Higher education has emerged from many decades in which the number of instructional options for faculty, students, and institutions was quite limited. The new challenge is having too many choices, instead of too few. Now, no institution can afford to embrace every attractive combination of teaching approach, technology application, instructional materials and educational objective. No single strategy for improving teaching and learning with technology will be effective for every university, college, division, or department. No single set of strategies will be uniformly appropriate for all kinds of institutions. And more attractive options keep arriving.
The following system of categories offers a way of analyzing
your options and developing a "portfolio" of strategies appropriate
for your institution (or for your division, department, etc.) more confidently
and effectively:
1. Pace and Risk
Determine the pace and risk you are willing to accept in conjunction with technological change. Do you need to be a leader? Can you afford to? Are you more comfortable among those who delay the longest?
2. Purposes
What do you hope to achieve by integrating information technology more fully into teaching and learning? See “Why Bother?” for an exploration of many goals.
http://www.tltgroup.org/gilbert/WhyBotherLIST.htm
How will you change your current selection of goals?
3. Incremental and Programmatic Change
Incremental change is based on swapping ideas and materials among faculty colleagues who try new bits and pieces and gradually refine their courses. Many institutions use a more structured team-based “instructional design” approach to developing, testing, and improving entire courses, programs, or instructional units. The two kinds of change are not mutually exclusive.
4. Credible, Rational Balance
In the absence of a publicly explained and demonstrably implemented plan, many faculty members and other members of the college/university community will assume the worst. Their erroneous assumptions may lead them to resist or disrupt institutional efforts to improve teaching and learning with technology. Consequently, having a “portfolio of strategies” that anyone who is faintly interested can understand and see as equitable is a good beginning! However, the technological infrastructure must also provide a foundation of positive experiences that support the development of realistic expectations – expectations that match the explicit goals of the portfolio.
5. Technological and Support Service Infrastructure
Establish a foundation of minimum levels for access, capacity, and use of various technologies – hardware, software, telecommunications. These minima can be subdivided into requirements for access to technology, capacity to use the available technology, and achievement of certain levels of usage. Further, different categories of users (e.g., faculty, students, professional staff, administrators) may need different minima. The technological foundation may also include minimum specifications for classroom equipment, laboratory configurations, residence halls, etc. Institutional sub-units such as departments within a college or colleges within a university may set and achieve even higher standards – built upon the broader institution-wide established minima.
6. Depth, Breadth, & Combinations
Each portfolio should include some strategies that are Wide and Shallow and other strategies that are Narrow and Deep. The wide/shallow strategies should offer something useful to almost everyone. The narrow/deep strategies should enable some smaller groups to explore more expensive and risky combinations of technology and educational approach -- with the hope that what they learn will prove useful to others later. Together, they will eventually produce results that are both wide and deep – involving [almost] everyone in significant improvements.
7. Conclusion: Building the Portfolio
Develop an affordable, explainable combination of wide/shallow and narrow/deep strategies built on a solid technological infrastructure. The wide/shallow strategies should offer something useful to almost everyone. The narrow/deep strategies should enable some smaller groups to explore more expensive and risky combinations of technology and educational approach -- with the hope that what they learn will prove useful to others later.
Publicly describe the process by which the initial portfolio can be changed to:
; take advantage of emerging opportunities,
; use information gained from experience, and
; enable those most newly interested to participate more fully and effectively.
Overall Institutional Strategy
Each institution should establish the context for shaping its own unique portfolio of change strategies with respect to educational uses of information technology by deciding whether it will be a leader, a follower, or a resister. Leaders are prepared to make the greatest investments with the greatest risk of failure, but also with the excitement and potential payoff of being pioneers. Followers will identify their peer institutions and watch them carefully, adopting any practice that about 20% of the cohort has already embraced. Resisters will avoid all new practices except those for which non-participation becomes embarrassing. Note that an institution's overall strategy with respect to educational uses of information technology need have nothing to do with its strategy in other areas such as athletics, research, excellence in specific disciplines, etc., etc.
Which is the most appropriate overall "position" or strategy for your institution? Leader, follower, or resister? Why?
Enabling incremental change vs. Guiding programmatic change
Many faculty members have been improving courses and improving their students’ learning for many decades – and more recently. There have been at least two successful models, and they are not mutually exclusive! First, incremental change based on swapping ideas and materials among faculty colleagues who try new bits and pieces and gradually refine their courses. Second, more structured team-based “instructional design” approaches to developing, testing, and improving entire courses, programs, or instructional units.
1. Enable
Establish minimum levels for quality and ease of use for various technologies – hardware, software, telecommunications. Ensure that all students and faculty have quality and ease of access above those levels. (e.g., for email and the Web). Students should not find it difficult or frustrating – whether they are in a campus computer lab or in their own residences or workplaces -- to log on to get email, participate in a Blackboard-based course, or find other information about resources that are intended to be accessible to them. For example, outfit most classrooms with computers, Web connections, and projection devices that permit a faculty member to find and show a Web page to all students in that room. Be sure to consider various categories of students and faculty members when developing Wide-Shallow strategies: on-campus residents, commuters, students with easy home access to computing, students who have had little access to computing before college, students who have significant disabilities, faculty members who are extremely uncomfortable with technology, faculty members who have been acquiring equipment via grants, etc., etc…
Permit institutional sub-units such as departments or colleges within a university to set and achieve even higher standards. Review carefully the desirability and viability of maintaining a 3-year ‘refresh’ cycle for replacing obsolescent computers and software; determine criteria for eligibility for some people to be on a shorter cycle.
2. Require or Urge
For example, require all faculty to put basic course syllabus information on the Web within WebCT. For example require all faculty to give their email addresses to their students and respond to all messages from students within 36 hours.
What is the process you will use to facilitate the extension and modification of these goals?
Examine the most likely short-term and long-term
consequences of specific strategies, using the factors emerging from the
distinctions among three basic paradigms:
a. Using information technology to increase institutional productivity and access to
education;
b.
Using information technology to increase communication between faculty
and
students and to expand the content that can be taught; and
c. Using information technology to
support collaborative learning and community
building.
Three Paradigms
As you consider specific strategies for your institutional portfolio, decide whether each one fits better in the "Certificates," Chips," or "Sweatshirts" paradigm. See "Certificates, Chips, and Sweatshirts," by Steven W. Gilbert, in this workbook.
2. CERTIFICATES, CHIPS, OR SWEATSHIRTS?
As you consider the short-term and long-term changes that you want to accomplish with your portfolio of strategies, decide whether your institution should lean towards the "Certificates," "Chips," or "Sweatshirts" paradigm. Why? For which students or faculty? Which subjects or programs? Which courses?
Revise the following chart to make it a template useful in comparing, contrasting, and selecting among the most attractive candidates for your institution's portfolio of strategies for change. The idea is to use this chart to guide your examination of a specific strategy for change. Answers to these questions should provide a good basis for determining the desirability of the strategy with respect to its most important impacts on students, faculty, and budget. Working together as a group to modify or prioritize the items in this chart should help clarify the values that your institution attaches to these key factors.
Building Breadth and Depth on the Infrastructure
Foundation
Your institution -- guided by the deliberations of your TLT Roundtable -- should develop and support a portfolio of change strategies that also vary by "depth" and "breadth." Select a “portfolio of strategies” and establish criteria and mechanisms for changing those strategies and for making major resource allocation decisions. Enable anyone (who tries) to understand these processes
[“Wide-Narrow” refers to the number of people who are affected by the strategy: a narrow strategy would affect very few students and faculty. “Deep-Shallow” refers to the magnitude of the impact of the strategy on those involved: a shallow strategy would not cause much change in the way those involved teach and learn.]
Most strategies are either Wide and Shallow or Narrow and Deep. By assembling and maintaining a portfolio of such strategies, the net result over time will be an impact that is both Wide and Deep! [Attempting strategies that are immediately Wide and Deep is usually prohibitively expensive and impractical for other reasons.]
The following four categories of information technology benefits go from "shallow" to "deep":
(1) personal and institutional administrative productivity;
(2) enhancement of traditional teaching;
(3) change in pedagogy; and
(4) change in content and epistemology.
Each successive category requires increasing both the amount and kind of support services for effective implementation. Most important, strategies in categories (1) and (2) may be pursued with only technical support services, while strategies in categories (3) and (4) require support from those who understand pedagogical alternatives, students' learning strategies, and ways to help faculty make fundamental changes in how they teach. Of course, "shallow" strategies tend to be less expensive per faculty member and student than "deep" strategies.
Now consider breadth of change, ranging from "narrow" to "wide." The narrowest change is one that touches a single topic in a single course. The widest change is one that makes an impact on all teaching and learning throughout the institution. Somewhere in between would be changes that engage only the "early adopters," usually somewhere around 5-15% of the faculty. A change that engaged 20-40% percent would be well on the way toward including everyone except the technological rearguard. Getting to 80% or more of the faculty with a change of real depth will require a major commitment of institutional resources.
6. BUILDING YOUR PORTFOLIO OF STRATEGIES
A. Institution-Wide Support
How will your TLT Roundtable develop a portfolio of strategies that will move your institution from a few narrow/shallow changes to at least one wide/deep change, while increasing the likelihood that more of your faculty, staff, and students will understand and support this approach? How will your Roundtable engage others from your institution in the process of developing, refining, and revising this portfolio? How will the portfolio be described and communicated to those who were not directly involved in its development?
B. Gaining High-Level Support for Strategies
How will your Roundtable convince the necessary decision makers and participants to adopt this portfolio?
C. Selecting Affordable, Feasible Combinations
Wide/deep strategies are the most costly. Narrow/shallow strategies are the least expensive and least significant. "Wide/shallow" strategies and "narrow/deep" strategies tend to be the most attractive. The goal is to adopt a comfortable, rational combination or "portfolio" of wide/shallow and narrow/deep strategies that, together, are likely to have an educational impact that will eventually be both wide and deep.
Wide/Shallow strategies often apply to the development of instructional modules or materials within individual courses. Narrow/Deep strategies may work more deeply within individual courses or may focus on entire courses or programs that involve several courses. Some Wide/Shallow strategies are aimed primarily at enabling or permitting certain achievements, while others focus more aggressively on requiring certain changes. Many Narrow/Deep strategies have higher costs and higher risks than other strategies.
Determine what percent of all faculty use which of the most common computing/multimedia/telecommunications utilities (email, Web, PowerPoint, course-management tools, video) in their courses, and in their classrooms – and at which general levels of sophistication. Determine current levels and set plausible goals for increasing them.
For some institutions, a reasonable narrow/deep strategy might be to enable all faculty and students participating in upper division courses in one department to conduct much of their course-related communication and develop course-related information systems on the Internet. This might be accomplished by providing laptop computers with built-in modems, paid-for accounts on a dial-in Internet service, and one quarter-time allocation for one academic year of the services of a computing support person and a librarian.
Another attractive narrow/deep strategy might be to establish an internal grant-making program in which a Request for Proposals is distributed to all faculty members. The RFP might specify that half the grants will be made only to those who have never before used information technology in their teaching, and that pairs of faculty that include one experienced and one inexperienced with technology will get special consideration. Further, each proposal may request a combination of a stipend up to $500, hardware and software valued at up to $2,500, one course release time, and assignment of 10% each of a librarian and a technical support person and a faculty development professional. Those applying would be asked to explain how their proposed teaching approaches fit especially well with the applications of technology and the kinds of support services they are requesting. They might also be asked to specify how they will evaluate their results and assess their progress. Finally, applicants could be told that the grant-makers favor projects permitting the teaching of important topics otherwise difficult to include via conventional presentation methods. Grants could be made for one academic year with the possibility of one renewal. A variation on this narrow grant-making strategy would be to permit departments to apply as a group.
Select a few projects and programs for unusually full support – equipment, staff, funding.
Select a few course-related projects proposed by “Compassionate Pioneers.” Choose these projects based on evidence that the faculty members involved will make exceptional efforts to use technology AND TO HELP COLLEAGUES WHO MIGHT BE WILLING TO TRY SOMETHING SIMILAR.
Select a few program areas in which your institution has already developed unusual strengths or in which you are already building a new focus. E.g., Extend some of your programs where demand for enrollment already exceeds supply – where you often have an admissions waiting list.
Can you select an affordable, explainable combination of wide/shallow and narrow/deep strategies? The wide/shallow strategy should offer something useful to almost everyone (e.g., virtual office hours via electronic mail) while the narrow/deep strategy should commit the institution to allowing a relatively small group to explore more expensive and risky combinations of technology and educational approach -- with the hope that what they learn will prove useful to others later. Identify, develop, and describe briefly three wide/shallow change strategies and three narrow/deep strategies appropriate for your institution:
Formulate a goal for your institution in terms such as "Moving the institution from having a few Narrow/Shallow changes to achieving a cumulative, coherent Wide/Deep change in five years."
Your final list of Wide/Shallow and Narrow/Deep strategies could be a significant part of your proposal -- demonstrating how the Roundtable’s efforts will be linked to a coherent portfolio of strategies designed to improve teaching and learning with technology in a reasonable way.