Command, Control, and Curriculum

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Opinion

Command, Control, and Curriculum

8/21/2003

By Kenneth C. Green

Even as institutions spend increasingly difficult dollars to license course management systems, upgrade labs, install wireless networks, provide faculty training and support, and create presentation classrooms, campus and conference conversations suggest that many senior officials feel their institution is not progressing: “Maybe a third or 40 percent, maybe even half of our faculty are doing something with technology in their courses. But we seem stuck, as the numbers have not been rising the past two-to-three years.”

Is this simply a matter of biblical metaphors? An old joke in the software industry notes that God could create the world in seven days because there were no legacy systems or legacy users. Clearly we’ve spent far more than seven years (and some multiple of $7 billion) to build the IT infrastructure for American colleges and universities.

Or d'es the too-slow migration of IT into the syllabus reflect the Marx Brothers’ theory of academic culture? At his inauguration as president of Huxley College in the 1932 movie Horsefeathers, Groucho Marx, as Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, proclaims in song and dance that “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”
Admittedly, these are (comic) extremes in the serious conversation about technology and instructional integration. But the questions linger: why, after so much time, effort, and money, is there still much to be done? Why do many faculty continue to avoid technology as an instructional resource?

The core infrastructure is in place; the student interest (read expectation) is there. But what seems missing for many faculty is a compelling sense that technology makes a difference in student learning and educational outcomes. Too, given that many students (aged 18-68) may have better IT skills than their professors, there is also the professorial concern about “How do I do this—use this technology stuff—without looking foolish in front of my students?”

Ah, it would all be so simple if college presidents and provosts had the power and authority of generals: send the troops (faculty) to training, give them the resources, and set hard deadlines for implementation.
Yet as Eisenhower learned from his provost, faculty are the university. The atoms of academic organizations are individual professors who operate as free agents rather than as employees of the university.

In the closing chapter of War and Peace, Tolstoy reminds us, “For a command to be carried out to the letter, it has to be a command actually capable of fulfillment.” From “user-friendly DOS” to the Web and beyond, an important lesson of the past two decades has been that infrastructure, not just technology, fosters adaptation and innovation. More than just “Build it and they will come,” curricular deployment and technology integration also depend on sustained support and some sustained support and some significant nurturing to attain “fulfillment,”to experience broader instructional intergration.

Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at The Claremont Graduate University, is the founding director of The Campus Computing Project, a comprehensive, continuing study of the role of information technology at higher education institutions in the United States (www.campuscomputing.net).
View more articles by Kenneth Green.