Student Demands or Strategic IT Planning?
Are we placing too much importance on students’ needs when making IT decisions?
A new survey’s findings include the fact that at today’s higher
education institutions "executives place students well ahead of faculty
and staff in their adoption of IT." According to Jose-Marie Griffiths,
chair and professor of information science at the University of Pittsburgh,
and an author of the survey’s report, much of the IT agenda – including
things like connectivity on- and off-campus, mobility, smart classrooms, distance
learning, course management systems, help desks, and more – is driven
by a competition to recruit students. This is not necessarily bad, but she sees
it creating a subtle disconnection from institutional strategic planning that
might be diminishing the attention paid to the potential IT might have for the
academic disciplines.
I agree, and further, I think that there is a direct relationship between this
"disconnection" and the failure to recognize and reward early adopter
work in technology applications for non-technical research and for teaching
and learning. The issue is further complicated by a strong aversion, again on
the academician side, toward getting involved in all that strategic planning
stuff – especially if it means working with people who aren’t subject-matter
experts. And this is killing liberal education.
The survey research study, titled "Information Technology Success and Best
Practices in Higher Education," is a compilation and analysis of survey
responses from 400 higher education executives at the president, chancellor,
CFO, CAO, CIO level. [See Resources, below.]
These top executives believe that financial support for IT is critical to institutional
growth and reputation. Consequently, they want their institutions to move further
toward the early adopter position in developing and implementing new technologies.
They’re also concerned about privacy and security issues. All of this
is good news for IT staffers – it means more money, more "stuff,"
and more prestige on campus.
The same leaders also believe that IT is important to the achievement of institutional
strategic goals, although they acknowledge that measuring its impact is not
something we yet know how to do very well. Also, a lack of coherent IT planning
processes is a major concern.
That sounds pretty mundane, but it’s also pretty important. Part of what
it means is that if you define institutional goals as more students and you
can show that you attracted more students because you have the coolest wireless
network around (just like having the coolest campus around works in recruitment
brochure pictures), then you can measure that success. But if your institutional
goal is more students, then that’s not a whole lot different from saying
it’s "more sales" of a product, and then you’re just another
company.
What about success of a more esoteric sort? You know, the "core of the
academic mission" sort: teaching, learning, research, scholarship? I think
this is what Griffiths is getting at, and I think she’s right. Most of
what has been spent on campus IT has been driven by students’ needs, or
at least by their perceived needs. And it is important to keep them coming in
the door. But, while that’s a precursor for institutional success, it
isn’t what the institution is aimed at, necessarily, unless you work for
a for-profit.
Why isn’t there more discussion of technology implementation in a strategic
sense? It’s because the folks who are closest to the teaching and learning
thing, and the scholarship and research thing, aren’t involved in the
IT planning. But there is one notable exception. Early on the science and technology
researchers and scholarship people bought into IT, and they’re doing a
pretty good job with it. In their cases, they got rewarded for being good with
IT – rewarded with things that mattered on their career path.
So, where is the reward for a faculty member to be an early adopter of IT? It
wasn’t there 10 years ago, it wasn’t there 5 years ago, and it almost
isn’t there at all right now. There’s a little bit of scholarly
reward coming to those who specialize in the area of technology and teaching
and learning, but that’s now a specialty in itself. What d'es the anthropologist,
or the philosopher, or the p'et get from participating on IT planning committees?
The answer is, in terms of immediate rewards, that there often is nothing except
lost time. That’s been the answer for many more decades prior to the previous
one, for faculty who got stuck on other kinds of strategic planning committees,
like the one about the campus master plan, or the one about developing capital
for and designing the new building. These are the kinds of things that faculty
run from or participate in reluctantly. Yet, their input is vital.
Even if there were rewards, being on planning committees is uncomfortable. For
this one, it may mean interacting on a peer level with subject matter experts
outside the academic realm. And that’s not something that many faculty
are comfortable with – full-partner working relationships with experts
in student services, architecture, classroom design, maybe even writing and
communication. There are not a lot of historical mechanisms to let those kinds
of discussions take place, and there’s rarely a shared language.
This reluctance to work with other kinds of experts, along with our inability
to change the paradigm and find ways to reward academicians and subject matter
experts – in short-term ways they can feel, as in the tenure process –
is a significant part of what may now be fueling the relative disappearance
of liberal undergraduate education. Wouldn’t it be nice if IT staffers
could find mechanisms to induce those conversations and to make those activities
rewarding; to create better mechanisms for engaging the faculty in planning
of all kinds?
It’s nice that our CEOs and CIOs want to be early adopters, and that they
think it’s worth spending money on IT. But if students already know what
their education needs are, then why do we even have faculty at all?
I often hear from campus and master planners how difficult it is to work on
a campus without an overall strategic or academic plan. Sometimes the physical
facilities planners have to make an academic plan happen first. It sounds like
IT planners are in the same boat, and that many IT plans stand out there on
their own, either disconnected from a strategic or academic plan, or on a campus
without one. Unless we can get faculty involved in strategic planning, and integrate
IT planning in that process, then we risk moving our institutions’ directions
away from traditional institutional kinds of goals and objectives.
Griffiths says that the campuses doing the best job are those with a strategic
or academic plan and, within that group, those where the IT planning is fully
integrated. She says that the best gains are at institutions where entire disciplinary
groups of academicians are brought up to speed together on IT issues, training,
and capabilities. That makes sense. Let’s hope that we see more of it!
