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Preserving Academic Independence Through Cost-Saving Collaboration
2/27/2004
Independence is one of academe’s time-honored ideals. Universities encourage
faculty to think independently with compelling ideas, however controversial
and regardless of any perceived institutional points of view.
Independence can also be expensive when it comes to the technology tools that put teaching and learning online. If every department and school in a university or every college in a university system uses its own learning management infrastructure, it spells trouble for tuition-paying students and taxpayers. Such independence means separate contracts, overhead, and time investments for licensing, training, content development, implementation, and technical support.
Higher education needs a way to protect academic independence, yet eliminate wasteful redundancies in technology spending. Institutions need learning management platforms that can support multiple educational entities in a central installation, giving each department—or school within a university system—a unique look and feel. Learning management platforms should also define sophisticated role-based access to content, administrative processes, tools, and information. And where institutions as deem appropriate, platforms should provide an ability to create, store, tag, reuse, import, export, manage, and share content beyond course boundaries.
These were the ideas that Connecticut educators focused on when the state’s three largest public higher education units joined forces with the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium.
The Connecticut Community College System, the Connecticut State University
System, and the University of Connecticut decided in January 2004 to select
WebCT Vista as their shared academic enterprise system. A single shared license
for WebCT Vista will support escalating eLearning activity across the three
independent systems and their 72,000 students.
The state expects immediate savings of more than $200,000 by sharing a single
software license, technology architecture, administration, training programs
and, in the future, a repository for learning objects. The repository will contain
Web pages, media clips, curricula, and other components. Educators will be able
to use these learning objects to create courses without having to develop them
from scratch.
This license-sharing agreement will yield significant cost savings through collaboration on course development, technology administration, services sharing, and licensing fees. These are the economies of scale that taxpayers and tuition payers look for and the cutting-edge technology that Connecticut students deserve. Savings will grow if the implementation expands over time, as expected, to include private institutions and other schools in the state.
WebCT Vista will enable each institution within the three units to develop a unique online identity. Yet, students moving through several institutions—for example, a community college graduate enrolling at a university—will experience a familiar basic system as they move from school to school, eliminating the need for retraining. Students will have online access to course materials, assignments and assessments, and they can to use tools such as e-mail, chat, and forums. The system allows teachers to track the number of times students post discussion items, determine whether assigned readings have been done, and communicate with students between class meetings.
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