William Graves
On the Emerging Knowledge Economy

William Graves is president of COLLEGIS Research Institute, founder of the Institute for Academic Technology, and member of the EDUCAUSE board of directors.

Educom Review: You've recently transitioned from academia to the so-called real world; tell us about that.

GRAVES: As you know, I was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 31 years, and made a decision late last year to leave the University to join COLLEGIS. At the same time, we created the COLLEGIS Research Institute as a separate nonprofit organization, a reincarnation and refocusing of the Institute for Academic Technology done outside the University. I still love working in higher education, which I'm doing; I'm still working with almost all of the colleagues I brought together at the IAT; I'm still dealing with many of the same colleagues on a national basis that I did when I was at the University. And, maybe more to the point, I've really enjoyed the opportunity to practice on a broader scale what I've been preaching for so long.

ER: Let's explore that a little bit. Has there been any difference in the practice and the preaching?

GRAVES: Well, for eight years I was in the senior technology position at the University of North Carolina, so I was certainly practicing the management of information technology. But the thing that compelled me to step away from tenured faculty life was associated with what we were trying to do and accomplish at the IAT. And that idea in its origin was to create a national center where we could better understand the implications and applications of information technology for teaching and learning in higher education.

We had a good experience with the university, and were set up as part of it, as a practical research center trying to understand what works and what doesn't, and helping not only our own university but all colleges and universities. Indeed, other institutions increasingly asked us to come on-site to help them plan and implement instructional technology initiatives. But we couldn't do that very broadly from our university base. Now we can, as part of COLLEGIS, a company with a long and distinguished track record of providing on-site technology services to colleges and universities. So now we're fully in the business of practicing what we preach.

ER: Explore for us some of the issues and, in particular, go back to the idea of finding out what things work and what things don't. What's an example of something that worked and something that didn't work?

GRAVES: Well, what doesn't work so well is the idea that what's involved is mostly technology, and that enough technology thrown over the transom to faculty members will result in an initiative that pays off. In other words, what doesn't work is the idea that everything depends on bottom-up activities that can be managed on an ad hoc, project-by-project basis without regard for scalability, sustainability and institutional coherence. And what we found of course is that, by and large, that approach just does not work at the institutional level. That strategy does not add up to institutional gains, let alone national gains. So we worked on the top-down piece, the institutional perspective and the national perspective of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative and the Instructional Management Systems Cooperative. The idea now is to balance in a more systemic way the need for institutional investment, management and standards with the power of individual and departmental innovation.

ER: Let's talk about academic-corporate partnerships. Is there a right way and a wrong way to design such arrangements?

GRAVES: Well, I think the right way is to have a clear understanding up-front of what the goals are and what the deliverables are. The way I like to think of it is that if an institution has a contract with us, then it has a plan because the contract specifies deliverables. The institution is committed to action because it is investing in those deliverables. Now, having said that, I admit it's often difficult to pin down those deliverables. When I visit with college presidents, I often find a keen sense that something needs to be done--that the future is upon us and that the institution needs to change not only the way it manages and administers itself but also the way it delivers core educational services. Then, if I probe a little deeper, I'm likely to find that the institution needs help in deciding exactly what to do.

ER: So what do you do then?

GRAVES: We are really trying to help institutions build their capacity for academic change enabled by information technology. Another way to look at it is that we are trying to help institutions create a coherent and manageable instructional and institutional presence on the Web that strategically employs the Web as a medium--as a set of technologies that can amplify learning communities by tying them together and improving their communication processes. Our tagline is "enhancing academic community through technology." The Internet revolution has two dimensions--a revolution in human communication and a revolution in resource sharing. And if you are going to take advantage of the Internet and of the way it encourages sharing, then you are going to have to think partners and you're going to have to think beyond your own traditional locus of planning. And that's a difficult thing for institutions to do.

So, part of the service we provide is an up-front facilitating process for exploring the possibilities and making decisions about how to get started on some interesting projects. Then we provide capacity-building professional services and technology for developing and delivering those projects, evaluating them, adjusting course in mid-stream as dictated by the evaluation, and generally helping the client start and stay on the right technical and institutional path. It's typically a continuing contractual relationship for a collaborative effort that joins our expertise and experience with the client institution's. Also, another way to think about this is that on the academic side today, especially in terms of instruction, maybe we are where we were 20 or 25 years ago in administrative systems. Many colleges and universities set out then to create their own administrative systems. That effort was not very successful, and most colleges and universities today acquire a package from a major vendor, turn to another vendor to help integrate it into the management process, and perhaps even turn to a vendor to operate and maintain the system on an ongoing basis.

We are at that stage today where most colleges and universities are trying to build their own solutions to introducing information technology into the curriculum as an enabling tool, whether it's focused on enhancing the traditional classroom or offering instruction entirely online at a distance. And I believe that many institutions are about to repeat in the instructional systems domain the mistakes they made years ago in the administrative systems domain. As we know from our experience with administrative systems, it's not just technology. It's chiefly about restructuring practices and processes, and that's difficult to accomplish without impartial and informed help. Let's not repeat our mistakes.

ER: And what is the nature of that? Inadequate resources, poor implementation, or what?

GRAVES: Well, let me address that issue from a president's point of view. One of the problems is that instructors and departments are creating their own Web pages without much thought for the institutional implications of these random acts of progress. Indeed, most individual faculty members are extremely bright people who can do very interesting things. But will the things they do add up to an institutional win? Or will they be unmanageable--resulting, for example, in thousands of flat HTML files with lots of cross-linking that perhaps breaks down? And if they are manageable now, will they be manageable over time? Are they scalable and sustainable? Can you really afford them? Will your students, for example, have to learn one interface to take a course from Professor A and a totally different interface for Professor B's course and yet another one to get to the student system? Is this really the best use of faculty time? We help institutions convert random acts of progress into planned progress.

So institutions need to strike the right balance between innovation, which is a bottom-up idea, and the institutional good. That's difficult when the traditional governance model favors individual and departmental autonomy. Many institutions are investing too much cash and faith on that end of the balance scale and maybe not enough on the other end of the institutional good, the institutional coherence and the institutional goals.

ER: Let's talk about the faculty and change. Five or six years ago lots of papers were given on topics like "overcoming faculty resistance to technology and change." Then the issue seemed to lie quiet for a long time--but then recently there have been some new signs of faculty resistance. Comment on that.

GRAVES: Sure. I think there is still faculty resistance, but I think the basis for it has shifted somewhat. It used to be that the resistance was often just plain old fear--"This is fad; it may go away; I'd like to retire before I have to confront it."--that sort of thing. Today I think it's mostly different. First of all, I find a lot of faculty members who say: "Yes, I take this seriously. I can see the value of using this with my students, and I'd really like to do so. However, I'm not ready to commit because I don't think my institution will support me." In other words, "Yes, but don't waste my time until you can assure me that my institution is behind this--and at the moment I have no evidence that it is. It's not buying me a computer, it's not increasing its support for information technology, it's not giving me time off to learn new things, to learn to deal with this wisely. It's not removing the barriers to the fair consideration of this type of work in advancing my career." That's the first of two dimensions.

ER: And the second?

GRAVES: The second dimension is a pretty deep-seated one, and in order to explain it I have to use a metaphor: Learning as an expedition and faculty as the guides. As faculty, we do three things in that guiding role to take a student from point A to point B. First of all we organize course materials, perhaps selecting a textbook, creating a library list, building an online list of URLs, and so on. It's generally the idea of putting together a map of where we're going to go in pursuit of new knowledge and some of the source materials we'll use to get there. Another part of the task is to guide the student in his or her self-study. I like to call it "guiding the solitary discovery of knowledge." It's the idea that you're asking students to do reading on their own time, to write a paper, to take a test. You construct that test or that paper assignment so that they'll learn something both from getting ready for the test or paper as well as from the actual act of taking the test or writing a paper. So it's a guided self-study mode. Now those are two things: organizing the resources and guiding the self-study. But if we stop there, what do we have in the electronic version? We have the network-based correspondence course or independent study course. And a lot of people have concerns about that. They say, well, that's missing something.

What's missing is the third component, and it's that third component that people fear losing. It's what I call the "shared social construction of knowledge," and we guide that in our faculty roles as well. At its best, classroom discussion is about that. We're not lecturing at students or simply delivering knowledge to them. Rather we are engaging collectively with them in their discovery of knowledge.

ER: What do you think about electronic classrooms that simulate that activity?

GRAVES: Well, I think that's the real point. It's certainly important if you are going to instruct entirely on the Web and not have any classroom at all. But I think it's equally valid to ask that about networked collaboration even when instruction is still based in the classroom, and the answer is that's where asynchronous threaded discussion tools come into play. We call ours a discussion forum, and it becomes, in a way, the heart of the course. It's an inviting and unintimidating online environment for discourse.

So whether it's in connection with a class that meets in a classroom or one that never meets in a classroom--in the latter case it's really important--it's taking advantage of the Internet as a communications revolution. And I think a lot of faculty resistance is around the thought that we're going to do everything online with the instructor disappearing from the equation and, with her, the human communication that we all value. Perhaps teachers experienced the same fear when libraries were first built. In spite of all the knowledge now captured in a library, faculty continue to play an important role in education that goes well beyond giving students a map to the library.

ER: How do you see the future evolving?

GRAVES: We have to realize when we talk about the future that higher education today is not a one-size-fits-all enterprise, that there's the very valid notion of the 18- to-20-year-old coming to a campus as part of the experience of growing up. It's the idea of general education; it's the idea of liberal education; it's the idea of learning to work together; it's the idea of being exposed to new ideas in an intimate, seminar-like way and also in the melting-pot socialization that takes place among students outside the classroom. Now we've got to be honest and admit that a lot of what takes place in the residential or on-campus experience today doesn't necessarily align with the ideas I just stated. I don't think the large lecture hall necessarily does those ideas any great service. Nevertheless that's what the campus experience in part is all about.

ER: The ideal, anyway.

GRAVES: Yes, the ideal. I think there will continue to be demand for the residential and on-campus experience and therefore there will be plenty of institutions that continue to provide that service. My one fear would be that the idea may not be supported by the tax-paying public. The notion that public universities provide general education may suffer as we see government--state legislatures, mainly--backing out of funding higher education. General education could become again a luxury as it started out being years ago.

Anyway, I think liberal education will survive and be improved in the presence of the new technologies. I think though that there are lots of other forms of educational change to consider. We all know the demographics tell us that non-traditional education, or adult education, is growing in proportion to more traditional forms of education. It's very important today. I think that technology will play a major role in providing that kind of education. I think convenience is another key word. A lot of us use technology because of its convenience and I think there will be people looking for education with convenience in mind, not with brand name or any other attribute in mind but convenience.

ER: What do you say about issues of quality?

GRAVES: There will always be tradeoffs between quality and affordability. As you well know, the classroom lecture has its limitations. I can't make it more efficient without putting more students in the room or teaching more sections. And all those things run counter to my faculty sense of quality, which is that small classes are better. I think we need to look beyond the issue of absolute quality, though I think quality should be at the top of the list of our concerns. This idea of absolute educational quality is an impractical idea. If the issue were about absolute quality in education I suppose we might all try to practice the Oxford-Cambridge model-one-on-one tutoring. But we gave that up a long time ago for obvious reasons. It just doesn't scale in a democracy dedicated to affordable educational opportunity.

So this is not about compromising quality, because it's not about absolute quality. It's about how good is good enough for particular educational purposes. So I think we're going to see a lot more niche educational markets blossom based on factors like convenience, shorter courses and different ways of approaching learning. Does everything have to be packaged by the contact hour, the quarter or semester, the two- or four-year experience, and so on? I think we are going to see those kind of constructs begin, not to go away, but begin to be supplemented by more flexible ones that focus on learning outcomes.

ER: One final question: what would you suggest to a new president of an educational institution that has somehow almost entirely missed the information technology revolution and finds itself in a dreadful state from that point of view?

GRAVES: First of all, I'd say the institution might not be in such a dreadful state even though it missed the first wave. I'd say to the president: because you missed the initial bandwagon you may now be in a better position, since you have no baggage to carry forward.

But in terms of going forward you need to do two things in parallel. You certainly need to invest in technology, but you better make it a strategic investment, which means you'd better know why you're doing it and how you plan to use the technology. If you don't, you'll be trying to manage the investment as a cost, which basically means containing it. If you see it as a strategic asset you'll be acting differently on it. Not that you're going to spend in unlimited ways on it, but rather that you're going to really make it pay off in the form of a coherent and competitive instructional presence on the Internet that helps secure your institution's role in the emerging knowledge economy.

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