Changing teaching and learning at Worthy University
Malcolm Brown
Dartmouth College

Assumptions
Setting: a small, major private university that attempts to bring to students and faculty the best of both worlds: high quality research in the context of a liberals arts tradition. The institution has three professional schools: engineering, law, and medicine. As a smaller institution, services tend to be more centralized than at larger research schools. Departments and even the professional schools are glad not to have to run their own mail servers and to be relieve of the burden of managing their networking infrastructure.The university has in the past been a leader in the use of computing in education, having been a early adopter of GUI-based desktop computing and universal network connectivity. The use of computing in teaching and learning, especially with respect to low threshold applications, is so routine as to be taken for granted. Beyond that, most faculty see the advantage of using digital resources in their teaching. The gating factors are the time it takes to prepare them and the copyright issues associated with much of the more interesting content. The faculty hold a great deal of unofficial sway in the governance of the institution. The school requires that all undergraduate own a personal computer.

Context
The Provost is relatively new, not yet a full year on the job.The institution is not facing serious challenges. Its financial situation is lean but it is a leanness that can be managed. The alumni have become increasingly vocal about Worthy’s attention to undergraduate education. They have good memories, but have the perception that Worthy’s attention is drifting away from this focus. It was in response to the alumni pressure that Worthy identified teaching and learning as a major area of self-study for its re-accreditation report. Some 50% of Worthy’s classes utilize the current course web system. Roughly two-thirds of the classrooms have technology permanently installed, and faculty keep asking for such treatments in all the classrooms. In the past, several attempts to establish some kind of teaching center have floundered, all due to faculty resistance. The typical faculty response to the idea of teaching center is “we don’t need one of those; we just need more smart classrooms.”

Scenario
Joana Stern is provost at Worthy University. She has been a member of the economics department at Worthy for sixteen years and became provost just ten months ago. She is looking over, again, the accreditation report, which was issued two months earlier. One of the three areas of self-study undertaken in the report was the area of teaching and learning. It is this section that has her attention now.While the report found nothing seriously lacking in Worthy’s teaching and learning efforts, it did detect an lack of initiative and leadership. In the authors’ opinion, Worthy was covering the basics. Its classrooms were in good shape and reasonably equipped with respect to technology. Worthy had an informal teaching and learning program, offering only a minimal orientation program for graduate students and new faculty. Everything else was as you would expect. Worthy was using the standard course management system from the company XYZZY and faculty seemed reasonably satisfied with it. Yet something seemed missing. There was no leadership, no over-arching vision, and certainly nothing that would enable Worthy to stand out among its peer institutions and be a more attractive prospect for graduating high school students.
The report, together with conversations with a few key faculty, has convinced Provost Stern that Worthy should take some action on the basis of the accreditation report. There were also increased rumblings from the alumni that were beginning to trickle their way up to the trustees. To do nothing in this area would become increasingly untenable.

But the challenge! How to find the resources needed at time when fiscal resources are limited and all the faculty already have full teaching loads. How can one initiate something innovative in the area of teaching and learning and yet doesn’t require significant investments of time on the faculty? Change is expensive. An additional question is how to undertake something that could see widespread adoption. Worthy is a conservative place with respect to changes in its culture.
She recalls conversations she has had recently with the university librarian and the CIO. Their organizations collaboratively ran and supported the XYZZY course management system. Both had expressed frustration with it. In addition to being expensive, it was hard to customize and hence hard to do much that was innovative with it. Both of them had called her attention to NextGenCMS, a course management system that was available as open source. Indeed, they had downloaded a copy and had been experimenting with it.

These conversations had prompted Provost Stern, while at the Prestigious Conference, to go to a session devoted to the NextGenCMS. This session had been helpful, as it had focused on the pedagogical goals of the system rather than the underlying technology. This NextGenCMS had been built to promote learning by making tools and mechanisms available that made it easier for faculty to make content available for students. One such mechanism was a large, inter-institutional archive of—what was the term?—learning objects which faculty could browse for content for their courses. Once located, they could be immediately “snapped” into place and available to students.

Other comments that she had heard confirmed that NextGenCMS was indeed an innovative application. She wonders if perhaps it could be the basis for a fresh initiative in the teaching and learning area, one that would address points raised in the accreditation report. For any initiative like this to succeed, she knows that she will need to get buy-in from three principal groups: library, IT, and above all faculty. She might also need to provide additional resources to the library and IT. But faculty buy-in is the essential key.

It first must be ascertained if NextGenCMS is equal to its reputation. She raises this issue at her next meeting with Bob Teller, a chemistry professor who is currently serving as dean of faculty. Bob, initially, is dubious about any initiative in this area. In his opinion, if it’s not broken, there is no need to fix it, particularly when budgets are so tight and the chances of getting faculty buy-in are, in his opinion, not good. Besides, harumph, it’s well-known that all Worthy faculty are good teachers, otherwise they would not be at Worthy. Yet he too has read the accreditation report and concedes that this idea may be worth exploring and that it might well be worthwhile to appoint a committee to look into this. If nothing else, it might get the trustees and alumni off their backs.
This gives Provost Stern the opening she needs. She consults with the librarian and CIO and determines that conducting some pilot courses with NextGenCMS with not require any new servers or licenses. While they can support the test courses with current staff resources, anything beyond that will indeed require some additional resources. The CIO in particular mutters something about needing to integrate NextGenCMS with the campus portal and student information system. Provost Stern notes that without fully understanding it.

One key to getting faculty buy-in is to get the “right” faculty serve on the committee. She must appoint faculty who are respected by the colleagues and yet not viewed as unbridled IT enthusiasts. In a subsequent meeting with Bob Teller they are able to agree on a list of faculty who will serve on this committee. Half are faculty are those who Provost Stern feels fit the bill, which, when viewed overall, is a success. The remainder of the committee has been drawn from library and IT staff. The committee is charged with evaluating NextGenCMS and the learner-center principles on which it is based. If that is indeed the case, the committee is asked to make recommendations about its adoption at Worthy.

Three months later, in almost record time, the committee submits its report to Provost Stern. The committee feels that the new functionality in the NextGenCMS is significant and could well provide the basis for new curricular approaches at Worthy. The committee highlighted several capabilities of NextGenCMS that were especially significant. First, being an open-source application that adheres to many international standards, it provided the basis of integrating functions for both faculty students, functions which, under the current system, forces faculty and students to make numerous digital “stops,” entering a different password for each function. The calendar function is a good example: NextGenCMS’s calendar can synchronize with the current campus calendar application, so that complete calendar information (e.g., personal, academic, campus events) can be accessed from either system.
Another aspect of interest to faculty is the inter-institutional learning objects capability, which gives them access to a wide variety of course content developed by their peers at other institutions. If a simulation a Worthy professor needs has already been done elsewhere, the Worthy professor can simply download it and add it directly to the course content. No need to reinvent wheels or even to involve IT staff. The report points out that problem with the XYZZY system was that it could only support content that had been constructed specifically for use in the XYZZY application; hence the possibilities for inter-institutional sharing were quite limited.

The report concluded that the collaborative tools in NextGenCMS are much more robust than in the current application. Students can initiate their own discussion threads, share files with version control, and utilize the virtual whiteboard and chat functions, both of which can be logged for future reference. By simple point and click operations, faculty can easily link student groups to an assignment, can track a group’s progress, participate if needed in the group functions, and assign a single assignment grade that is distributed to all in the group. Again, it appears that NextGenCMS both supplies a learner-centered function while at the same time making the professor’s administration of the function easy and straightforward.

The committee calls attention to another significant NextGenCMS capability, the assessment tool. It makes it easier to construct tests and quizzes, and provides a broader range of question types, including a contextualized question function as well as a “drop the needle” function. Faculty can develop entire libraries of questions, can easily draw from that library to develop new assessments. By simply setting access permissions, faculty can share their assessment library with colleagues. NextGenCMS makes it easy to add hints and “wrong answer recommendations.” To enable students to do self-assessment, faculty can also enable students to generate quizzes and tests, drawing from some portion of the assessment library. Students simply request a quiz on a course unit, take it and are given recommendations for areas where improvement may be needed.

The next half of the committee’s report makes recommendations with respect to the resources that will be needed to make the transition to NextGenCMS and to support the use of its learner-centered features. On the technical side, a full time programmer will be needed to make local modifications to the code. That salary, Provost Stern calculates, can be recovered once Worthy no longer is required to pay the annual fee for its current CMS.

Provost Stern concludes from the report that the NextGenCMS application can provide the basis for the innovation she seeks. So she has the vehicle. Knowing that faculty cannot be “commanded” to use it, she decides that her best bet will be to put carrots in their path. So her strategy is twofold: provide resources to get NextGenCMS running on campus and then to encourage faculty to “next generation” teaching using course relief. She meets with the librarian and the CIO. They construct a plan to begin an initial installation of NextGenCMS; as they had indicated, they could pool current resources to get the application operational and support up to a dozen or so faculty using it. Her next step is to encourage the innovators to come forward and for that she needs a carrot. She hits on the idea of the Innovator Fellowship. Faculty can apply for the fellowship by writing up innovative teaching ideas that would be carried out using NextGenCMS and other support services already in place at Worthy. The carrot is course relief: every fellow gets a term of course relief to enable them to do what they have proposed.

The next ensuing year brings, overall, good results, though the pace of adoption is slow. The change is neither swift, dramatic, nor revolutionary. But the Fellowship has proved a popular program and competition for fellowships is keen. The past year has yielded six fellowships and nearly two dozen pioneers who are all using NextGenCMS. So far, both faculty and students are reporting overall satisfaction with the system and the support they are getting. There is a series of presentations planned, at which the Innovator Fellows, as well as other pioneers, will present their work to their colleagues. Challenges remain. It seems that the time is at hand to broaden the use of NextGenCMS, and resources need to be identified to support this increased usage. It will be necessary to convince faculty that it is worth changing from XYZZY to the new system. But Provost Stern, in the basis of the early adopters, is now fairly confidence that these challenges can indeed be met. But knowing what lies ahead, she meets with the CIO and librarian and arranges to the have them draw up a report on the first year’s experience with NextGenCMS. She asks them to emphasize the benefits the faculty will realize by switching and to point out ways faculty can do basic operations (such as the development of on-line tests) much more quickly with the new system. After the meeting, she heads to the Provost office kitchen for a cup of coffee. Musing on this long process, she realizes that the NextGenCMS project is less about technology and more about institutional change.

Lessons learned
The key challenge is that of institutional change. By comparison, the technology, while expensive, is easier to manage.
The faculty have to be motivated to change they way they do things, as some of them have years of investment in the way they teach.
The are pioneers and early adopters who can generate excitement and “good press” about the use of technology.
Adoption is a matter of building momentum, and the momentum needs to be sustained.
Leadership requires marshalling resources, shrewd tactical measures, continuous vision, good staff, and the ability to anticipate how the institutional culture will react.
Change and innovation is difficult to sustain all the way to the end point, at which time it becomes a part of the culture.