Historically, academic computing at universities has basked in the shadow of academic freedom. This implies that issues related to supporting the faculty and student has been open to an unstructured environment. It is often possible to find multiple technologies deployed to support a single campus-wide need...an example would be course management systems like Blackboard or Moodle. Often you will find multiple course management systems at a university. The diversity has led to innovation that is often not evident in other areas of the campus IT department. Going forward it appears the instructional areas of information technology will need to become standardized. This does not mean the innovation will be absent, but does imply local control will possibly give way to “cloud applications.” I predict the course management vendors will begin to migrate applications to the “cloud” to ensure a place in the marketplace. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft to offer a course management system to compliment the “Live” services it is promoting to the higher education world. I would expect the other leading vendors to respond aggressively. Do not be surprised to find you will have alternatives to campus-based solutions by 2010.
The good news is the cloud solutions will remove the many “religious wars” that take place today on whose application is the best and focus attention on developing course content. The migration to the cloud will also encourage many campus IT departments to address authentication and authorization using directory federation. Simply put, campus IT staff will be responsible for ensuring its student and faculty are legitimate, and the course management vendor will be able to offer virtual meeting services between higher education institutions. I have high expectations that this service will offer faculty solutions that will enhance their course materials at a very reasonable cost the university. This concept has been maturing in the social networking world and will be easily portable to the academic community.
Next, consumerization of IT will influence campus technology solutions in instructional computing. Campus IT will have to recognize its ability to “tell” users what to use to login is limited. The user will vote with their pocketbook on what device they want to use to access campus applications, some will use a laptop, others will want to use an iPhone, and many will want to use the computer in the home or office. Bottom line is the campus IT department will need to know what the end-user is using and ensure the campus applications will work with that device. The cloud vendors will offer the faculty and students this flexibility. We can be sure the device of choice is going to become increasingly mobile. Over the next 24 months faculty and students are going to migrate to the “smartphone” or “netbook.” The campus IT support organization will need to react to the needs of the user community. Good news is the faculty or student is going to pay for the mobile device, the bad news is the campus must be nimble and able to react to the needs of its community.
The changes coming to instructional computing will be positive to the university. Campus IT departments that are customer embracing will have little difficulty adapting to the emerging environment. Universities that resist the change will find the faculty and students will become frustrated and will use resources offered off campus when possible. The truth is the user community will be strongly influencing IT’s decision and that is good.
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