<idea> site:.edu”and find out what others have done and learn from that first. Of course some experimentation is ok but not at the expense of the ‘bread and butter' required for broad institutional progress. Be careful to look at the roadmap of new features planed from your existing primary vendors. I can give many examples of where 'innovation' efforts absorbed large amounts of time and resources before being completely overtaken by a free features added to existing products. A consequential lesson from that is to hurry up and make fuller use of the tools that you have, because the dream tools you want are probably coming faster than you can cope with. Furthermore , innovations are often competing with multinationals so it might be better to collaborate. If you truly believe you have an idea worth writing bespoke code for, make sure the cost does not outweigh the likely short lifespan. If you want to take it to the world and give it a chance of survival, open-source it or build it as SAS with open standard integrations (e.g. LTI for LMSs).The bottom line... if you put your innovation on the market and its not lapped up.... think twice about inflicting it broadly at home because it will take as much work to unravel as it took to build and deploy. We spend far too much time on deploying and unravelling bespoke failures, which arguably is causing institutions to fall behind.
Studies show that neglecting broad technology adoption in favour of innovation, risks significant productivity losses by as much as 45% (Comin, 2012). Its tempting to chase that high profile 'innovative' edge, but excessive focus on innovation steals scarce resources from much higher value mature initiatives, and when the innovation fails it gives technology a bad reputation, crippling adoption of useful ideas. Catching up with ‘the present’ is enough to be a leader. When you dig below the surface of many organisations touting innovations it turns out to be lipstick on their failure to maintain broad pace. So some experimentation with unproven technology is ok but not at the expense of mature technologies. A mature technology is one that past the hype hump on Gartner’s hype cycle. So its proven to return benefits that outweigh its cost, at at least multiple institutions.
Realise Benefits
Realising benefits is a bigger opportunity than innovation because most organisations have not done it very well. Benefits realisation is therefore a great way to get ahead of other organisations. Once you have all your missing mature technologies on board, find out how many people are actually using the technologies. Find out how many people even know about the functionality available to them. You might be surprised. Apply change management principles to help staff find out about and appropriately adopt the technology you have. Catalogue the capabilities you have; survey the staff to find out how many instructors know; demonstrate the capabilities at many staff meetings; survey to find out how many are interesting in training; provide the training and design support; monitor adoption rates. Make a small amount of adoption compulsory (because students want and need a consistent predictable minimum) and then let the rest of the adoption be voluntary, letting the staff make professional judgements. Trust that if they are aware of it and it makes sense they will use it.
Its tempting to get that high profile innovative edge, but really its sub-optimising when most Universities have failed to leverage all the mature learning technologies available like lecture recording by default, online marking, active learning tools etc. Catching up with ‘the present’ is enough to be a leader in a world obsessed with innovation and neglectful of genuine pervasive change support. Chasing the latest shiny thing at the expense of mature technologies sub optimizes limited resources. Structured experimentation is important, but after mature technology implementation and benefits realisation is done right.
Vanilla is Fastest
Vanilla implementations allow you to maintain a faster pace over time. Custom developments and customisations give a short term advantage but slow down upgrades that deliver the most value. Over time your core system vendors will deliver more functionality faster than you can develop because they have greater economies of scale. You might get a six month jump on your vendors with bespoke projects but more often your little dev-team will get left behind and run out of money. With increasing globalisation and more than ten thousand clients, the education market is very attractive to vendors so expect it to be very well serviced in the near future. There is little little value in writing custom applications unless you plan to commercialise and compete or sell off. What ever you imagine you need will land in your lap soon enough, and meanwhile your time is more effectively spent making better use of what is already out there. Yes you might have brilliant coders on campus and there is a place for that but: have they properly scanned for existing or upcoming solutions; do they have proven experience writing enterprise class usable systems; are they aware of the big picture corporate issues or just solving 1% issues (30 courses instead of 3000); will this end up another millstone around your corporate neck; does supporting research and innovation really outweigh the need to truly catch up with technology enhance teaching possibilities by funding staff training and course design support?
Consider Off The Shelf (OTS) systems instead of bespoke development. OTS functionality will overtake bespoke, so over time it can be better to spend precious resources leveraging mature vanilla technology than building and then decommissioning bespoke systems. There is a 45% productivity benefit for broad adoption and only 22% for innovation. Organisations that innovate after they have fully leveraged mature technologies will stay father ahead, and be faster overall. Some customisations are necessary and justifiable, but don’t let them slow down the pace of core system upgrades which deliver the most new capabilities.
Don’t be fooled into believing OTS technology can’t do the bulk of the work required. I completed a fully online masters degree on the ancient WebCT platform more than 10 years ago and the program won an international award for the best program in its field, online or face-to-face. Technologies were already good enough for delivery of world class degrees in 2005, so don’t be listening to people who say we need better technology to deliver high quality course design. In the words of one of my university's most awarded instructors “I hear lecturers listing off things they say you can’t do in <our LMS> and for every one they mention I know how it can be done. They just don’t know how to use it”. Communication, training, design support, leadership, vision and guidelines for aspiration are much more likely the missing ingredients, not technology.
.. only then actively scan for and test immature technologies
After you have added all the missing mature technologies, actively scan for and maintain high levels of awareness of new technologies. Actively test new ideas in your environment. Try a portfolio of experiments so you can re-deploy scarce resources from failed ideas into the most promising ideas.
... and manage your experiments as experiments... not deployments
Manage immature technologies as experiments, not deployments, or they will deplete your precious resources when they fail. Don’t make promises. Don’t over commit. Collect feedback and have an open mind. Have a clear stage gate at the end to review and kill or explore further. Treat ANY new technology (even mature ones) as experiments for your environment initially. Openly acknowledge they are experiments and don’t give them higher priority than fully leveraging the bread and butter mature technologies.
Prioritise by Value
Prioritise solutions that offer widest enterprise value. Something that helps 30 courses might sound important but that might only be 1% of your course base. If you can’t fund 100 equal projects, consider something with broader value. Leave minority projects to the schools or marketing teams. If you deliver a series of niche projects the broader organisation will eventually question the value being added. Deliver broad value and show you deliver broad value. Questions might include: Does it genuinely improve efficiency or improve learning outcomes? Is this what staff at your university actually say they want (else run a pilot)? How many courses will it benefit?
Be Evidence Based - Data Driven
Show you are evidence based by not making decisions based on a few anecdotes. Run lots of surveys to find out what the instructors and leaders really think of your services, and what they really want. Use that data to make and show improvements and progress. Defeat anecdotes with active data collection, or your valuable work will be vulnerable to very poorly informed opinions.
Leverage BYOD
To move faster, leverage the combination of software and BYOD. Minimise dependence on hardware in learning spaces. Software technology develops faster and is faster to deploy than hardware, so minimise use of hardware in learning spaces else you are stuck with embarrassing out-of-date hardware that no one knows how to use and frankly is a waste of $. Lab and library desktops are a student equity problem, because poor students can’t take desktops to class. Pay attention to the bread and butter. Do you have enough power points to support BYOD in your lecture theatres? Flat learning spaces might be the future, but meanwhile you can use collaborative and active learning software to achieve the same thing much faster at much lower cost, than very expensive refurbishments.
Think about Cloud Services?
Software as a Service (SAS) should theoretically be updated more quickly as we move into the future. Its not always a clear cut decision though so take it on case by case basis and consider the impact on integrations and customisations.
Thoughts?
Simon Collyer
References
Comin, D., & Mestieri, M. (2010). The Intensive Margin of Technology Adoption HBS Working Paper 11-026.
Comin, D., & Hobijn, B. (2012). How early adoption has increased wealth—until now. Harvard Business Review, 90(3), 34-35.
Ertmer, P. A. (2005). Teacher pedagogical beliefs: The final frontier in our quest for technology integration. Educational Technology, Research and Development 53(4). 25-39.
JISC. (2008). Exploring tangible benefits of e-learning: Does investment yield interest? Newcastle, UK: Northumbria University. Retrieved from http://sitecore.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bptangiblebenefitsv1.pdf
U. S. Department of Education. (2010). Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. Retrieved from: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
Young, I. (2014). Imagining an Australia built on the brilliance of our people, National Press Club. Retrieved from: https://go8.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/article/national_press_club_speech_-_ian_young_pdf_version.pdf
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