Strategic Plan

In August 2004, the NLII began a strategic planning exercise to examine the needs of its members, its position in the market and the changes that might make the NLII stronger. A major outcome of that effort was the transition to the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) as it exists today.

A group comprised of NLII Planning Committee members and others familiar with the NLII examined the organization's history, effectiveness, external environment, and aspirations. Joel Hartman, Planning Committee chair, and Jacqueline Brown offered some reflections that represented the feeling of the larger group. They cited two fundamental programmatic limitations of the NLII:

• As its name suggested, the NLII was focused on learning infrastructure: course management systems, learning objects, assessment, and so on. Based on that discussion, the group noted: "The tools are the easy part." Cultural and organizational change is much more complex.
• The NLII inherited EDUCAUSE's core constituency: CIOs. However, it is virtually impossible to change teaching and learning without involving the academic side of the institution.

The group observed that information technology types live to build and support infrastructure. The early NLII meetings were attended primarily by information technology types; the activities mirrored an information technology approach to teaching and learning. ("Let's get together and build X.") The problem remained, however, that neither learning infrastructure nor information technology organizations are adept at changing teaching and learning practice.

At the same time, NLII had begun to attract more and more instructional technology types, as well as faculty, librarians, and others outside the traditional IT organization. This enriched the conversation but did not lead to transformation because there was no overarching strategy for bringing these constituencies together to produce transformation. Hartman and Brown submitted that the NLII's unfinished business and principal challenge for the future concerned supporting the transformation of teaching and learning. Higher education could not be changed by thinking of academic technology as the solution. As the EDUCAUSE Board had already recognized, the association's focus should not be about IT, it should be about change in higher education through IT.

The planning group also recognized that NLII members faced another challenge - better understanding and responding to the new generation of students entering their campuses. These students adopt technologies that are not part of the traditional arsenal (e.g., wikipediae, blogs, IM, social networking sites, etc.) and use them in ways that are detached from the processes of the academy. Higher education institutions provide little or no constructive context in which students can use these technologies to improve learning, and so they use them to amuse themselves. They have a naïve understanding of intellectual property and academic integrity, and they learn in a multi-tasking, experiential fashion. The planning group concluded that NLII members need a deeper understanding of these phenomena so that they can better serve and educate today's learners.

Ten years after the creation of the NLII, a learning infrastructure exists. However, much work remains to be done on the more significant challenge - finding ways to ensure that people, pedagogy and technology support student success. To address that challenge, the planning group recommended that NLII itself transform into the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and adopt the mission of "Advancing Learning Through IT Innovation." The strategic plan outlines the planning group's recommendations that continue to form the core of the ELI agenda.