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A dean's progress; making sense of technology

Change - March 1, 1994

In the preceding article, Elizabeth Baer talks about how a dean can begin to learn about information technology and its role on campus. Having taken Elizabeth's advice, what might a dean do next?

Let's imagine an academic dean at a medium-sized institution that places a moderate emphasis on teaching. Our dean, in office for two years now, corresponds with an old friend, newly appointed as academic vice president at another institution. They frequently share their experiences, hopes, and frustrations about academic leadership.

What follows are excerpts from letters about our dean's struggle to make sense of the institution's investments in technology.

Dean's List of Frustrations

September 27

There isn't enough money, of course. Because of that, in part, faculty members, departments, centers, and offices are all looking out for themselves, and the institution as a whole is suffering as a result. We have good teachers who take risks to improve courses, but we don't have enough ways to adequately support or reward them.

Part of the problem is the growing sums being requested for various pieces of hardware and software. Although many of the requests are quite small, the overhead from just dealing with them is big. They're growing explosively at a time when our means of paying are shrinking. I'm not unsympathetic, but what else do they want me to cut?

Because the technology requests go to so many different offices (not always even within the institution--people go directly to vendors, government grant programs, and foundations), I don't know what we spend for technology for instruction. I don't know what implications this year's spending has for next year's budget. No one does.

October 5

I took my frustrations about technology budget requests to our executive committee. At the meeting yesterday, everyone agreed to send me copies of all the budget requests for instructional applications of computing, video media, and telecommunications that they get, initiate, or hear about. Those few who love technology know I'm no Luddite, and the majority knows I'm no pushover. Everyone realizes that this thing is growing out of control.

Looking for Patterns

October 24

I had no idea how much money was requested for technology in the name of improving instruction. We have requests for buying and creating software, equipping new computer labs, obtaining projection equipment for classrooms, refurbishing classrooms, acquiring satellite dishes, laying fiber, enlarging our Internet connection, purchasing video cameras, installing cable television connections, buying equipment for off-campus learning sites (we have two), rewiring dormitories--the list was staggering in length. How can we afford it? For that matter, if you follow this to its logical conclusion, how could a student afford to buy all those books, videocassettes, audiocassettes, and software packages for each course? It's insane. Maybe we should wait until the pace of technological change slows down a little.

What do I do now? If I meet one-on-one with each faculty and staff member making these requests, I'll set myself up as the bad guy. Not good. So I've decided to call all of them together, provide a little food and drink for lubrication, and see if we can talk education.

Meeting One: Sharing Goals

November 10

Many of the budget requesters came to the meeting. As I expected, some are staff members who seem very shy about discussing education. Many faculty members focus on particular requests for particular courses. To my pleasure, many faculty and staff members see themselves as educational revolutionaries, or at least "evolutionaries." (Admittedly they were a little fuzzy about what a successful, affordable revolution/evolution would look like!)

The group was on the large side, about 30 people, and relaxed enough to have fun. Some jokes were made at the expense of our required laboratory courses, which someone characterized as museums of the curriculum, the places students were forced to go in order to learn skills that professionals no longer use! Not altogether fair, but funny. I'm now persuaded that waiting for stability is not the answer for making most of these budget choices. In research, if a new field opens up, you don't wait for all the discoveries to be made before you hire a new faculty member to teach and do research. If our graduates are to be prized, they'd better have at least a dim idea of how to use today's tools to work on today's problems.

You know my desire to lead this place toward a more coherent educational philosophy while maintaining budgetary sanity. You also know that I haven't been able to mobilize much of an effort. Suddenly, I realized that right in front of me is this tiny army, full of energy. Well, maybe not an army yet, just potential energy--ambitious for their students, worried about money and time. If I leave them to themselves, they'll stay educationally disorganized, and their collection of budget requests will remain sane at the level of individual requests but insane as a total package--something that we can't afford and that might not even, as a whole, make educational sense.

We've agreed to meet again. Maybe they and I can become a force.

Meeting Two: Finding Common Aims

November 17

We met a second time on Wednesday and tried to group their requests into educational categories. I was a little surprised to find their educational philosophies were as familiar to me as their tools and language had been unfamiliar. They didn't have 50 goals, either, just a few common goals that united most of them (and me, I'll admit):

1) Project-based, Collaborative Learning. Most wanted to give students tools and resources so that they could learn by working on realistic projects. They talked about designing, composing, and other kinds of creative work, to be done both individually and in teams. One of them mentioned the "three P's": that students need to learn to pose significant problems, work on them (problem-solving of one sort or another), and persuade their peers. It took me awhile to get "persuasion," the third "P," but I finally realized it was obvious. As long as students only look to faculty for right answers, they haven't understood what being an intellectual adult is about. So the group talked about using technology to create a space where students have the power to identify interesting problems, work on them until they have a finding or product, and then get reactions from other students (or even from outside experts). That was a surprise; I used to think of technology as isolating, but these folks talked constantly about technology as encouraging students to work together. So that was our first goal: encouraging more project-based, collaborative learning.

2) Improved Access. A second goal was to provide greater equity of access for students, regardless of their location, native language, learning style, physical disabilities, academic preparation, and so on. A surprising variety of requests fits this theme: not just distance learning, but also some of the project-based work (when used in academic programs for disadvantaged learners).

3) Resource Sharing. Many realized how tight resource budgets are, thank goodness, so they talked about using technology to share with other institutions, with businesses in the area, with government--even with schools.

More than half of the budget requests dealt with the first goal, project-based learning, so we decided to learn about that effort and try to make more sense of what we're doing as an institution. Later, we can come back and deal with the other two. (I'm also tackling this one first because I'm afraid it will be the most expensive. If I have to tone down their enthusiasm for this, I want to do it soon, and gently.)

There was so much hope and energy in that meeting! I think it's the technology. When you and I were young, every idea for reform seemed new. In my 25 years as a faculty member, however, I've come to realize how little real progress is made in teaching from one decade to the next. But these folks--their hardware and software get more powerful every year, so they can do truly new things educationally each year. The key event is not when some new technology bursts above ground, but a few years later when that hardware or software becomes reliable and affordable enough to build upon. Their idea of progress really is alive.

Meeting Three: Project-based, Collaborative Learning

December 4

Here is what we know about this type of learning:

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