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Google Apps and the New American University
10/23/2006
At ASU we believe that to serve the American people’s growing need for higher education excellence, a new way must be found; one that combines academic excellence and access in a single institution. But to attain this goal – to reach out to twice as many students, to support the success of a diverse student population of uneven preparation, all the while maintaining academic excellence – will require new ways of thinking, new ways of teaching, and new ways of supporting and guiding learners that will yield better results at comparable cost. Many of these new approaches will be based on a continual infusion of emerging technologies, skillfully applied to speed the advancement of teaching and research.
The feat that Google and ASU achieved displayed a nimbleness that rivals the best of what Silicon Valley can do. Building a reputation for agility is critical to the success of our technology alliance strategy, and we made a big stride the week of our deployment. But perhaps more importantly, by partnering with Google, ASU was able to dramatically accelerate its technology development curve, a move that will be central to achieving the New American University Vision. The exploding potential of information technology is the most promising and hopeful development of our age. Each day capability expands, and each day it becomes more affordable. Such powerful gifts have been rare in the history of the human race.
To realize the full potential of this technological “golden goose” in higher education, we all have a long way to go. You don’t have to take my word for it. In his book the Creation of the Future, Dr. Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell University (NY), points out that:
“…in the basic business of teaching resident students, universities have not diverged much from the methods of Socrates, except that most faculty members have now moved inside…[P]aradoxically, the research universities, which created and developed much of the new communications technology, have been slow to apply it to their mainstream activities. Most instruction is still a cottage industry, little influenced as yet by the benefits and support of modern technology. It is as though an industry had computerized its business and management activities, but left its manufacturing operations and sales distribution essentially unchanged and unimproved.”
At ASU we have recognized that the pace of technological change is outstripping the development capacity of internal university IT organizations. The cottage industry phase of the information revolution is rapidly approaching its end. If we are to realize the potential of rapidly evolving technology, our internal IT organizations must somehow leave behind the provisioning of individual services and climb the value chain to focus on the application and integration of rapidly emerging capabilities to continuously improve the university’s core activities.
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