Toward academic and research technologies collaboration: A faculty scenariorevealing how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Prologue:
Ann Jackson loves research. The only thing Ann loves more than research is teaching. Ann Jackson hates committees. The only thing Ann hates more than committees is teaching.

How can Ann love and hate teaching at the same time? The scenario below presents acurrent state many faculty members experience, followed by a scenario of what it could be like after a structured collaboration of the many academic and research technologies
that are being concurrently developed.

Current Scenario:
Ann loves teaching. The days she leaves the classroom after strong interaction with her students, when she can bring her favorite research in and the students are engaged with the many possibilities, make her feel she is walking on air. Ann hates teaching. The days she struggles for hours to bring some resources to her students, to make them interoperate in spite of their differences, make her feel defeated. Just the multiple systems she needs to use, each with its own unique interface, basic transfer format, and authentication and authorization, deflect her energy from her domain expertise and make teaching dreadfully difficult. The struggle to allow students to participate in generating knowledge with real research transferred in palatable forms for
them becomes exhausting. No wonder Ann hates teaching.

Future Scenario:
Contrast that with the following future teaching and research situation brought about by a successful structured collaboration of the various organizations charged or identified with resolving some of academic and research technology issues. Ann thinks constantly about her various research projects and the course she is to teach. She is actively involved with several large research groups with members from different parts of the world. She has become facile with the research work sites that allow researchers to drag and drop various resources into local templates and, due to their built in API’s, enable the resources to automatically interoperate. Ann knows there are some experimental areas she can add resources but not modify, while on other sites her authorization allows her to conduct real-time experimental changes. She immediately starts setting up the group authorization levels for her students as she sees the same
potential for them. Dragging the resources from her personal workspace, (where she keeps her every changing professional portfolio, complete with sets of authorizations for who can see what) to one of her favorite research sites, she pursues the idea that this same site could become the nucleus for her course.
Quickly opening a new course master site, she sets the authorization and starts to build the various sub-sites or screens. Within a day or two Ann has the screens she needs start the course. She adds the functions to the student master course site: discussion, chat, resource searching, schedule, syllabus and real-time data gathering. Then she opens the course to the students even though it is two weeks before the start of the course. (As the students sign up for the course they are authorized to view aspects of the site and even develop personal profiles to share and discuss with others) She modifies the course as it
progresses, changing student roles and authorization, changing the syllabus to improve the course and building new screens, either by adapting a student screen, assigning her student assistant or doing it herself. By the middle of the course Ann has not only modified the course, but each student has a slightly different version of the course – all with the same sub-structure and some sub screens, but each with expanded screens for areas they emphasize.

The line between teaching and research has now become blurred. Ann shifts to presenting a case study to student teams and each team creates a sub site for their problem solving group. Sharing the problem solutions at the end of the course, Ann realizes that a couple of solutions may inform her and others in her international research team. The attribution of the research work allows her students recognition and allows them to begin the long road of professional development in a excited and seamless fashion, some already recognized for their work and sought after by other professors at other institutions who, as Ann, have looked in and participated in her course independent of distance. When the course ends Ann lets on to her students that this course really never ends, they can take some of the resources (perhaps not all…authorization), add them to their own portfolios in their person worksite, and continue to look in on future versions of the course.

Now, Ann loves teaching, period. The days she leaves the classroom after strong interaction are coupled with the preparation and real-time modification of ideas, resources and interaction. At all levels she can bring her research and involve students. Not only is she walking on air, but she is able to create the very air she walks upon.

Epilogue:
Each piece of the previous scenario exists. Only the integration of these pieces through a successful collaboration of academic and research technologies prevents researchers, instructors, and (most important) students from being able to bring the appropriate pieces together, have them interoperate, and end up with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Should we strive for less?