March/April 1999 |
This article was published in Educom Review, Volume 34 Number 2 1999. The copyright is copyright is by EDUCAUSE. See http://www.educause.edu/copyright.html for additional copyright information. |
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A Time to Assess?
The past may not be prologue
Albert Einstein once warned us that "everything has changed but our ways of thinking, and if these do not change, we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Information technologists have long conceived of themselves as agents of change. Indeed the convergence of changes in computing, communications and information resources is stimulating discussion and action related to the transformation of higher education's policies, practices and systems for delivering instruction, scholarship and service. At the same time, UC Berkeley Professor Martin Trow reminds us that information technology is "embedded in and used by institutions that have a history." Institutions possessed of histories, especially illustrious ones, embrace change slowly. The Knight Higher Education Collaborative reports that higher education now operates in the Age of Markets. The emergence of the Age of Markets is also evidenced by the growth of nontraditional providers of postsecondary instruction. One of the ironies and perplexing challenges facing higher education institutions is that the public "expects both the range of choice that markets provide and the subsidies that make the price of a public higher education less than the cost of its provision." This conundrum manifests itself in frequent and increasing calls for accountability by higher education's students, parents, trustees, legislators, regulators and others. On December 11, 1997, for example, the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education issued a controversial report concluding that concerns about college costs are overblown, while recommending that "institutions should devise standards and review processes that support efficiency, productivity, and cost constraint." Along with the macroeconomic pressures to privatize higher education and the hue and cry for enhanced public accountability, information technologists, and increasingly their provosts and chancellors, wax eloquent and enthusiastic about the potential to deliver higher education's mission any time and any place. Indeed today, a great deal of postsecondary instruction is being delivered over networks or asynchronously. The ability of traditional institutions in increasingly market-oriented environments to respond to public calls for accountability, and to realize the potential gains associated with eliminating the barriers of place and time, will depend in part on their success in communicating the contributions IT has made to their programs. This exciting story should be anchored in measures and disciplined by honest assessment. New instructional delivery modes, for example, will render many of our fundamental assumptions about higher education meaningless. What will the credit hour mean to the asynchronous learner? What will full-time equivalency mean to institutions whose students enroll simultaneously in classes offered by three accredited institutions? Information technologists are uniquely prepared to contribute to a dialogue about the new indicators of quality and performance in the networked environment. At the same time, we have resisted most efforts to measure and assess the impact of information technology on the higher education enterprise. Our reasons for resistance have been thoughtful and well reasoned. Information technology is messy. It is embedded in everything . . . it is risky . . . it is volatile . . . we don't "control it." We have also resisted measurement and assessment for defensive and political reasons, including mystification (if you can't measure it, you can't manage it!), and obfuscation (we'd rather bury our failures and even some of our successes quietly). The truth is that information technologists have done a remarkable job for our colleges and universities without engaging seriously in campus and national measurement and assessment efforts. Perhaps we can continue to step back when the next call to account is made. Perhaps not. Perhaps instead it is time for information technologists to seize the day and commit to the hard and complex work of communicating in credible qualitative and quantitative fashion the nature of our activities and investments. Perhaps, too, it is time to join with our faculty and administrative colleagues in efforts to assess the impact of these activities and investments on teaching, learning, and administrative quality and costs. The stakes have gotten high enough. As networks make it possible for providers to unbundle instruction from traditional and campus-based services, the costs and quality of instruction will increasingly be determined by the underlying technologies embedded in courses. In an ever more competitive instructional marketplace, the inability to measure and assess the cost of such embedded technology will be harder to explain and will place our institutions at competitive risk vis-�-vis for-profit providers who have no history. In environments such as those in which we operate today, the past may not be prologue. And, finally, someone will step forward and lead our institution through the complexities and pain of seriously implementing new methods of measuring and assessing information technology's role on campus. Why not us? Richard Katz is vice president of EDUCAUSE. [email protected] |