Productivity. There, I've said it! It is a word that many folks in the
academic community treat with the affection generally reserved for the
bubonic plague. It is the subject of a recent National Research Council
study that attempts to rationalize why we haven't or can't measure it in
the service sector of our economy. Lately, it is a pejorative relative
to the academy, as in, "Why aren't our institutions more productive?"
How do we show that information technology and the panoply of
information resources made accessible by computers and networks
contribute to academic productivity? And, not incidentally, just what is
academic productivity?
If we define productivity as creating something with economic value (a
frequent dictionary definition of the term), then clearly higher
education is productive. Studies continue to show that those members of
our society with a baccalaureate degree have a lifetime earning
expectancy that exceeds those lacking such credentials. Economic value
certainly accrues at least to the student and to those governments that
are the recipients of greater tax revenue as a result of the higher
earnings.
So, if that is the case, why do we still hear critics complain about
academic productivity? They likely have in mind a definition of
productivity that measures the ratio of some output to the resources
input to produce it. If a college or university education is the output
and if the cost of achieving the same is the measure of input resources,
then, adjusted for inflation, higher education has been increasingly
less productive for quite some time.
Will the infusion of information technology into the educational process
change this ratio? Most certainly it will--and in entirely the wrong
direction if that technology is simply a bolt-on to the existing
process. Can the infusion of technology change the ratio in the right
direction? The answer has to be a qualified yes--qualified because
absent any significant restructuring of the educational process, we can
look at only a few special situations for guidance.
In the distance education arena, study after study has confirmed there
is no significant difference in "learning" between students in a
conventional classroom and students at a distance on the other end of a
television link. It appears that even the most passive information
technology can be used without negative impact on learning. Similarly,
we have some initial evidence that the use of multimedia to replace
actual contact in wet labs can reduce the cost of a laboratory course
without lessening student mastery of the subject material. Some evidence
even indicates that student accomplishment as measured by conventional
testing increases in this situation.
So, we know that in the macro sense, the cost of completing a degree
program is going up faster than inflation while, in the micro sense, the
cost of completing a particular learning experience can go down as the
result of using information technology.
Likely there is more than one measure of productivity. If so, then at
least some of them should be related to the institutional mission. Some
institutions, especially our liberal arts colleges, differentiate
themselves based on residential living experiences and the
socialization/acculturation that is a part of that experience. Some
institutions are heavily focused on research, and many institutions have
a strong public service/outreach component. The productivity profiles of
institutions are likely to be different based on their sense of
institutional mission.
If we focus on learning regardless of institutional setting, it should
be possible to say something about productivity changes as a consequence
of the infusion of information technology. To do so will require general
acceptance of some measures of student accomplishment and a realistic,
fully burdened analysis of the cost of providing that learning
experience. Efforts by several disciplinary associations and
organizations, such as the College Board and Educational Testing
Service, to create advanced placement and subject mastery examinations
are a step in the direction of creating generally accepted output
measures for subject mastery. Most institutions already have
sufficiently disaggregated accounting processes to allow us to measure
the real costs of providing the context within which a student "learns"
a particular subject. So, in principle, it should already be possible to
do some comparative studies on the impact of information technology on
academic productivity--at least if we restrict ourselves to the issue of
student learning of subject material. Our publics, based on their own
experiences, are convinced that information technology should lead to
greater productivity. In order to address our critics and to better
understand our own processes, it would be valuable to make the
measurement that looks at productivity in all its aspects. Rather than
anathematize productivity in the academy, we should be seeking ways to
measure it, to make all of its various manifestations clear to our
publics, and to determine how information technology can contribute to
its improvement.
Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is president of Educom. [email protected]
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