Why MOOCs are like Farmville, Part II

On January 18th, I laid out my concerns with Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), understanding their rapid ascent within the confines of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. In doing so, my purpose was to suggest that the true innovations posed by MOOCs will be much different than what is commonly presumed. Ultimately, as MOOCs descend from the peak of inflated expectations, down through the trough of disillusionment, and onto a plateau of productivity, their impact will be less about the wholesale transformation of higher education and more about advancements in modes of learning that will decenter the learning process away from the traditional classroom lecture and empower students as both consumers and creators of knowledge. Simply put, the “Sage on the Stage” model of higher education ceases as the role of traditional gatekeepers are eroded and replaced with patterns of collaboration based on a “many to many” model. The traditional classroom lecture, rightfully so, is the first to go.

Along with the classroom lecture, traditional notions of teaching also change, primarily those that presume a gatekeeping role for teachers as the authoritative center of the learning process. As relationships between students and faculty shift from a “one-to-many” model of collaboration, power will be increasingly shared on an equal basis between them. Teaching becomes less about conveying information and more about stewarding a set of experiences and collaborations, which become the means by which higher learning occurs. Some models consistent with this shift include the following.

• Collaborative Learning. This model presumes that there is an inherent social nature to learning, and that learning is best facilitated through a set of shared experiences between participants. Types of experiences include group projects, engaging in common tasks, face-to-face conversations, as well as those mediated by technology (including social networks, discussion forums, etc.). Equitable sharing of power among all participants, including those stewarding the collaboration, is critical for this model of learning.

• Service Learning. This model focuses on providing students with a set of applied experiences which complements and extends the consumption of information obtained through regular instruction or self-study. As a form of experiential education, this model presumes that learning requires that content, whether produced or consumed, be reinforced by direct experience. 

• Undergraduate Research Programs. By engaging students in the process of research, learning becomes more about the processes of discovery and innovation and less about the mastery of content. By teaching students the processes by which knowledge is created, students are provided a set of experiences that spark creativity and critical thinking, and that prepare students for lifelong learning.

Just reading this list, one may wonder whether these newer forms of learning fully represent changes made possible by the Internet. But beyond the technology, change is ultimately a social experience, and the most lasting impact of the Internet is on the nature of collaboration and social relationships between individuals. As higher education embraces these possibilities, the importance of the relationship between faculty and students has never been more critical. New models of learning are centered on collaboration, experience, and the production of knowledge. These processes have been and should continue to be the center of what a higher education is all about.

Three Vexing Problems and their Common Origin

Walk around any institution of higher education, even those well known for effective delivery and use of information technology, and you will find the following to some degree or another.

1. Information Technology staff suffering from work pressures that never abate. With expectations far outstripping available resources, day-to-day work consists of putting out fires and moving on to the next. 


2. Critical stakeholders continually disappointed with the pace and performance of centrally delivered IT services and improvements. Faced with such disappointments, decentralized IT platforms and supporting staff become the preferred way to ensure that IT services are more responsive to functional needs.


3. IT cost structures that only go up, with no end in sight for additional funding requests deemed necessary to maintain or derive additional value from IT services. The only question for decision-makers is how much of the next increase in tuition or student fees must be dedicated to supporting IT.

What can seem to result from budget cuts or indifferent management, poorly performing central IT organizations, or regular escalating costs might just have another, more elusive common origin – our penchants for specialization, differentiation, and customization of processes, services, and organizations in higher education. Applied to IT services and support, such cultural tendencies can result in a proliferation of platforms and shadow systems, duplicative infrastructures supporting the same basic tasks, and extensive customizations to commercial software applications.

I’m reminded of a couple of conversations I’ve had in the past. Once, two stakeholders came to me out of concern that our staff was not able to upgrade a commercial software package and quickly start working with its most recent release so that new functions would be available to their offices. The conversation was whether or not funding for additional staff should be requested to better support this critical service, in addition to the several staff already dedicated to the work. Upon investigation, it became obvious that our timeliness challenges were related to the necessary work to refit many customizations that had been internally developed for the software application. Had some of those customizations been deferred, our upgrade path would have been timelier and much less costly.

Another time, when I had first started at a new institution, getting to the bottom of regular network glitches and periodic outages was the most important priority I had been given. Despite extensive investments in new equipment, network service was far from reliable. Upon investigation, it became obvious that the challenge was that there was not one network – there were dozens of them, each operating with different standards, with different types of equipment, and supported by staff working in isolation. Many times, problems assumed to reside with the core network really were caused by technical problems at the local level. In such situations, centrally supported services become easy fodder for finger pointing and confusion about where problems may lie.

Ask any CIO at a large institution and they will tell you that such cases are part and parcel of delivering IT services in higher education. I agree. These conditions manifest themselves more easily in a world where average tuition can increase 35% over ten years (inflation adjusted). However, in a world with much more scarcity, it is appropriate to question whether higher education can continue to afford its tendencies for specialization, differentiation, and customization. Absent real change, higher education IT organizations will continue to require regular infusions of additional resources or they risk facing the downward spiral of over-commitment and underperformance that threatens the potential long-term effectiveness of campus technology services.

What might such change look like? Such a sea change in the culture of institutions does not happen overnight – but here are some ways to baby step forward:

1. Make the deliberate decision to stop doing some things. The most important decision facing IT leaders and the stakeholders who depend on them is not what to do, but what not to do – that is, to determine what tasks and functions should cease so that IT staff can focus on critical campus priorities. When something good happens because of such a tradeoff, make sure it is communicated to everyone that the present good resulted from a difficult choice. At UGA, we are nearing the completion of a major project to overhaul legacy systems so they no longer depend on SSN identifiers. Every time we talk about this project, we relate it back to the decision to prioritize this critical work above regular requests for system enhancements – and we’re sure to thank everyone for accepting this tradeoff.


2. Focus on what’s common across campus Units, de-emphasize things that are not. At the core of every department and every unit on campus is a set of basic and common IT service needs – it simply takes time, extensive conversations, and sometimes a bit of negotiation to get to the bottom of them. Ignore the preference to build solutions that satisfy 100% of requirements; instead, opt for solutions that are 80% good enough. Drop the remaining 20% or rely on manual workarounds– which many times will result in recognition that the step was unnecessary to begin with. At UGA, we’re taking a new approach to departmental networks, relying on MPLS and VLANs instead of departments installing their own firewalls. As this solution is rolled out, it allows departments to rest assured that only they have access to their network nodes while at the same time insuring that the campus benefits from the economies of scale that come from a more fully managed network.


3. Subject all requests for commercial software customizations to strict scrutiny. Modifications and additions to baseline code are always easier to make than to support over the long term. Many times, such decisions are made in a vacuum or only with limited information on the short-term costs, ignoring the long-term impacts on staffing availability, patches, and the costs of major upgrades. Inevitably, every customization adds up and eventually there will be a price to pay – perhaps in the form of a lack of availability of IT staff resources or through costly dependencies on outside consultants. Always subject requests for software customizations to executive level scrutiny, and make sure that such decisions are fully informed by both the short-term and the long-term costs of the request. Budgets for changes should be clearly understood and transparent, ensuring mutually accountability for the long-term impact of customizations when they are necessary. At UGA, our ConnectUGA project is working to replace our current student information systems and it operates with change and governance processes that embody these principles.

While these simple principles can lead to more proactive, more focused, and less costly IT services, over the long term they will be less successful unless the culture of higher education itself begins to change. This is a task that is well beyond even the most capable CIO and their IT organization. Nevertheless, this type of change is possible in the macro if higher education leaders are able to articulate and apply similar principles across the institution. The CIO should not be afraid to step out and be a trendsetter by applying those outlined above.

EITS Status and Activity Report for April 2013

Significant technology improvements and innovations underway at the University of Georgia, led by Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS). Each month, the status of these projects as well as information on various support activities is detailed in a monthly report to the UGA community. Below is the link to the report for April 2013.

EITS Status and Activity Report for April 2013

The 'Sage on the Stage' and the End of the Classroom Lecture

I remain a traditionalist, a traditionalist in the sense that I believe the most important relationship on any college campus – the one with greatest potential to impact students in a positive way – is the relationship between students and faculty. I also believe that, at its core, this relationship has to be about the processes of discovery and innovation. There is nothing more impactful on students than faculty who conduct research in the lab, in the field, or in the library, and who then bring their innovations into the classroom each day. That is what makes a higher education a higher education.

A few weeks ago, in “Why MOOCs are like Farmville,” I opined that once the hype surrounding MOOCs died down, and they progressed from the peak of inflated expectations down through the trough of disillusionment to finally reach a plateau of productivity, their lasting impact likely will be dramatically different from what many today now expect. One of the most lasting effects will be on the ‘sage on the stage’ and the end of the classroom lecture.

Many proponents of MOOCs fall short when they advocate using technology to replicate the classroom lecture by beaming out lectures from star faculty members to students who access these courses over the Internet. Such a model replaces the physical with the digital, but this represents the use of technology to drive efficiency and scalability – it does not pose a significant shift in the nature of the learning processes. This is because, like the classroom lecture, the use of online technologies in this manner presupposes the role of the faculty to be one of content creator, while the role of the student is to be one of content subscriber. In such a model, the nature of collaboration itself does not change. This shortchanges the true impacts of the Internet regarding teaching and learning, even if the lectures come from faculty judged to be the best in the world.

A more lasting and impactful form of change results when we understand that the Internet has disrupted the traditional relationships between content creators and content subscribers, so that all individuals in a relationship can now play both roles, acting simultaneously as content creators and subscribers. In these types of relationships, learning becomes more about the processes of learning – the processes of creating knowledge – and less about the processes of consuming or retaining knowledge itself. In the world of Google, facts can be accessed quickly and efficiently at any time, from any place, and with any device – so rote mastery of facts is no longer the core of learning. Instead, knowing what to do with those facts – or, more importantly, imparting the processes by which those facts are created – rightfully becomes the center of the learning processes itself. That does not mean that faculty should not stand before students and speak, but that speech should be to evangelize, to inspire, and to demonstrate and not simply as a mechanism to impart knowledge.

Technology remains an important tool. Social networking tools provide the opportunity to engage others broadly and to provide instant feedback, while advanced analytical software provides capabilities to identify previously invisible patterns in “big data.” Our future economic success will be heavily dependent upon our ability to develop these capacities in our students. However, this success no longer depends upon using outmoded approaches to instruction, like the classroom lecture, as a singular mechanism for imparting knowledge to others.

The most lasting impact of the Internet is this – everyone is a sage now.