Great reminder that in order to be productive we need to have control and perspective.
It’s MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Education – The Conversation – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
While professor Laurie Essig’s post calling for Massive Online Open Administrations or MOOAs instead of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as the salvation for higher education must be recognized as a good work of satire, the post does reveal that we have a fundamental problem in Higher Education.
Whenever an industry is being radically disrupted the constituents within that industry will start to entrench their positions and defend the status quo that they know so well by taking pot shots at the people or groups who they believe are disrupting their world. This post reveals that many faculty are being threatened by MOOCs and technology in general and are opposed to being forced to change the way that they have been teaching. Similarly, many administrators are turning to the technology flavour of the day to improve the bottom line for the University and are often asking faculty to change simply for the sake of change. Yes, it is much more complicated and involved but the reality is that higher education cannot sustain it current practices and must change. The proverbial writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Change is happening.
Unfortunately, for Alberta instiutions the opportunity to be proactive and to control how to deal with the forces of change have passed. The Edmonton Journal article Mandate Letters Sent to Schools reveals:
On Friday night, Advanced Education and Enterprise Minister Thomas Lukaszuk sent out the first drafts of so-called mandate letters to top university officials outlining expectations under the new guise of Campus Alberta.
The notion of the “new guise of Campus Alberta” is not accurate. Various iterations of Advanced Education over the past decade have been warning higher education leaders and faculty that a voluntary move toward a collaborative Campus Alberta was necessary to sustain and improve education options for all Albertans. Unfortunately, time and dollars have run out and the once voluntary option has now turned into a mandate. Despite these strong words there still is an opportunity for Alberta Universities and Colleges to be proactive. Even though Advanced Education and Enterprise is requiring a move toward Campus Alberta the details on what the Campus Alberta will look like, how resources are shared, how institutions will collaborate is open for discussion.
Perhaps there is still time for the administration and faculty in higher education in Alberta to be proactive. Unfortunately, when you look at past performance as indicator of future potential is doubtful that there will be little more than a reactive response to the cutbacks. We only have to go back a few years to the late 90’s to see how well higher education reacted to forced change.
How can so many highly educated people continually miss the opportunity to proactively improve education. Pointing fingers isn’t going to help. When the faculty blame administrators (who were once faculty), when the administrators blame the faculty and when unions and everyone else blame the government we all loose sight of the fact that it will be our learners, our children, who will loose out.
How do we fix it? We focus on the learning. By building a learning culture that prepares our children how to learn how to learn we can prepare our children for an ever changing future. The solution is really that simple–unfortunately, changing or re-shaping our culture is the challenging part. We out it to our children to move beyond our personal needs and ambitions and take on this challenge.
In the TechRepublic blog post 10 of IT biggest sand traps Mary E. Shacklett, president of Transworld Data, points to ten common IT problems, or sand traps, and offers suggestions on how to avoid them. Mary’s list is accurate but I want to consider that the list has much more to do with managing people and their expectations than it does with technology. The list includes:
- Uncooperative users
- Unhelpful users
- Lack of tool integration
- Platform loyalty
- Poor project management
- Lack of documentation
- Poor data quality
- Jargon
- Unrealistic deadlines
- Lack of people skills
Other than “lack of tool integration” all of these problems are people problems, not technology problems. But even lack of tool integration has its roots in people because someone or some group chose the tools that the organization is using and that individual or group didn’t challenge or vet the tool vendors adequately to determine how well the tools API work with other tools within their infrastructure.
Another potential technology problem that has its roots in people is poor data quality. Once again it is people who develop the methodologies, policies, and procedures for putting the data into the databases. The better a data collection system is configured the more effectively it is used and the less duplication or corruption of data exists.
These IT issues are major sources of problems for higher education because they rely so heavily on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Resource (HR), Student Information Systems (SIS), and Learning/Course Management Systems. The problems with these systems and the resources required to maintain and support these systems take time and resources away from other educational technology initiatives that have the potential to have an even greater and direct impact on the student learning experience.
IT departments in higher education need to get so good at implementing and supporting these infrastructure systems that it appears that they simply go away. Once IT gets to this point and the fundamental IT infrastructure works so well then time and resources can be spent on the online, mobile, social, media, and communication technologies that are so important to our students and their future.
To do this, IT must hire individuals who have people skills, not just technology skills. This may also mean that promoting your best technicians may be a wrong move if those technicians are not able to lead and manage people effectively and, more importantly, are able to interact with the user and user groups in a language that is jargon-free. Furthermore, IT in higher education needs to hire leaders and managers that are able to communicate in “Geek” and Acadamise” because the ability to translate between the two groups is so important in resolving so many of these typical IT/people problems.
Implementing and managing technology is the easy part for IT, the management of people and their expectations is the challenging part. Finding the right leaders who can build and lead an organizational culture that can understand and work to resolve these challenges is the key to mitigating these common problems.
As we can see from the infographic from Staff.com, Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 3GS in 2008 corresponds to the explosive growth of their revenue, profit and market capitalization. In late 2010 and early 2011 we also see a drop in Microsoft’s profit which corrisponds with the release of the iPad and what many are referring to as the beginning of the Post PC era (review several post on this topic). With the lack of success in the release of Windows 8 and poor sales of Microsoft’s Surface tablet we may see and even greater decline in the future for Microsoft.
Unfortunately, the infographic does not include the most disrupted company Research in Motion (RIM), which is now called Blackberry. Back in 2007 Blackberry dominated the smartphone market and just six years later many are wondering if the company will survive despite the release of their long awaited new OS and phones. Another perspective that the infographic doesn’t reveal is the way that Android is now beginning to disrupt Apple. It will be exciting to watch how the whole mobile industry which didn’t even exist six years ago will evolve over the next few years.
Source: Staff.com
