SOURCE Scholars

If you offer fully online programs, this report may be helpful

 The 1^st anniversary of The SOURCE was officially celebrated on Tuesday, March 13, 2012. It came two days after publishing our ninth report in The SOURCE Library – “A Systems Approach: Expanding Access and Achieving Student Success through Support Services at Rio Salado College.”

To celebrate the 1^st anniversary, I took the day off last Tuesday only to come back to work by early afternoon because I was feeling like I needed to do something. That’s an indication of how much The SOURCE has become part of my daily life. Perhaps I enjoy doing this to a fault.  Who takes off on a Tuesday anyways?

The mission of the SOURCE is to provide freely accessible information in the form of self-published, in-depth reports, as well as vetted links to valid and authoritative information from other sources that are timely, relevant and useful to community college educators.

The recent report about Rio Salado College (RSC) seems to be particularly timely, relevant and useful, especially for community colleges in the throes of developing fully online programs.  RSC did not become the largest public two-year institution offering online associate degrees overnight. The report shows how a business-oriented culture layered over an academic culture was refined over 20 years to bring RSC to where it is today.  But even more important, the report shows how an enormous amount of student and faculty support services are needed for any institution offering fully online degree programs to achieve success.

An easy-to-navigate website for registering; academic advising; financial aid; counseling; tutoring; online library; helpdesks; faculty training; and a host of other important support services were presented in this report by interviewing 24 administrators and faculty at RSC. In short, the report reveals how RSC is a holistic enterprise in which all the various support-related departments work together.

I’ve been writing fairly regularly and extensively about online higher education for more than a decade. I think the “free” RSC report is well worth taking a look at if only to see how much work and collaboration is really needed from many different-but-not-separate entities throughout an institution to create and sustain fully online degree programs well into the future.

George Lorenzo
Write and Editor of The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies

 

IT Governance in Higher Ed

By George Lorenzo

Editor’s Note: This is a reprint from an Educational Pathways article published in the summer of 2008 that is still relevant today.

Perhaps the most concrete, and redundant, statement that can be made about Information Technology Governance (ITG) in higher education is that its time has come of age. Strong, sophisticated and effective ITG structures and processes in higher education have evolved significantly over the past decade.

Intelligent Perspectives On ITG
ECAR is a leading source of information about ITG in the higher education sector that has published a good number of highly informative and educational research studies and papers about ITG. ^1,2

On the corporate side, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) is a widely known intelligent source of information about ITG.³ In 1998, ISACA formed the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) to focus on original research, publications, resources and symposia on IT governance and related topics.⁴

Defining ITG
ECAR defines ITG by referring to MIT researchers Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, who wrote that IT governance means "specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in using IT." ⁵ ECAR also provides its own informal description of ITG:

IT governance describes who makes which decisions, who provides input and analyzes the issues, who sets priorities, and who settles disputes when there is no clear consensus. Good governance processes are actively designed and well understood by participants, and foster timely decisions that are communicated effectively. Ultimately "desirable behavior" in using IT means behavior that is aligned with and helps achieve institutional strategic goals.⁶

Central to Teaching, Learning, Administration, Outreach and Research
Anywhere from five to ten years ago, information technology (IT) was often categorized as institutional "plumbing," draining funds and never quite getting enough real attention at the executive level until the "pipes" broke down or started to malfunction. However, IT’s new twenty-first century stature, driven by effective governance, places it central to the support of teaching, learning, administration, outreach and research in higher education. The people leading and managing IT efforts at colleges and universities — namely CIOs and VPs of IT — sit on executive cabinets where institutional-level goals and challenges are discussed and debated, and where decisions are ultimately made that affect students, faculty, staff and administrators at all levels.

Hard to Predict
As the growth of technological innovation moves quickly, future ITG scenarios are difficult to predict. In addition, the ways in which ITG develops at colleges and universities differs vastly from one institution to the next, making it difficult to report on this topic from a singular, all encompassing point of view. For instance, a relatively wealthy private research institution might have funds, infrastructure and staff for developing and governing strategic initiatives around high-performance research computing projects while another financially strapped institution cannot even begin to look at or govern such initiatives as it struggles with keeping its basic IT services up and running efficiently under the pressure of budget cuts.

Change, especially when related to the IT industry, can be hard to keep up with, not to mention expensive and risky to implement. In the modern world of IT, with Moore’s Law still alive and well, ITG decision-making processes can be complex, hesitant to move forward quickly enough, and overly political. Nonetheless, decisions must be made, because, to put it simply, IT development and maintenance issues on every college and university campus are vitally important. Put in another way, both the academic and administrative computing sides of higher education have come to rely on ITG to provide critical guidance and solutions to a wide swath of management-level tasks and issues more than anytime in the past.

Pertinent Issues
There are numerous decision-making processes that fall under the realm of ITG today. Here’s a short list of important ITG-related issues based on the interviews and literature reviewed for this assignment:

• security and privacy issues;
• data and network infrastructure development, including work related to the cyberinfrastructure;
• the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, new student information systems and teaching and learning software and services;
• the implementation of disaster recovery systems;
• managing the growing use of network-connected mobile devices and gadgets increasingly finding their way on campuses;
• understanding the possibilities for outsourcing IT services;
• facilitating closer collaborations with library systems;
• facilitating better communication among all campus constituents whom are affected by IT-related decisions; and
• keeping up with the latest IT innovations related to the so-called "cloud".

Building Security Measures
Security and privacy issues are ranked very high in importance among senior IT administrators, requiring strong ITG processes. The 2006 EDUCAUSE Current IT Issues Survey ranked security and identity management at the top of the list of strategic challenges facing IT leaders. ⁷ The 2007 EDUCAUSE Current IT Issues Survey ranked security number two and separated out identity/access management as the number four strategic challenge facing IT leaders. ⁸  The 2008 EDUCAUSE Current IT Issues Survey had security at number one again. ⁹

"IT security and privacy continues to be a significant issue for us, and I do not see that decreasing in importance in the next five years," says Patrick J. Burns, vice president for IT at Colorado State University. "The whole area of security is going to become more important," explains Betty Leydon, vice president for information technology and CIO at Princeton University. "We are implementing a new security and identity management system right now. This is one area that will grow and change and become more important."

Burns identifies three primary areas that fall under security that he claims are getting more difficult to manage, requiring the development of new ITG processes for better management and control: the possibility of database injection attacks on campus web servers, individuals not following IT policies and procedures, and how to provide services for and secure the burgeoning mobile computing environments that carry unencrypted files on portable media. "We don’t have good solutions for cell phones, which are becoming computers, but they do not have the protection of computers in terms of anti-spam, anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewalls and encryption of files," Burns explains.

Ubiquitous Computing
Another important issue for ITG — one that is related to mobile computing issues — can be lumped under the topic of "ubiquitous computing," a term first coined by Xerox as far back as 1988. Also referred to as "ubicomp" or "everywhere," ubiquitous computing, as Information Architect Peter Morville notes in his book "Ambient Findability," refers to the electronic, Internet-connected devices that have become more commonplace in our everyday lives, and, accordingly, on every college and university campus. Wireless laptops and web-enabled smartphones, including the popular iPhone, are part of the modern student’s backpack. The growth of ubicomp also takes into consideration newer devices, such as smaller and more sophisticated GPS receivers, the growth of location-sensing and surveillance technologies, and more. ¹⁰

It’s easy to see that smaller and thinner ubicomp devices are being utilized by campus constituents as their personal choice for computing, bringing new challenges for ITG. The role of ITG shifts as end users increasingly take advantage of outside web-based services and expect to tie their mobile devices into the campus network. This gives ITG more issues to resolve, such as the development of mobile/handheld carrier relationships, policy questions and security challenges.

An interesting case in point relative to ubicomp can be found at Abilene Christian University (ACU), where a mobile learning pilot called "ACU Connected" has recently started. This fall, iPhones or iPod Touch tools will be distributed to 1,000 students and faculty for a wide variety of uses, including the development of "curricula that incorporate the phones to handle podcasts, flashcards, polls and live assessment for use in classes across the university." First-year students will be the primary participants. Some of the goals of the pilot include making "computing easier for students, and to strengthen enrollment and retention as a result." ¹¹

Are similar ubicomp-oriented initiatives in the cards for other campuses? Dan Updegrove, IT consultant and former VP for IT and CIO at the University of Texas Austin, explains how innovative technologies can start out as relatively small issues and suddenly become vitally important, requiring immediate solutions. As an example, he refers back to the days when e-mail usage, wireless connectivity and course management systems were all pretty much in experimental phases and relatively untested only to become absolutely necessary campus-wide IT components over a short period of time.

"Wireless is a good example," Updegrove says. "We spent a fortune running Ethernet cable to every pillow in our dormitories. Now students can’t be bothered with having a 20-foot Ethernet cable. They want wireless in their dorm rooms." He adds that in many ways CIOs are getting what they always wanted: ubiquitous access to information resources anytime, anywhere. The question becomes can the university afford to respond to these kinds of demands in which there is a disconnect between what students and faculty expect [e.g., 24 x 7 ubiquitous computing access] and the cost implications and IT staffing and maintenance challenges that come with such demands. The overall effect is that IT-services, in general, become more challenging to maintain.

The Cloud
The expectations and services that come with ubicomp are part of "The Cloud" or "cloud computing." *  What is cloud computing? Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

Cloud computing means Internet-based development and use of computer technology. It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided "as a service," allowing users to access technology-enabled services without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. It is a general concept that incorporates software as a service, Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. ¹²

Nicholas Carr, author of "Does IT Matter?" and most recently "The Big Switch" is a popular, well-informed voice on matters related to cloud computing. Carr writes in "The Big Switch" that computing, like electricity, can be delivered over a grid, shared by many people simultaneously.

The network — the Internet, that is — has become, literally, our computer. The different components that used to be isolated in the closed box of the PC — the hard drive for storing information, the microchip for processing information, the applications for manipulating information — can now be dispersed throughout the world, integrated through the Internet, and shared by everyone. The World Wide Web has truly turned into the World Wide Computer.

Carr goes on to say that Eric Schmidt coined the term for the World Wide Computer when he called it "the computer in the cloud." ¹³

So, what does all this have to do with higher education and ITG?

Theories About Commoditization
Ubicomp and cloud computing have a lot to do with theories about the possible commoditization of IT products and services — similar to Carr’s comparison to electricity — and its possible influence in the education sector. Again, a definition from Wikipedia is in order:

The majority of cloud computing infrastructure currently consists of reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers that are built on computer and storage virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers.

Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. By sharing "perishable and intangible" computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved [as servers are not left idle], which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. ¹⁴

The theory can be interpreted to mean that much of IT is becoming commoditized through such new technologies as Google Apps and other freely available web-based software, new open source environments, and server virtualization offerings. Taking this theory into higher education could mean that although ITG has evolved into being central to the overall strategies and progress of colleges and universities today, the pendulum may be in an early stage of shifting to the past when ITG was not so prominent.

For example, the aforementioned ACU Connected initiative utilizes Google Apps. In addition, a well-publicized, commodity-oriented scenario in relation to e-mail services happened at Arizona State University (ASU) in late 2006 {and is now happening at other institutions], when it was determined to outsource the university’s student e-mail system to Google. The decision raised some eyebrows within the academic community because it resulted in saving ASU an estimated .5 million dollars per year, and, as noted by its technology officer, has actually provided better security and privacy than the internal e-mail service ASU continues to offer its 65,000 students as an alternative option to the new Google-hosted and maintained system. ¹⁵

ITG Reoriented
As noted on the Google Apps Education Edition website, their hosted services will free up IT departments to focus on more important issues, are easy to deploy, and will save you money. In short, everything you need is in the cloud, making ITG irrelevant? But, the reality of all this, at least right now, is that it means exactly the opposite, primarily because making any kind of decision about such things as outsourcing e-mail, as well as other types of new and innovative IT-services-oriented outsourcing models, is a complex endeavor, requiring ITG to mediate and solve.

James Hilton, vice president and CIO, University of Virginia provides a good explanation of how things are changing for ITG when he says that he does not know "how much longer we are going to be in the storage business — at least internally provisioning and sourcing storage, or provisioning and sourcing all of the commodity services that are currently out there. I envision in some ways a central IT shop going forward that is supremely good at managing relationships and provisioning from whatever source is the best deal at the time. So, you become more of an integrating unit than a source unit."

"Sooner or later we are going to have to reorient what the role of IT is on campus - whether it is central or local IT - to take into account what people are calling the cloud," says Ron Yanosky, ECAR deputy director and senior fellow. "This brings up some fundamental questions tied to governance. It used to be easy to govern IT when there weren't many users on campus, and they were sophisticated users. Now everyone is a user, including people who are naïve about technology. And we may be evolving to a state where most users do not get their IT resources from campus."

Trent Batson recently wrote that "campus IT organizations might start thinking of themselves not as service providers, but as service enablers. In other words, the IT unit should help campus constituencies get the technology services they need, whether on campus or on the Web." He then asks if central IT units are, indeed, at a tipping point, "shifting to services out there." His answer: "Probably not." Why? Because Internet applications are too numerous and innovate too quickly and they reside in a perennial beta-land. In short, they are too unstable for an education sector that must always have technology stability at basic levels. ¹⁶

So, ITG is here to stay, just in a different form.

Cyberinfrastructure
In addition, ITG’s staying power stretches wide. For instance, another highly important area of interest that requires ITG processes is the growing development of the cyberinfrastructure. Issues related to the cyberinfrastructure correlate to the challenges faced by higher education to manage the large amounts of data that come with the territory of scientific research as well as with the management of overabundant rich media files [video, audio and digital imagery] that flow across the lines both internally and externally between higher education institutions and others.

How higher education ITG is currently dealing with cyberinfrastructure, as well as data management, issues and challenges is a topic for an entirely separate report. Cyberinfrastructure has been touched upon in past issues of Educational Pathways and plans are to continue covering this topic in more depth in future issues. The Chronicle of Higher Education consistently publishes articles about the cyberinfrastructure. Also see the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure website. In addition, the EDUCAUSE Net@EDU Initiative has a Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group website.

Customer Relationship Management Systems
Another area of interest that cries for ITG processes is the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Janice Rickards, pro vice chancellor (Information Services) at Griffith University in Australia, mentioned customer relationship management (CRM) as a very high priority at the highly centralized [in terms of overall governance] multi-campus Griffith University system.

The CRM initiative is a new item in the overall Griffith University budget. It is basically a small but important fraction of an Electronic Infrastructure Capital Plan (EICP) for 2008-2010 that was created by Rickards in collaboration with colleagues in IT units from across the Griffith campuses. The EICP was used as the basis for a series of discussions with the university’s Executive Group, which Rickards belongs to along with the vice chancellor, two deputy vice chancellors and seven other pro vice chancellors. The Executive Group decides on a funding list and respective funding amounts, which, in this case, Rickards says turned out to be "somewhat less than the [original] figure requested" in the EICP. Once the Executive Group agreed upon the funding, it was endorsed by the university’s Finance and Resources Committee and finally approved by the executive-level, centralized Council of the University as part of a final three-year $96 million Capital Plan for the entire Griffith University system.

The CRM initiative was allocated a substantial budget. "We haven’t got a CRM system at the moment, and we consider that a business priority," Rickards explains, particularly in relation to some of the university’s strategic objectives around student retention. It compliments our student administration system and is really about managing an ongoing relationship with students."

Communication and Organizational Management are Key
Managing ongoing relationships, not only with students, but with all campus constituents and stakeholders is another important element related to ITG. Facilitating effective communication and collaboration between all campus constituencies and stakeholders is basically on the top of the list of issues that keep most ITG leaders awake at night.

The job of the CIO is increasingly becoming dependent upon his or her ability to communicate creatively with and recruit faculty, department and program heads and other staff members throughout the institution into the fold of the ITG structure and processes. The University of Virginia’s Hilton, for instance, has created informal advisory groups in which he invites faculty to help sort out what’s really needed, what’s feasible to implement, and to play a more vital role in actual decision-making. Hilton has created an informal advisory group on computational intensive science, another on digital humanities, and another on course management and collaboration software issues.

"Where I see a focused need, I go out and recruit and invite a set of faculty," he says, adding that once inside the group, "I preach ambition and practice pragmatism. I bring faculty together and say let’s dream, let’s blue sky. We set the ambition and then say, if somebody walks in with the funds, we are good to go, but assuming that they don’t, what is the first thing we want to do to make tomorrow better than today? That gets us closer. How do we start prioritizing?"

Hilton also finds it extremely important to develop a very close relationship with library staff at the University of Virginia. Historically, there has frequently been tension between the library community and the IT community on any given campus. However, "if you want to know what faculty are doing, talk to librarians," Hilton says. "My closest collaborator here is the university librarian. Both worlds [library and IT] are changing, and the blur between the two is becoming much less distinct. Making sure that they are coordinated and collaborating is critical."

Fred Siff, vice president and CIO, University of Cincinnati, adds his take on ITG communication and collaboration issues, saying that CIOs will increasingly be required to take on the responsibility of making IT initiatives "compelling and interesting to the community." Examples of this kind of strategy are driven by the CIO’s ability to present IT issues in a way that gets more people on campus engaged. "Governance is about giving people an opportunity to speak, to have a hand in things. Everybody wants a hand in computing. Everybody has their own perspective. I don’t see that changing."

Some examples for facilitating more active engagement in IT issues across campus include presenting security issues by stating to campus constituents that vulnerable systems, no matter where they might reside on campus, are going to be taken off the network, Siff says. "That has gotten a lot of discussion. We put it out to the public, and we got a lot of interesting comments back. Almost all were supportive. Community engagement ought to be a positive process not a C-Y-A thing." Another example entails funding allocations. "Everybody can get energized about that," Siff adds. "We have a technology fee that generates about $7 million a year. This year we are proposing a different way of allocating that money. That gets peoples’ attention." Or, on the topic of business continuity, Siff says the term alone typically does not garner much attention. Instead, "if you say you are going to take all of the systems and rank order them in importance for protection and being made up to date with back-up and recovery sites ready for them — that gets people interested because they want their system to be number one."

Princeton’s Leydon claims that "ITG should not focus on IT for IT’s sake." For example, when talking about IT as it relates to academic affairs, the discussion should be about how IT can improve teaching and learning. When talking about IT as it relates to finances, the conversation should be about how to improve auditing and compliance through IT.

UCLA’s Davis talks about the governance process as necessarily being distributed by strategic, functional, technical and investment views and challenging to manage from presentation, communication and coordination perspectives. For example, "we look at strategy, function, investment and architecture in different ways with different governance groups," he says. "This is very important because it is where you not only make decisions, but were you get buy-in. We spend a lot of time with how to structure various discussions for different groups and keep them oriented to the purpose of the group."

Davis adds that proper presentation techniques and meeting management procedures are important to achieve real acceptance of a decision. "It is very easy to make a presentation that is too granular or too high level, missing the real purpose of that particular part of the governance structure." In addition, Davis says that the Office of Information Technology, has three FTE and four student employees supporting the administrative function of the campus governance process. A management team of eight directors/managers, who work on the critical campus technology projects, are spending more time conducting background, analysis and planning work and documenting processes. "We have been taking votes, documenting meetings and taking a variety of steps to ensure that a decision, when made, remains a decision."

Another part of the ITG structure and processes — one that brings together stakeholders at UCLA into defined decision processes — entails the establishment of Analysis and Project Oversight Groups. Davis provides one example of how this worked for a UCLA Common Collaboration and Learning Environment Initiative (CCLE), which, in November 2006, ultimately came to the decision to choose Moodle for its campus-wide course management system. A cross-disciplinary Functional Specifications Group, comprised of faculty, and a corresponding cross-unit Technical Specifications Group, comprised of IT experts, conducted separate systematic analyses from the two perspectives. The analyses were merged, and the UCLA Faculty Committee on Education Technology made the decision on Moodle as the campus environment.

A Project Oversight Group (POG) — comprised of IT staff from humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, engineering, the library, the management school, public affairs, the Office of Information Technology and the Office of Instructional Development — was established to oversee the implementation of Moodle and develop campus outreach and participation processes that basically engage the UCLA community in its implementation. The (POG) has subsequently evolved into formal campus management entities — a Standards and Practices Group (S & PG), responsible for policy, direction, outreach and assessment, and a Systems Operations Group, reporting to the S & PG responsible for the campus Moodle system operations.

Survey Paints Portrait of ITG Effectiveness
These notable examples from the University of Virginia, Princeton, the University of Cincinnati and UCLA are all representative of effective ITG structures and processes that are having a positive influence campus wide. Are similarly positive results happening at most institutions today? A generally positive portrait of IT governance effectiveness in higher education was revealed in a 2007 ITG web-based survey conducted by ECAR, which generated 438 responses from EDUCAUSE-member-institution senior IT administrators, of whom 83% were CIOs.

Almost two-thirds of respondents strongly agreed that ITG was effective, and the overall agreement was 3.64 on our 5-point scale. When asked if ITG balances institutional and local or departmental needs, 71% agreed or strongly agreed. Nevertheless, we found considerable variation among institutions in their evaluation of IT governance effectiveness and noted a number of associations between overall effectiveness and other variables.

Among the factors we found most strongly associated with higher agreement about ITG effectiveness were

• active design of IT governance;
• perceived ability of key IT participants to describe ITG accurately;
• higher overall mean frequency of participation in providing input and taking part in decision making;
• incorporation of measurement and review in IT governance;
• ITG involvement in formal project review and approval; and
• ITG participating in institutional budgetary processes. ¹⁷

In conclusion, ITG has transformed into something that is indispensable for helping higher education meet its needs and goals. A common consent that came out of this project was that ITG effectiveness depends on the ability of CIOs and VPs of IT to identify all the people who really are responsible for the myriad of functions and services that fall under the jurisdiction of IT, and, with them, build meaningful involvement and engagement in order to tackle strategic initiatives that ultimately benefit everyone on campus.

Endnotes:

1. Ronald Yanosky, with Jack McCredie, "Process and Politics: IT Governance in Higher Education" (Research Study 5), EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Boulder CO, June 21, 2008.
2. See EDUCAUSE Connect IT Governance section.
3. For more information, go to the ISACA website and click on the "Governance" tab, http://www.isaca.org/.
4. For more information, see the IT Governance Institute website at http://www.itgi.org/.
5. Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross, "IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision for Superior Results," Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2004, in Ronald Yanosky and Judith Caruso, "Process and Politics: It Governance in Higher Education" (Key Findings), EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Boulder CO, 2008.
6. Ronald Yanosky and Judith Caruso, "Process and Politics: IT Governance in Higher Education" (Key Findings), EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Boulder CO, 2008.
7. Barbara I. Dewey, Peter B. DeBlois, and the EDUCAUSE Current Issues Committee, "Current Issues Survey Report, 2006," EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Number 2, 2006.
8. John S. Camp, Peter B. DeBlois, and the EDUCAUSE Current Issues Committee, "Current Issues Survey Report, 2007," EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Number 2, 2007.
9. Debra H. Allison, Peter B. Deblois, the EDUCAUSE Current Issues Committee, "Current Issues Survey Report, 2008," EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Number 2, 2008.
10. Peter Morville, "Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become," O’Reilly Media. Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 2005.
11. Campus Technology, "Campus Technology Innovators, 2008," August 2008.
12. Wikipedia, "Cloud computing," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing.
13. Nicholas Carr, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google," WW. Norton & Company, New York, New York, 2008.
14. Wikipedia, "Cloud computing," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing.
15. The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Tech Therapy: Should You Outsource Your Technology Services," Wired Campus, April 3, 2008, http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2871/tech-therapy-should-you-outsource-your-technology-services?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en.
16. Trent Batson, "Can Campus IT Outsource to Web 2.0?," Campus Technology, April 2, 2008 http://campustechnology.com/articles/60410/.
17. Ronald Yanosky and Judith Caruso, "Process and Politics: It Governance in Higher Education" (Key Findings), EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Boulder CO, 2008.

* I have been conducting an informal survey with some friends and acquaintances, all of whom are not educators but are computer literate and web savvy. None of them have even heard of the so-called cloud. Thus, I have come to the conclusion, at least temporarily, that the average intelligent citizen who uses a computer and goes online regularly does not have any clue about cloud computing and what it means in relation to the future of web-based services, Internet access and our constantly changing lives in the Digital Age.

 

On Repairing Community College Online Degree and Certificate Program Websites

by George Lorenzo

Last week The SOURCE published a relatively brief report titled “What Community Colleges Need to Know About Advertising & Marketing Online Programs.”  It generated hundreds of downloads and some very interesting comments.

For example, please see the email below I received from a community college director of online learning. The director’s sentiments are similar to many others in the same line of work.

”Thank you for sending the link to your report. I read through it and found it to be full of very helpful, practical tips. Unfortunately, I did not find that our college is doing many of those things at all. I have a lot of work to do!”

The director added that he would get back with me for possible assistance/advice related to fixing their website sometime in the unknown future.

Well, the time is really now. Having a website that provides meaningful information is a basic necessity. It does not have to be real sophisticated in the beginning – just enough to show your visitors in a clear and informative fashion what you are offering and how they can apply or obtain more information. Keep building on that in a continuous improvement cycle to include many of the other features noted in the aforementioned report, and you are on your way.  

Many postsecondary colleges that offer online associate degree and certificate programs face similar circumstances. Why?  I don’t know the answer.  Is it because funds are not allocated for, at the very least, making their web pages more comprehensible and easier to navigate? Is it because online learning departments don’t get the attention they might deserve from community college IT departments and/or high level administrators?

I have had some conversations with people who know a lot about how community colleges operate and have been told that they often have very poor practices related to accounting and money management. Plus, faculty members, as well as administrators, have told me that online education is still not fully accepted by the professionals who run some community colleges at the highest levels.  So, perhaps it is a combination of several things – poor fund allocation strategies, or no funds, and no real support – in which case we’ll continue to see some online learning department websites out there that are pretty dismal.

Other community college professionals have told me that their websites are under development (going on over nine months now with no significant improvement).

That’s all too bad, really. We are not talking about investing huge sums of money to fix a website in order to have a basic, first-phase presence that looks professional and has information that could be the right catalyst for getting student enrollments. I think, depending on how many web pages and features need to be revamped, you could be looking at anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for a quick repair. Perhaps, however, getting this kind of minimal support is extremely hard to obtain or next to impossible for some community colleges? 

Comments, of course, are welcome.

Higher Education is at a Strategic Inflection Point

by President of Shoreline Community College
and SOURCE Editorial Board Member Lee Lambert
reprinted from President's Blog/Lee Lambert: Sustaining Shoreline for Student Success

In “Only The Paranoid Survive,” Andy Grove, co-founder and chairman of the board of Intel Corporation wrote, “a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it can just as likely signal the beginning of the end.”

This is the case for public education as a whole and especially true for Washington state’s community and technical colleges. There are many factors driving the need for change in our system. Dramatic cost shifts to students in the form of tuition and fees, significant reductions in state support, globalization and technological advances are driving the need for envisioning a new future for our colleges.

This new vision must include a dramatic shift from the model of teaching and learning currently deployed in our system. The community and technical college system in its present form was enacted into law in 1967. Under past circumstances, the system served the residents and businesses quite well. With its emphasis on open access, the system paved the way for scores of individuals to receive a quality education at an affordable price. Many of these individuals have gone on to be business leaders, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, teachers and the list goes on. Legislators, past and present, should be proud of the system they helped form. The countless educators, staff, administrators and boards of trustees deserve our respect and appreciation for the outstanding work they have done to educate and train the residents of Washington state. Employers – large and small, past and present – should be thanked immeasurably for their commitment to partnerships with colleges and support for the students that often go on to become valued employees.

When they were established, community and technical colleges were an innovative response to serious needs. However, the law is nearly a half-century old and crafted for a different era. As they say on Wall Street, “Past performance does not guarantee or imply future success,” a warning well worth heeding. Colleges can once again be an innovative response to serious needs, but not without significant changes made as soon as possible. I believe the challenges are clear and the solutions available for a brighter future where the system can continue to be an innovative leader.

Forces driving change

It is tempting to attribute today’s challenges to the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. This is akin to saying the problem is not of our doing, placing the blame at someone else’s doorstep and shunning responsibility and accountability. Undoubtedly, the recession is painful, but it obscures the truth that the winds of change have been gathering strength for decades. As Walt Kelly’s cartoon-strip character, Pogo so pointedly said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

As I reflect on my own schooling, I realize that I received a less-than optimal education in high school. And, that was from 1977-81. In 1983, the “A Nation at Risk” report was released, signaling the need for change or America’s standing would be compromised. Another important snapshot, published this past May by the independent Washington State Budget and Policy Center, reveals a slow-but-steady shift over the past two decades away from public support for higher education to placing a greater burden on students for the cost of their education. All the while, positive student learning outcomes at all levels are in serious doubt and U.S. students face increasing competition from abroad in a globalized economy.

For the first time in U.S. history, the current generation of college-age Americans will be less educated than their parents’ generation, according to the non-profit group, Achieving the Dream. If our state, and nation hope to attract and retain the best talent in order to maintain economic viability, we must raise the educational standard for all residents.

The 21st Century version of globalization – as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likes to call it, Globalization 3.0 – has made human capital the No. 1 currency. According to the World Economic Forum report, “Human capital is replacing financial capital as the engine of economic prosperity.” The ability to attract and retain the best talent from wherever will define a nation’s, a state’s, a company’s success or failure. Therefore, a nation’s or a state’s success, will turn on its ability to train and educate its citizens. However, the skills needed are those that the current system is failing to deliver.

What are those skills? Tony Wagner, in “The Global Achievement Gap,” details the Seven Survival Skills our students must acquire to be globally competent. While much more is needed and expected for ongoing success, these skills are foundational to that success. In “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back,” Friedman and his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum, argue that individuals need to think, act and perform like an immigrant, a waitress and an artisan. In other words, everyone is going to have to develop extra skills and abilities.

Another key consideration is the need to close the educational achievement gap, especially for our low income, disadvantaged populations. The recent report released by the American Council on Education, “Minorities in Higher Education – Twenty-Fourth Status Report: 2011 Supplement,” underscores the pressing challenge facing us as a nation. This challenge continues to persist with very little cost saving scalable solutions being piloted.

The clarion call has been sounded time and time again with little or no meaningful gains being made. The Educational Testing Service, in its 2007 report, “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future,” writes, “there is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem…we must raise our learning levels, increase our reading and math skills and narrow the existing achievement gaps…” This report utilized data and was released before the current economic crisis. If we thought it was difficult during good times to solve this national and state-wide challenge, it may seem near impossible giving the current set of circumstances. However, I don’t believe or accept the premise the challenge can’t be solved now. It will require a laser like focus, and a total restructure of how we approach teaching and learning to turn the tide.

Fortunately, there are positive solutions we can employ now. These innovative approaches will require all of us to collectively and dramatically shift our thinking, and create systems and processes that will welcome current innovations and allow for experimentation.

At Shoreline, we’re trying changes to meet students’ needs. For example, we are piloting a modularized developmental math program. Students move through the modules at their own pace, completing what they can during the quarter. What they pass, they keep, and pick up where they left off the next quarter. We’re building on our successes in the online environment, including fully online health informatics and supply-chain management degrees. We’re creating a virtual college that can serve students wherever they are in the world. Our automotive technician and CNC machinist programs are the blueprints for delivering employable skills with third-party verified, portable certifications. We’re expanding our international education program to benefit both domestic and foreign students. We’re actively courting private-side partnerships to offset the continuing loss of public funding.

These are all efforts within the existing regulatory framework, but systemic change will require systemic solutions. To that end, we’re also working with the decision-makers to look at how best to change outdated rules when they get in the way of our mission of helping students, our community and our state.

Are We on a Path Toward an Unprecedented Societal Crisis?

by George Lorenzo, Editor of the SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies

For a great story about how someone beat the odds and pulled himself up from poverty through higher education and sheer hard work and determination, beginning with community college attendance, see SOURCE Editorial Board member Terry O’Banion’s  “I Am a Community College Student” essay reprinted  in Community College Week. Terry’s longstanding upwardly mobile career as a leader in the community college sector spans 50 years, from living in a chicken coop as a boy to President Emeritus of the League for Innovation and currently Senior Advisor at Walden University.

I’m sure there are many stories of a similar nature  to Terry’s, including my own featured in the earlier three-part series of this blog,  in which hard-working community college students from poverty-stricken or low-income  families pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. However, I also believe that the higher education playing field has changed dramatically since my days as a college student as well as since Terry’s, making the likelihood of such successes much harder to achieve than in years past.

Consider the following information from an article published inside the recent October 31 issue of Time Magazine, appropriately headlined “I Owe U.”:

• “The cost of college has soared 538% over the past 30 years. That’s more than four times the growth of consumer prices and almost twice the increase in health care costs.”
• According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the wages of those with a college degree have been roughly flat for 10 years.”
• U.S. student-loan debt has exceeded credit-card debt for the first time and is on track to reach $1 trillion. College graduates in 2011 are labeled as the “Most Indebted Class Ever.”
• Increased college costs, more borrowing, and a lack of good-paying jobs could result in long-term stunted economic growth in the U.S. as “today’s grads end up being too poor to start a business or buy a house or send their own children to a university.”

What does this all mean for the future of our adult society in the U.S.? Are we producing a large population of stressed-out, overly debt-laden people who can’t see the light out of their lower economic status, regardless of the degrees they earned?  

In addition, how does this scenario play out for community colleges? You would think that enrollments would continue to be rising due to the simple fact that community colleges are more affordable, but that does not seem to be the case. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, made note of enrollments slowing down at community colleges.  In another story from The Chicago Tribune, it was explained that a recent drop in enrollments at Illinois community colleges could partially be due to more financially strapped students choosing work over school.

I hate to sound like an alarmist, but the so-called “College Payoff” theme, whereby we are advising students that going into debt in order to ultimately earn a degree can be considered a wise pathway in the long term, looks like a bad idea.  Instead, shouldn’t we be advising students who do not have any financial support to avoid going into deep debt and to work at whatever job(s) they can find and enroll in only those courses they can pay for out of their pockets combined with any aid they may qualify for through federal and/or state grants?

All these challenges also point toward a growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Are we increasingly becoming a society in which only the wealthy can go to a decent college or university?  Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are students with lots of student-loan debt and no decent employment in sight.  Are such examples of discontent the beginning of an unprecedented societal crisis or am I being overly alarmist?

Comments welcome…. 

ABOUT SOURCE SCHOLARS

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