What’s In It for the Cat? CMS Policy as Coordinated Autonomy
- By Stephen R. Acker
- 12/02/03
Cats are autonomous creatures of mysterious mind. Trying to ‘herd
cats’ assures frustration because it opposes two forces: control and independence.
‘Enticing cats,’ aka organizing the self-interests of faculty, aligns
motivation and independence, unleashing remarkable agility, grace, and concerted
movement toward a goal. ‘Coordinating autonomy’ is the proper model
for setting CMS policies to achieve institutional goals.
The dissertation had focused on the development of three early online courses
from Ohio State’s College of the Arts. The process the candidate had presented
was intriguing because each of the three course teams had elected to work in
isolation, consciously choosing not to learn from each other’s successes
and failures. Were these case studies unique to the Arts, bastion of self-expression
and individualism; or had the Arts again laid bare the obvious so we could see
the universal? We concluded it was the latter; individuals inherently resist
control until persuaded social oversight is in their self-interest.
Anthony Giddens describes organizations as consisting of agency and structure.
Agency -- actions and energy that lead to outcomes -- is the domain of the self-directed
individual. Structure -- environmental factors that support or thwart agency
-- is the domain of institutions; or more accurately, the agency and history
of administration. Our colleagues in the Arts wanted to control both structure
and agency to preserve their self-direction. Most administrations abhor the
waste of resources involved in perpetual ‘re-inventing the wheel,’
portrayed by our guarded entrepreneurs. Their challenge is to marshal independent
agency toward structurally beneficial outcomes. "Because it is policy"
is seldom an effective slogan to align independent thinking and institutional
goals.
Jim Davis, Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology at UCLA, uses
the phrase "coordinated autonomy" to describe the running of a large,
decentralized university. The phrase captures an appropriate strategy for introducing
new services and systems in universities. Pessimists describe gaining compliance
as ‘herding cats,’ and the phrase carries the notion of external
control that guarantees failure. A better approach is to establish incentive
structures that lead individuals to reach decisions that benefit the group.
This is the essence of coordinating autonomy.
Let’s start with an easy example. In 1998, we surveyed the use of course
management systems across Ohio State University’s 21 colleges and five
campuses. We discovered six local WebCT licenses; each priced at $3,000 per
annum. At the time, WebCT also offered an institutional license for a yearly
fee of $12,000. We pooled the campus resources, purchased one institutional
license and invested the collaboration windfall in training. This consensus
was easily reached; each partnering group continued to operate its own services
at a reduced cost. What would happen if that improved resource allocation came
with a loss of local control?
We tested this premise three years later. A popular course posted a set of
images for student review prior to autumn quarter exam week.
The instructor
preferred to maintain the image collection locally, on a server at the end of
a 10MB/second network connection. This autonomy came at a high price -- the
server repeatedly crashed from excess traffic, the building e-mail services
disrupted, and the faculty member’s phone rang off the hook. The image
collection was moved to a more robust server resident on the campus backbone.
Additional resources flowed to the large-scale problem of image management,
benefiting both the individual and the community.
What other online course practices might benefit from concerted action to
serve both the individual and the campus at large? End of quarter grade submission
is a candidate on almost all campuses. Until last year, OSU’s system for
grade submission required downloading grades from the CMS to the instructor’s
local computer and then uploading them to the Registrar. Across all instructors
and courses using the CMS, this amounted to a massive waste of time and energy.
Working with a multi-section Biology course, we piloted a prototype for electronic
grade submission directly from the CMS to the Registrar. Shortly thereafter,
the procedures were adopted widely, and voluntarily, across the campus.
We’ve learned that coordinated autonomy also serves both individual
and campus needs in staffing help desks and providing network security. The
massive cost and disruption caused by viruses (security) and misdirected student
queries (multiple help desks) has encouraged campus-wide collaboration in both
of these areas. Building ADA-compliant Web sites is a third area that benefits
from common campus practices.
So when should an institution encourage distributed agency rather than administrative
collectivism? At the point where too little is known about the problem at hand
to standardize the solution. We can promote best practices in license purchasing,
network administration, security, ADA compliance, and help desk that align the
energies of the majority of our end user community members. We succeed by clearly
communicating these benefits, rather than by setting policy edicts. On the other
hand, we are still in the early stages of understanding effective use of CMS
as distinct from its efficient use. Here we should let the course design teams
play, capitalizing on their experimental zeal.
Effective CMS deployment rests on administrators building structures that
unleash agency from all individuals that make up the educational system. Policy
that paralyzes, or even neutralizes individual sense of agency, inhibits discovery
and social benefit in spite of the best intentions. Successful CMS implementations
operate through coordinated autonomy not legislated conformance.
Giddens, A. The theory of structuration. http://www.theory.org.uk/giddens2.htm.
Referenced from the World Wide Web November 29, 2003.
