Adoption of NextGenCMS at Egoid University
Phil Long, MIT

Assumptions:
- The setting is a medium sized private university that emphasizes both research and teaching, with the expectation that service to the community, nation and the world is a manifestation of responsible citizenship.
- The university values technology as a tool and area of innovation. Technology implementation for teaching is largely dependent on individual faculty or faculty teams working on projects where innovative teaching includes specific technologies.
- A mixture of fee-for-service centers and basic core of information systems infrastructure services provide central support for educational technology. A small educational technology team must work closely with departments, laboratories, and centers to scale their services.
- Central resources are provided but a gap exists between the diversity of independent projects and the portfolio of centrally managed technology services. This is in part by design, fostering competition among competing ideas/projects. However, inattention to the implications of transitioning from project to service
and in particular the budget model needed to address this on an on-going basis exacerbates the discrepancy between the level of departmental innovation and central services.
- The university culture is such that faculty and students generally embrace the use of technology as an integral part of education.
- Student access to technology is generally not an issue. However, sensitivity on the part of the administration and some faculty to the potential for some students not to have comparable technology access remains a potent undercurrent.
- The university has widely differing views by various schools and departments as well as by faculty members. This is summarized by the faculty senate culture which allows a vote of one to veto a plurality.

Context:
- The Provost of Egoid University has recently concluded that a centralized CMS provides the best solution for cost-effective technology based teaching support. However, the Provost is both a leader and a peer among powerful and decentralized departmental structure.
- The Provost has endorsed a specific CMS strategy and provided some central funding. Many faculty have adopted it, while others continue to develop their own solutions, or participate in research teams that are developing new technologies in potential competition with a central CMS standard.
- The University has partially funded a project to develop a new open source CMS that will provide a framework of core central CMS services, with a clearly defined profile by which tools developed by faculty and students can extend its functionality. Being centrally blessed, it runs counter to the
departmental/faculty based innovation and development tradition. This immediately raises skepticism on the part of faculty.
- Faculty adopters of the anointed CMS range from early adopters, evangelists to complete skeptics.
- About 45% faculty utilize the current a CMS (Course Management System) to at least supplement faceto- face courses.
- A key issue for the Provost is spurring continued adoption while balancing the essential requirement that it respect and enable the diverse nature of faculty needs for educational technology.
- The cultural bias of the institution is to promote diverse, independent projects and let them compete for the resources and interest of the faculty.
- The Provost is also responding to severe budget constraints and is seeking economies of scale across the institution. He has committed to continued central support of the current CMS development work but has also ruled out any further increases. New development and new functionality will not come from central
funds. External collaborations, grants, or research foundation support is encouraged to meet these needs. Nevertheless, he is an advocate of a central CMS solution providing it can capture faculty imagination and support their diverse needs.

Scenario:
As a leading R1 university Egoid ‘s primary mission is the creation of knowledge and its application to improve humankind. An equal responsibility shouldered by Egoid U. is the education of the next generation of scholars, engineers, poets, and citizens who will continue this noble enterprise. In many respects the boundary between the educational mission and that of the research activity is porous. Students are expected to find their path through the rich
variety of academic disciplines and join with faculty in their professional endeavors as scientists, engineers, and scholars. This rich educational and research environment is an outcome of selecting high standards for students, hiring the best faculty possible, and providing them with resources that foster their
scholarly pursuits. A characteristic of Egoid is the diverse, decentralized structure of governance and resource distribution. As Provost of such an institution, Jasper Newberry believed that leadership is exerted by listening carefully to the voices of the faculty and reinforcing those pillars of the institution that underlie its success. This occasionally requires taking firm stands, but more often it involves respecting the disparate needs of the disciplines, supporting central services that cultivate the commons and rewarding independent success.

It’s not an easy job.

Until recently courseware was generally regarded as the purview of the departments. If they wanted to have an online environment to supplement their course, they could build it, buy it, or borrow it themselves; else they went without. More recently, however, the expense of the redundancy that had ensued from this path, along with the diversity of the student experience in trying to work using the distinctive online course sites of the faculty led Jasper to reconsider
central support. Perhaps, he thought, there was a case for institutional investment, as long as it supported the diversity and independence that was the hallmark of the university academic structure.

Provost Newberry chairs an educational technology council consisting of key faculty, service providers and research centers. He challenged the group at their last meeting to consider criteria by which a course management system would be evaluated and considered for adoption at Egoid U. A lively discussion ensued in which the buy, borrow or build approaches were dissected. On the one hand, there was a strong feeling that buying a commercial product was the preferred
strategy – developing enterprise software systems was not the mission of the institution. In addition, Egoid U. has some influence in partner relationships with vendors that suggested the potential to coop or encourage their development directions would better suit its needs. The vendor’s own need to innovate to remain commercially successful was a powerful attribute that could be leveraged with sufficient persuasion.

Others on the advisory council were unconvinced. The extraordinary independence of the departments translated into quite distinct needs, even for what other institutions might consider common tools. Grade books, for example, were radically different in physics compared to math, let alone the process by which the writing program tracked and graded the work of its students. Yet a commercial course management system generally offered one. If the needs of the different
departments could not be well met off the shelf, there needed to be a mechanism by which the departments could modify or create their own tools that plugged into the course management system. “We may not be software developers as our core mission,” said Prof. Swift from Nuclear Engineering, “but if we have to build the tools that reflect how we teach, we will.”

There is a strong tradition at Egoid U. to build tools or develop projects that solve specific needs faculty encounter in their various courses, fueled by the same creativity that marks their research. Indeed, Provost Newberry was fond of pointing out that a faculty member who couldn’t figure out ways to meet their research computing needs wasn’t Egoid material. For their classroom needs, this translated into building simulations and interactive problem sets, but the concern now is having an infrastructure suitable to deliver them. A CMS that provided an environment within which these different learning objects could live might actually leverage the work already going on independently.

Prof. Lovelace, the CIO at Egoid U., pointed out that this was one of the characteristics of the NextGenCMS project. It provided a framework, she said, and a set of design guidelines that developers of learning objects could, if followed, use to plug their applications into the CMS and get the enterprise services (authorization, content distribution, digital repositories, etc.) that they needed. In fact, if the faculty of Egoid U. were able to set aside their concerns about
software built elsewhere, there was great promise in the formation of learning object repositories from contributors around the country and the world that they might be able to use. This, of course, assumed that the NIMBY syndrome could be overcome! The outcome of the meeting was a willingness to further explore the NextGenCMS system, and Jasper charged his CIO with that task. However, it was made equally clear that while he understood that Open Source nature of the NextGenCMS did not mean this was a cost free system he needed to have a clear business model for delivering and supporting NextGenCMS along with an evaluation of the scalability of the environment. Jasper used to run a large scale computing operation and knew full well that something that satisfied the first few hundred early adopters did not necessarily predict that the next thousand were going to be equally pleased.

Provost Newberry knew that the key to adoption at Egoid U. was transparency. The faculty needed to be able to continue to do their work, without being intruded about by yet another new thing that challenged them for the one resource they didn’t have, and he couldn’t give to them - time. Further, each distinct department needed to see the NextGenCMS as something that met their unique needs. There was a saying in Academic Council; it only takes one vote to derail the majority. Hence, everyone needed to see the NextGenCMS as providing their solution, or at least not inhibiting it – they needed to select the tools that they wanted and not be forced to deal with anything else. Some faculty and departments wanted to be able to brand their look and feel to reflect their interests, while still providing a consistency of experience that minimized relearning a faculty member’s course site by students. He knew, however, the real challenge was going to be how to get the other campus enterprise systems to work well with the NextGenCMS. Faculty were clamoring for grade submission and course evaluations, to name a few, to be made easier and less onerous than the distinct individual applications imposed on them now.

It occurred to Jasper that he was potentially facing the specter of another enterprise behemoth, and it frightened him. Was he walking into an open source version of PeopleSoft, with no company to blame and no scapegoat to hang but himself? Troubled, Jasper walked back to his office and stared out the window at the rain starting to streak the windows overlooking the bay.

Lessons from the scenario:
1. Technology adoption in teaching must demonstrate direct benefit faculty (save time)
2. Central services enable and support “local” technology choices
3. Responding to faculty culture is key to the question of adoption
4. Provosts lead by a mixture of fiscal authority and bestowed local empowerment
5. Central support is permission, not necessarily sufficient funding
6. Exerting leadership requires vision, technical expertise, persistence and fiscal entrepreneurship