Options for Academic Technology

The Chief Academic Officer will soon have many opportunities to determine how to use technology to support faculty and students on campus. We have written about the opportunities the CAO has in the area of desktop services: Google is providing a number of services beyond email and Microsoft is matching Google service for service. Take an inventory against you own campus offerings. Do you provide your students:

1. A full featured email system with at least 5 gigabytes of mail storage that is optimized for all Web 2.0 services and offers everyone mobile-friendly access.
2. A location to save your files: today it is common for Google and Microsoft to offer you another 25 gigabytes of storage space for your PowerPoint slides, your PDFs, your Word and Excel documents, and the ton of video and pictures you want to keep to reuse in your courses.
3. Now we find a number of companies teaming up with service providers to offer additional core services. Dell has combined with MoodleRooms to offer a course management system a faculty member can access from anywhere. Google has decided to offer a product called CourseSmart that will offer a service that will look a little like a course management system and a little bit like a course registration system.
4. Several large companies are offering cloud-based research computing by teaming with low cost server providers and specialized university researchers to offer access to specialized research data sets in the cloud. No longer will the liberal arts college or the regional university faculty member be at a disadvantage because the university cannot offer computational computing on campus.
5. Just this year two new Web 2.0 web sites have emerged: Academia, a location where faculty with like research interest can collaborate or can develop curriculum together, and Einztein, a site just entering public beta where faculty can share their content with the world or can develop a course with peers.
   

What this means to the CAO is you no longer have to invest in significant technology infrastructure capital unless you would rather spend money on technology instead of your academic programs. All of the above do not require a capital investment for the host hardware or software and only a small (or no) recurring services cost. The CAO needs to task the CIO in researching the options available today to create a roadmap that would allow the university to shift capital funding previously associated with technology to academic interests. It appears the only future funding for campus applications will focus in two areas: the devices the faculty, student, or staff uses for access, and a few programs governed by compliance laws that should remain on campus.

Two Cloud Reports

Two reports of interest have been issued recently: the first is Shaping the Higher Education Cloud and the second is The Future of cloud Computing. The chief academic officer will find both reports informative and should assist in future planning efforts.

The first report, Shaping the Higher Education Cloud, is a joint report from EDUCAUSE and NACUBO. The report provides the findings from a meeting held earlier this year in Tempe, Arizona attended by CIOs from many colleges and universities. The outcome of the meeting was a list of issues each campus must address prior to implementing cloud computing services; the topics are all the familiar ones led by security and content location. The CAO needs to be aware of the issues that are coming from a single voice on campus, Information Technology. Another report needs to be developed from a faculty and/or student perspective. The right plan for a campus will always exist between the early adopters and the departments being asked to change. IT has always been eager to ask colleges to change but have been reluctant to follow that advice with emerging cloud computing technologies.

The second report is from the Pew Research Center, The Future of Cloud Computing. The theme of the report is two emerging technologies will impact higher education by 2020. The first is change will be future access to university IT resources will be with a mobile device. The success of the Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are defining the future requirements of our students. The second change will be cloud computing. Microsoft and Google have established a new model for campus IT departments and have shown many CAOs that the University can save money using the cloud. Recently the State of Kentucky moved 700,000 students and teachers to Microsoft mail and saved millions of dollars. There are many examples of Universities implementing Google’s mail solution and experiencing similar savings. The future will be defined by many of today’s university IT application providers moving their software to the cloud and sell the application to the university on a software as a service (SaaS) platform. What this means with regard to students, faculty and staff has yet to be imagined. The report is very clear the change is coming, and universities need to be prepared.

Relevant Actions for the Next 18 Months

Higher education leaders must ask themselves the age-old question: will today’s technology change the university experience? We predict some elements of legacy practices will survive to ensure existing good experiences continue, but overall higher education must change business processes to remain affordable.

To achieve this goal, the Chief Academic Officer must wisely choose what remains and what changes. Faculty will be faculty and the migration to a technology-enriched learning experience should happen in an orderly manner. Further, technology will offer the faculty member productivity enhancements that will be embraced and adopted. Faculty adoption will be gradual and manageable.

Student adoption will be different; today’s student will expect an online world, a rich web experience, instant access, and a user-friendly experience. The day of limited university email systems, dated library systems and many one-off vertical applications is over and judged wanting by the students. A recent dialogue with student leaders suggested that students would believe the university cares when it begins to address the above issues. The question for the CAO is how relevant is the student's request to adopt emerging Web 2.0 technologies.

What relevant and affordable actions can be completed in the next 18 months?

Several of the suggestions are similar to earlier suggestions but are worth repeating:

1. Software portfolios must be rationalized. The CIO and Deans need to create a strategy of technology support that makes sense and is not duplicative. A good start would be single sign on to all core systems, a simple but powerful student system for registration, a user-friendly library system, and student -centered customer support. The change suggested does not require the university to change applications. Implementing many of the above ideas will save the university real dollars.
2. The CAO, Deans, and CIO must agree to work together to improve the adoption of technology by faculty and students. Students frustration with multiple support organizations and multiple applications is growing and students are beginning to understand their tuition dollars are paying for inefficiencies that are frustrating. Further, the university cannot afford to offer duplicative services without value being added.
3. The university should look at outsourcing its email. Recent research suggests only 25% of universities are using cloud services from Google or Microsoft. The cost for providing cloud based email for all students, faculty and staff is zero!!!!! Many universities are spending thousands of dollars annually to offer an inferior campus based service and hiding behind security or compliance rumors that are false. Both the Google and Microsoft solution far exceeds what universities are offering locally on campus.
4. Google search is a verb, students know and understand its value and use it daily. Faculty and administrators must ask how the existence of Google Books, Scholar, and Search available at no cost could enhance the student learning experience.
5. Students are familiar with Rate My Professor, myedu.com and Wikipedia and have incorporated them into their university experience. University supported applications will be evaluated against what is available on the Web and the student will expect the experience to be equally rich.
6. Facebook is central to the social life of the students. The CAO must understand how Facebook will change the student life experience and incorporate it into the technology plans of the university.

The above changes will not require a significant financial investment by the university. The above changes will require organizational changes and coordination in offering technology services. The above changes could be made in less than a year and result in a savings of thousands of dollars annually.

New Standards for Student and Faculty Support

Yesterday’s support for students at universities was departmentally focused; information was highly segmented allowing the communication to become fragmented and often ineffective. Today’s students are quickly becoming frustrated with this type of structure and expect the environment to be more student-centered. You might wonder what I mean by this; it is common for today’s students to go to one location to get resolutions to complex issues throughout their high school careers. High schools are offering comprehensive access to online academic resources, have coordinated student services, and have encouraged collaboration. One can just count the number of smartboards in high schools or review the online student portals offered to find the difference between the student experience in high schools and in universities. Graduation from high school results in the student entering a different support environment that is based on business practices founded in the past decade.

Today's university support services are in need of change. Some examples:

1. A student must call multiple customer support centers to get help on a single issue, such as getting support for an online class. It is not uncommon for the student to be expected to call three areas looking for that support: the Information Technology department, the teaching-learning support center, and the academic department.
2. The library and the teaching-learning center support the faculty member in offering online courses. The student is often expected to know what services each group offers to call the right department.
3. Central Information Technology departments and academic departments offer support services, many times supporting different systems (email, course management systems, collaboration systems). The result is a student being expected to learn all the systems offered by any department.

To correct this, the Chief Academic Officer must establish a standard for faculty and student support. This effort is similar to the centralization of IT ten years ago and for the same reasons: efficient and effective customer services. Today’s technology-experienced students and their parents are demanding a support organization that makes sense. The university that figures out how Apple and Best Buy can satisfy the masses will be able to grow and expand despite declining budgets.

What should be the Chief Academic Officer’s first steps to determine if the university is providing relevant services and support to students and faculty?

1. The university needs to contract with an independent customer service consultant that uses a formal methodology to analyze if the student and faculty services are relevant. The methodology should also provide the CAO with facts on the quality of support being offered. It is clear higher education offers significant support; it is not clear that the faculty or students consider the support relevant in today’s environment. A formal analysis can take the emotion out of the services and support issue and provide a foundation for change.
2. Count the number of groups that offer students and faculty support and attempt to itemize what each support organization is offering. An organization that has 2-3 locations to contact to get support is questionable; any more than three is unreasonable.
3. Spend personal time with students and faculty, determine what is really happening and how well the library, Information Technology, and teaching-learning center are meeting the needs of each group. Focus groups suggest the students and faculty opinions are much different than the leadership of the support organizations.
4. Look at organizations like Google, Apple, Best Buy, and Target and ask yourself what they are doing to be so successful in the eyes of the customer.

Students and University Technology Support Services

An interesting convergence of events during the past three weeks has resulted in this blog post. In the past year it has become evident that most research universities are struggling with student technology support, among the issues:

1. Is the university IT department relevant for today’s students? Most feel that if they are offering the minimal number of services, they must be relevant. Time to ask the students what is relevant in 2010; is the campus meeting the requirements of the present day student?
2. Is the library relevant to today’s students? Does today’s investment in information resources (the library staff) need to be reexamined? Never thought I would ask this question so directly.
3. Does today’s university have the appropriate relationship between campus departments to remain relevant in a technology and information rich environment?

Several weeks ago, the campus IT group spent time with students in two focus sessions. The first glimpse of student impressions was in a senior level marketing class, and the second was a focus group between IT and interested student government leaders. Both groups resulted in similar student perspectives. First, the students did not know who offered technology support on campus and did not feel it was relevant to know the source of services. Second, the focus group had seven seniors/graduate students, and of the seven, only 3 had ever attempted to contact the campus IT department and only one had ever visited the customer support center during their tenure at the university. Third, students all agreed that anything online was preferred to going to a campus department, including the library. It does not take a genius to recognize today’s IT organizations are using yesterday’s methods to meet today’s students requirements, and it does not appear to be working.

The second event was the release of the latest Project Information Literacy Progress Report from the Information School at the University of Washington. The report recognized that students and university professionals are not in alignment. The student is focused on efficiency, and the university departments are focused on thoroughness. Two outcomes were evident in the report: 1) students want to acquire information online and 2) students rely on instructors first, not the library staff or IT staff. As universities focus on retention and graduation rates, Chief Academic Officers must ask several hard questions:

1. What must be done with the university research library to make it relevant to students in a search-oriented, information rich world? It is clear that students are not going to use the traditional methods encouraged by the library staff, so what is next?
2. Today’s IT departments are offering support services the students are not using. Why? Are the services relevant? Are the methods of offering the services relevant?
3. Students are using online library resources and are using the services offered by IT, but the student is not connecting the online resources with the available human resources. Should the CAO consider future organizational alignments that address the students use of technology and library resources? If yes, what would the organization's mission and goals state?
4. Is today’s information resource staff relevant? If it is, why are today’s students not connecting with the professionals? What can be done to bridge the gap between services and professionals in the minds of the students?

Throughout the year, we will address these issues on this blog and will suggest directions the CAO follow to ensure the university is meeting student needs.