Do you have an investment strategy on your campus to guide the way you allocate information technology resources to teaching and learning? If your campus is like most, your investments are probably concentrated in three areas: 1) purchasing hardware and software for individual faculty members and for student labs; 2) increasing network connectivity by building the campus infrastructure; and 3) funding the technical staff required to support the first two. In some cases, you may also have invested in an instructional technology unit specifically designated to help "the faculty" use technology in their classes or develop multimedia instructional materials.
If you ask campus leaders why they are making these investments, they are likely to respond that they must do so in order to remain competitive (or comparable) with their peer institutions. Some may also cite traditional academic goals such as improving the quality of instruction; others may express a desire to enhance academic productivity. But when pressed to describe how they intend to bring about these outcomes or what they see as the connection between buying hardware and creating instructional change, their answers frequently become less precise.
Such investment strategies focus more on the technology itself than on ideas about how and why technology might be applied to teaching and learning. They also add substantially to the input side of higher education's cost equation. What is missing are concrete plans for linking investments in information technology to the attainment of strategic academic goals.
Furthermore, these strategies are teacher-centered rather than learner-centered-in the words of the TQM movement, they are provider-driven rather than customer-driven. Teacher-centered strategies treat "the faculty" as an undifferentiated mass; learner-centered strategies begin with a focus on students and seek to have an impact on as many of them as possible. Let's consider an example of a learner-centered academic investment strategy. Suppose you were to do an analysis of your undergraduate academic program to find out where students are concentrated. Ron Bleed, Vice Chancellor of Information Technologies at the Maricopa Community College District, decided to do just that. Maricopa, one of the nation's largest institutions of higher education with a student enrollment of 90,000, offers 2,000 distinct courses. But Bleed discovered that 44 percent of the student enrollment at Maricopa is concentrated in just 25 courses. Put another way, about 1 percent of Maricopa's courses generate nearly half of its total enrollment!
The 25 course titles would not surprise you: they include introductory studies in English, mathematics, psychology, sociology, economics, accounting, biology, chemistry, etc. Any institution with a computerized registration system can do such an analysis very quickly. I would guess that Maricopa's numbers would be typical of all community colleges and probably not that far off for most four-year institutions.
Should Maricopa develop a strategy for helping "the faculty" or for helping the faculty in those 25 courses who teach 44 percent of the students? Should Maricopa have a strategy for helping faculty develop multimedia materials regardless of what they teach or for developing or, better yet, acquiring multimedia materials for these 25 courses? Should Maricopa think about re-designing all of its courses by integrating technology and new pedagogical techniques or should they think about reengineering these 25 courses to produce the most effective learning experiences possible for students? If you seek to develop a strategy that is learner-centered, rather than teacher-centered, the answer is clear.
Bleed also discovered that the satisfactory completion rate for these courses is 64 percent. A rule-of-thumb estimate of direct instructional costs yields a figure of about $38 million per year not including the costs of facilities, overhead or student support services. This means that more than $13 million per year is spent on unsuccessful attempts at learning.
In 1992, Bruce Johnstone, the former chancellor of the SUNY system, wrote a monograph on what he called learning productivity. Johnstone urges that we give less attention to cost-side of productivity and more attention to the output side-or the productivity of learning. Expressed another way, Johnstone suggests that the productivity problem in higher education stems not from excessive costs but from insufficient learning. His thesis is that enhancements in academic productivity should come not from cheapening inputs-mainly the faculty and staff-but by increasing higher education's output-mainly learning, in a way that delivers the same or more educational quality but for less money. Johnstone sees technology-aided, self-paced learning as a key element of such a strategy.
It is difficult to apply Johnstone's creative thinking to an entire institution. But if we wed Johnstone's ideas to Bleed's analysis, the proverbial light goes on. Suppose we decide to increase the learning productivity of not 2,000 courses but of a mere 25-about 1 percent of the total. And suppose we set as our goal upgrading the quality of these courses to eliminate attrition and to strengthen substantially the foundation that successful students build on in future courses. Then we can examine how information technology can be employed to accomplish this goal and what kind of support is required to do so.
Some of the ways that information technology might be put to use would be to create a series of modularized, multimedia materials that would be delivered both on campus and off on a year-round basis. Designed so that students study at their own pace, such materials would include self-assessments and mastery tests as well. Instructional support staff could target their efforts on faculty working to redesign these courses. The $13 million per year currently wasted on students' not learning would provide a formidable financial base from which to launch this effort. And, of course, if Maricopa joined with other institutions that spend the same $13 million on identical instructional problems to co-develop or purchase course materials, we'd be talking real money.
It's time for our investment strategies to move beyond the laissez-faire, build-it-and-they-will-come approaches that predominate on campus today. What we need are academic plans for using technology rather than academics planning to use technology. We must identify and solve significant learning problems. Only then will we realize a return on our information technology investments.
Carol A. Twigg is vice president of Educom. [email protected]