Incremental Revolution
Improving Teaching and Learning with
Technology:
A Model for Description, Planning, and Implementation
A Portfolio of Strategies for Collaborative
Change
The TLT Group, Steven W. Gilbert, February, 2002
For ideas about how to apply this model to your institution, see the Introductory Worksheet and Questions
No college or university has the resources necessary to engage every faculty member, every student, and every academic support professional immediately and fully in new educational uses of information technology. Choices will be made intentionally or de facto. Of course, in an environment of rapidly increasing complexity – more options, limited resources, ill-prepared institutions and individuals – choosing only one goal for improving teaching and learning with technology doesn’t work. Nor does it make sense to diffuse your effort evenly across all conceivable goals.
Most institutions also find that the “traditional” efforts to develop 5-year strategic plans fail to produce adequately flexible guidance for the short-term decisions that are necessary given the pace of change in the area of educational technology. Traditional strategic planning and lack of planning at all both fail to interrupt the continuing cycle of crisis-lurch-crisis-lurch decision making. Developing something called a “technology plan” may produce a plan that focuses on technology without taking into account the needs of most of the people who are likely to use the technology for academic purposes.
A more useful approach is to develop a constellation of related strategies, programs, and working plans that can be frequently and easily revised to reflect significant unanticipated changes in conditions. This set of strategies should be closely linked with implementation programs so that each influences the evolution of the other.
It’s important to develop and keep the confidence of all constituencies by providing a coherent, public description of a rational planning and decision-making process in which everyone benefits eventually; and everyone can understand how and when some will be more deeply involved and more extensively supported than others. Don’t overlook the ways in which many faculty members have been improving courses and supporting their students’ learning for many decades – and more recently.
We recommend a Portfolio of Strategies for Collaborative Change with six features or characteristics, described briefly immediately below and then in more detail in the following sections.
1. Institutional
Educational Mission
(and Vision
Your strategies ought to advance a well-articulated and widely shared educational vision (including definition of the institutional community – who is being served, and who is providing and supporting the service). In choosing a vision, you’ll need to consider a number of criteria, including identity, pace, and risk.
2. Foundation
(Minimum Requirements
Well-developed descriptions of minimum requirements for the technology infrastructure (people as well as hardware, facilities, other information resources, and information literacy goals) and widely understood plans for achieving them are also essential.
3. Wide/Shallow
Projects, Programs
(Something for Almost Everyone, Every Year
Most Wide/Shallow programs enable modest changes or the development of instructional modules or materials within many different individual courses. Many Wide/Shallow programs are aimed primarily at fostering achievements associated with themes from the institutional vision. However, other Wide/Shallow programs may enable or permit faculty members to make changes based largely on their own judgment and preferences -- "within reason.". The overall success of Wide/Shallow programs often depends on faculty members helping each other to learn and use Low Threshold Applications (LTAs).
4. Narrow/Deep
Projects, Programs
(More Focused, Extensive, Expensive, Risky Programs for a Few
Narrow/Deep programs may work more deeply within individual courses or may focus on entire courses or sequences that involve several courses. Most should reflect themes from the institutional vision. Many Narrow/Deep program have higher costs and higher risks than other kinds.
5. Culture
of Collaboration and Learning
(Developing a Nurturing Community
Many of the most valuable strategies, projects, or programs likely to be used in this model depend on inter-departmental and inter-office cooperation. Develop and sustain collaboration and communication throughout your community by identifying and supporting your "Compassionate Pioneers."
6.
Thoughtful Planning, Assessment, Implementation
(Tools and approaches that generate information to guide successful
implementation, program revision, and realistic budgeting)
Establish criteria and mechanisms for changing those strategies and for supporting them through major resource allocation decisions. Enable anyone (who tries) to understand these processes.
NOTE: The dimension of “Wide-Narrow” refers to the number of people who are affected by the strategy: a narrow strategy would affect very few people. 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. The dimension of “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 behavior of the teachers and students involved.
The following outline offers a way of describing your current situation, analyzing your options, and developing a “portfolio” of strategies appropriate for your institution, division, or department.
What does your institution hope to achieve by integrating information technology more fully into teaching and learning? That is a question about education and mission even more than a question about technology. Consider distinctions among basic paradigms such as:
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.
Estimate the pace and risk your institution is willing to accept in conjunction with technological change in a particular direction. For that direction, which is the most appropriate overall “position” or strategy for your institution? Leader, follower, or resister? Why? 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 or oppose the new practices until they become thoroughly commonplace. Note that your 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.
Establish a foundation of minimum levels for access, capacity, and use of various technologies – hardware, software, and telecommunications. 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 broader institution-wide requirements.
a. Access
Establish minimum levels for quality and ease of use for various technologies – hardware, software, and telecommunications. Ensure that all students and faculty have ease of access above those levels (e.g., for e-mail 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 e-mail, to use a course management system, or find other information about resources that are intended to be accessible to them. 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 with disabilities, faculty members who are uncomfortable with technology, faculty members who have been acquiring equipment via grants, etc.
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.
b. Training
What are the minimum skills and knowledge (“Information Literacy”) related to information resources and information technology that you want all your graduates to acquire? Faculty? How will you provide the necessary training?
c. Usage
Do you want to require that all faculty give their e-mail addresses to their
students and respond to all messages from students within 36 hours? Do you want
to require that all faculty put basic course syllabus information on the Web
using a course management system (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT, Prometheus, Angel,
etc.)?
Determine what percent of all faculty use various common computing, multimedia, or telecommunications utilities (e-mail, Web, PowerPoint, course-management tools, video) in their courses, and in their classrooms – and in what ways and at which general levels. Determine current levels and set plausible goals for increasing them. The most common oversight is that of ignoring the instructional progress enabled by appropriate use of the most widely accepted (least newsworthy) technology applications. For example, by the late 1980s, Reed College was already using word processing to alter the nature of homework across the curriculum, apparently improving graduates’ abilities to create complex, coherent arguments (Ehrmann, 1995). Or consider how the remarkably rapid rise in the number of faculty and students who use email to communicate with each other opens new instructional options – many of which are adopted with little fanfare, guidance, or support. Has your institution ensured that all students and faculty have access to email and the Web at least above some plausible minimum level of ease of access and use?
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.
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 while widening participation in those conversations; for example, if the college is relatively small and its student body is relatively homogeneous, some of those conversations might involve students at other, very different institutions, as well as outside experts. The technological side of the change 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. These improvements must be complemented with other ingredients to help this recipe achieve improvements in learning outcomes, e.g., help for faculty in redesigning a sequence of courses that can take full advantage of the enhanced communication.
Choosing and Implementing a
Narrow-Deep Strategy: A small grants program.
One option to elicit and support ideas is to establish an internal grant-making program. The Request For Proposals (RFP) might focus on a particular type of improvement, such as extending student skills of inquiry or enriching/extending academic community and might or might not specify the kind of technology to be used. The RFP would seek educational improvements that are important, feasible, and difficult to achieve without the use of technology. It might be open to different priorities or focus on one strategic priority (e.g., access for students with nontraditional schedules; projects that involve enhancing student inquiry). It might solicit responses from teams or from individual faculty. Each applicant would be able to request a combination of stipend(s), equipment, software, course release time, and/or assignment of support from a librarian, technical support person and/or 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 should also be asked to specify how they will evaluate their results and assess their progress. The RFP might specify that some of the grants will be made to those who have made little use of information technology in their teaching, or that teams will be favored if they include a mix of faculty (experienced and inexperienced with technology). Choose 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 (we call these kinds of people “compassionate pioneers” because of their tendency to help their colleagues, too), and select a few program areas in which your institution has already developed unusual strengths or in which you are already building a new focus.
Many of the most valuable strategies, projects, or programs likely to be used in this model depend on inter-departmental and inter-office cooperation. How do you support collaboration and communication throughout your community? How well do you support everyone’s needs for learning about new instructional and technological options? How do you communicate to all stakeholders how they can influence and participate in the overall planning, decision-making, and implementation processes? [For more on Nurturing Communities and Compassionate Pioneering, see: http://www.tltgroup.org/gilbert/FireCircles&NurturingCommunity.htm]
What process will you use to facilitate the extension and modification
of these strategies, programs, and goals? Establish criteria and mechanisms for
changing those strategies and for making major resource allocation decisions.
(See “Collaborative Change” programs at www.tltgroup.org.)
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.