Lord Kelvin once made the observation, "If you can measure that of
which you speak and express it in numbers, you know something about your
subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is of a very
meager and unsatisfactory kind." If he is correct, then our knowledge
about how, and to what extent, the use of information technology in
teaching and learning affects outcomes--both learning and cost--is
meager indeed.
One of our continuing tasks must be to measure, hypothesize, and finally
formalize theories about how technology applies to the business
endeavor--in our case, the educational enterprise. One of our great
failings as a profession consists of relying too heavily on the
anecdotal and not doing the hard work of "proving" our concepts through
meticulous measurement and theory building. It is no wonder that we have
so much trouble convincing our chief financial officers that technology
should be considered an investment rather than some black hole that
sucks in money on an annual basis.
If, as many of us are already convinced, information technology will be
the lever that dramatically repositions the learning enterprise in our
society, then we have a truly formidable task ahead of us in selling a
significant reallocation of institutional resources away from personal
mediation and toward technology mediation. Absent well-documented
measurements of how much learning for how much resource, we can expect
to see a continuation of the pursuit of academic quality that is
indifferent to cost.
Perhaps the simpler view of this was expressed by Anatole France in the
apothegm, "People who don't count, don't count." I think the information
technology corollary is, "If you don't count it, it won't count."
Computer folk have counted lots of things for lots of years. Most of
those things had to do with the arcane details of how systems
"performed." They were measurements of inputs rather than outcomes and
were tenuously, if at all, related to business product: learning
outcomes. We need to turn our attention to helping faculty and learners
measure outcomes and the costs required to produce those outcomes.
Regardless of which measurement strategy we adopt, we must get on with
it. The portion of the institutional budget devoted to information
resources--computers, networks, instructional technology, libraries, and
the like--is growing well beyond 10 percent and rapidly approaching the
budget of the largest colleges in our universities. We simply must
devote some time and effort to demonstrating, in a measured way, the
payoff from using information technology in higher education. Our
colleagues want such measurements, our legislatures and funding agencies
are demanding such measurements, and the future health and well-being of
our profession require such measurements.
Whatever we do, the bottom line demands that we provide insightful and
useful information that is comprehensible by the average individual on
our faculty, in our administration, on our boards of trustees, and in
our legislatures.
It seems more and more to me that our job is to make a stone soup of
sorts. You probably remember the old story that tells of a peddler who
comes into a village one day and says, "I can make delicious soup using
only this stone. All I need is a big pot, some water, and a fire."
Everyone in town comes out into the public square to scoff. Gradually,
however, the people become captivated by this fool and his rock. Why not
give him what he asks for? they think. This could be entertaining.
Having set up the pot over the fire, he drops his magic stone into the
boiling water, saying, "This soup will be delicious, but a pinch of salt
would improve it tremendously." Willing to bend the rules to such a
minor extent, someone inevitably goes off to fetch some salt. By the
same tactic, a little pepper is added, then a handful of herbs, a few
carrots, several potatoes, perhaps a turnip or two. Meanwhile, the kids
are turning somersaults in the village commons, the dogs all are
barking, and a festive atmosphere is infecting the crowd. Everybody's
chatting and gossiping and wondering how anyone could be dumb enough to
think one could make soup from a stone. The concoction by this time is
beginning to smell pretty good, and our peddler is saying, "You know,
this soup will taste wonderful exactly as it is, but a few chunks of
meat would make it really excellent!"
We have so far managed to find institutional commitments for some salt
and turnips. We now need to turn our attention to the meat. In the case
of learning outcomes, that will require significant restructuring and
resource reallocation. Our institutions will be understandably slow to
provide this "meat" without some effort on our part to formally measure
the meat's costs and benefits. The magic stone for our soup needs to be
built on measurement, theory, and credible "proof" that information
technology will be the driving force of the coming transformation of
higher education.
Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is president of Educom. heterick@educom.edu