The views I express are my own, and not necessarily those of Union College, or its faculty or administration.  As Associate Dean for Information Technology, these represent my observations, and some ideas that I feel are worth pursuing.

J. Douglass Klein
Associate Dean for Information Technology and Professor of Economics
Union College
Schenectady, NY  12308
kleind@union.edu

1.       What do you see as the greatest issue of concern regarding the use of instructional technology in higher education?

For faculty: Time; reward structure.  I know this is two things, but they are related.  Time spent on technology takes away from traditional research, and the rewards for integrating technology into teaching (salary, promotion, tenure) are not at all clear.  The time it takes is plenty clear.

For the institution: Keeping technology current and support staff.  Again two things, but each requires a financial commitment from the institution that is a challenge to maintain.

2.       Do you believe that the use of instructional technology in on-campus contexts affects the quality of teaching?

I do.  In several ways.  It forces instructors to spend MUCH more time preparing courses than they otherwise would.  An interesting question is, if faculty spent that much time preparing without using technology, would course quality similarly rise.  Or, is there a selection bias: faculty who care more about teaching are willing to put in the time to incorporate technology.

Another by-product of using technology (for me, at least) is that using technology has enabled (forced?) me to use more cooperative learning methods in class, which keeps students more actively engaged.  This again does not require technology, but the technology has been the change agent that has gotten me to change how I teach 

3.       What do you perceive to be the promise of distance education ventures?  Are such ventures right for your institution?  Why or why not? 

Since we are a residential liberal arts college, “distance education” has in general been a dirty word.  In fact, I have started talking about “remote collaboration” rather than “distance education” in order to avoid knee-jerk reactions.  That said, we are using, or planning to use remote collaboration to enrich the curriculum we can offer students.  The concern on the part of faculty is the fear that they will be replaced.  As a faculty member, I understand the concern, but it is absolutely clear to me that (1) there is a solid future for residential liberal arts colleges and (2) that future does not include wholesale replacement of faculty by courses imported from a distance. 

The areas where I do see a bright future for remote collaboration at a college like ours include:

a. Collaborative research projects between our students and remote (especially international) students.  We are already doing this in our engineering division, and this term for the first time, our economics department.

b. Similar to (a), but putting our own students studying abroad in touch with our students back here in the States.  We have piloted this twice, with good success.  The collaboration here can be as simple as students here e-mailing questions to students abroad. (This was done, for example, linking introductory anthropology students here to students doing research in Fiji.)

c. Pairing classes here and elsewhere (instructors at each end) for synchronous or asynchronous discussions of common topics.  For example, a course in American Studies in France might “meet” with a class here studying similar material, to discuss how to interpret the material.  We  will be exploring such possibilities in France, China, and with several other colleges which are quite different from us in the US.

d. On a strictly limited  basis, allowing students here to enroll in distance ed. courses at other institutions.  This is more controversial here, but I feel that it is promising, particularly if we can join with similar institutions to solve the “low-enrollment” course problem.  We regularly list courses which do not get sufficient enrollment to be offered.  Other schools must face similar problems.  We would like to set up, among a small group of schools, a clearing house for low enrollment courses which could be offered at a distance.  These courses would by definition be quite small, probably with total enrollments under 10, with no more than five from either school.  The objective would export courses where we have faculty strength and other schools do not, and vice versa for imported courses.  For any course we import, it must be clear that we cannot offer the course locally, and are unable to hire in that field.  Of course the hope is that we would have faculty to teach any field, but that is unlikely to be financially feasible.

e. We have discussed (but not implemented) offering distance enrollments to our alumni body into our campus based courses for which some or all materials are available online. 

4.       Do you believe that instructional technology may enhance access to or equity in higher education, for example, by providing educational benefits to disadvantaged groups?  Are there other social issues that you believe may be affected by the use of instructional technology?

This is certainly a goal, and apparently the digital divide is lessening somewhat.  Certainly technology improves access to some kinds of information, but whole courses delivered via distance learning cannot replace the intellectual community found at a residential college, and that kind of education will remain expensive.  Technology can supplement library materials at a residential college, but there too, some of the best digital resources are quite expensive.  Much as I would like to say “yes” to this question, I have my reservations.  For technical training, technology is likely to be more beneficial.

5.       Do you believe that instructional technology has the potential to grow enrollment at your institution and reach new types of students?  Might it have the potential to marginalize groups of students?

This does not appear to be an issue, with the exception of a small distance learning program we are starting this summer in our Graduate Management Institute (an affiliated graduate program, semi-independent of the undergraduate school).  This masters program in Bioethics will be targeted to health care professionals who would probably be unable to enroll in a residential or place-based program.

6.       What would you take to be the hallmark characteristics of quality and effectiveness in the realm of online education?  What research might help tease out such characteristics?

“Online education” is quite a broad concept, ranging from completely self-taught, self-paced technical training, with no need for human intervention on the instruction side, to attempts to recreate as much of the residential college experience as possible online.  We are more interested in the latter.

a. An experienced academic instructor trained in both the technology and the pedagogy of running an online course.

b. Small class size (certainly under 20)

c. Active participation by all class members – regular feedback from instructor.

d. Access to academic and student services similar to those available on-ground.

e. The online program is subject to assessment and review with an eye to maintaining and improving its quality.

f. Evidence of institutional commitment to the program, including adequate support for faculty and students, and recognition of faculty efforts.

7.       Do you believe that the use of instructional technology may have an impact on academic values, processes, or governance?  If so, how?

Academic values:  We are quite concerned with an apparent rise in plagiarism cases brought about by the ease of cutting-and-pasting.  This seems to result from a combination of ignorance, laziness, and opportunity.  We are alarmed by the proliferation of online resource libraries touting the ease of research made possible by these sites.  In my opinion, this trend makes the college’s mission of teaching academic values and critical thinking more essential than it has ever been.

Processes: I am not quite sure what you mean here, but certainly IT has been involved in the process of running an academic institution for some time.  PeopleSoft, SCT Banner, and Datatel have raised the bar for the kinds of administrative and student services that are possible.  Managing these systems to the benefit of the College is the major challenge.  We must constantly, on both the administrative and the academic side of things, keep Neil Postman’s question in mind: “For what problem is this the solution?”

Governance: IT can help institutional studies collect and analyze data, which can help in strategic planning for faculty loading, staffing needs, enrollment management, and the like.  Faculty and students alike can keep electronic portfolios (we are experimenting on the student side) to assist in assessments and performance reviews.  IT is unlikely, however, to replace the kind of debates that go on in faculty meetings and faculty senates. I leave it to the reader to decide whether that is good or bad.

8.       What do you believe to be the economic benefits, if any, to institutions of using instructional technology?  In particular,

a)      Do you think that the use of instructional technology is likely to affect costs or affordability of higher education?

I worry that schools are engaged in a technology arms-race, sometimes without fully addressing the “what problem does this solve” question.  If true, it is not helping the affordability of education.  On the other hand, a different class of institution (the University of Phoenix class) which uses almost exclusively adjunct faculty can offer a brand of course to students who might not be able to attend, for reasons of time or money, a residential college.  I am an economist by training, so I will give the economist’s answer: yes, and no.

b)      What do you believe to be the opportunity costs of large investments in instructional technology and distance learning?

The biggest one is faculty research.  Beyond that, in an era of scarce resources, any investment in technology for DL must come from somewhere.  Early reports from the Pew project suggest that no one is making a pile of money at DL yet.

c)      In what ways might using instructional technology on campus or launching distance learning ventures enhance revenues for your institution?

See (b).  We hope that the things we are doing reported in (3) above will help enhance our reputation, and will appeal to prospective students.  If we can increase our applicant pool, and increase our yield, good things follow: grants, alumni donations, and so on.

If we can use (3d) to marginally increase enrollments in under-enrolled there will be a marginal revenue enhancement, and if we implement some version of (3e), alumni could be charged.  I do not anticipate any of these to become a gold mine for us.

9.       Do you believe that the use of instructional technology introduces opportunities or constraints regarding campus resources?

Opportunities. 

- for different styles of teaching and learning

- to bring together students and teachers who might not otherwise be able to collaborate

- for access to resources

- to enrich curriculum

10.   Do you believe that the use of instructional technology is likely to bring about institutional changes?  What sorts of resistance to such changes are prominent?

One possible change, which will meet (and is meeting) resistance is a tipping of the teaching-research balance toward teaching.  Using IT is so time-intensive at this point, that faculty doing it are asking for/hoping for/demanding recognition.  In many fields, there is pressure to recognize a “scholarship of teaching”, and along with that, there are a growing number of avenues for peer review of teaching and teaching methods.

There is also a genuine concern for the future of faculty lines, and indeed for the survival of residential colleges.  I am not fearful, because as noted, I think the information overload that we are subjected to makes the skills and values taught by residential liberal arts colleges more and more essential.  It is up to us to preach that necessity.

11.   Do for-profit ventures in distance learning make sense for your institution, or for the higher education sector on the whole?

Not for us, at least not yet.

More in the training arena than what I would call more traditional education.  It is really a different product.

12.   What effects do you believe that the use of instructional technology is likely to have on faculty—in terms of compensation, status (in or out of the university), or roles (e.g. as instructors or researchers)?

See (10).

13.   What do you believe are the central issues raised by online education regarding intellectual property (IP) rights?  What are the right policies for higher education institutions?

The answer is to rephrase the question: One of the central issues raised by online education is intellectual property rights.  Yes, it is an issue.  Who owns online materials – whether used for distance learning or traditional courses?  I am not a lawyer, but the solution seems to be along the lines that Carol Twigg suggests: it is not an issue of ownership, but more an issue of rights.  Clearly, unless specified in a contract to the contrary, a faculty member who has developed course materials retains some rights to use them if she moves to another institution.  By the same token, if the College has invested in developing the materials (particularly by offering a “work for hire” stipend for their development, then the College also retains the rights to use, and even to modify those materials.  Getting this balance right is probably one the  key things (along with the time burden) slowing down the development of quality online courses at traditional schools.

14.   What is the place of collaboration between higher education institutions, or between higher education institutions and other ventures—commercial or nonprofit—in the world of online education?

Collaboration between HE institutions is a good thing, but a difficult thing.  A lot of pride and tradition and turf are at stake.  Everyone wants to collaborate with institutions better than they are, hoping to benefit from the association.  This makes collaboration difficult, at best.  Still, as noted in (3c) and (3d), there is room for quite useful collaborations if the administrative (and calendar) hurdles can be overcome.

Academic freedom is compromised, or has the appearance of being compromised, whenever the commercial sector gets involved.  I would think less of any school which carried advertising on its website, or on its course pages.

15.   What do you think will be the medium and long-term impacts of online education on your institution and the higher education sector?

There will be lots of experimentation; lots of assessment; probably a continued fragmenting of the HE market into different market niches.  In the short- to medium-run (10-20 years) it may become increasingly confusing for high-school graduates to decide what kind of education to pursue, as more choices emerge. 

Union College is likely to parallel the traditional liberal arts colleges and will lag the national market for distance education.  It is not viewed as what we do.  We are, and will continue to monitor very closely what our overlap schools are doing, and will try to forge some collaborative projects with them.  Distance learning will not become a large part of what we do any time soon, except in the ways noted in (3), and even those will be relatively small endeavors.

16.   Which of the issues raised here are pressing concerns on your campus?

Faculty recognition and reward; threats to staffing levels if our students are allowed to transfer in large numbers of DL courses.

17.   What should be the parameters of such debates?  Are there any options or stances on these matters that should receive greater attention?

Technology is forcing, for the first time in my 25-year career, a real reassessment of what education is all about.  This shifting focus away from research (which we all pretty well understand, because that is how we were trained) toward teaching (about which there is a lot of uncertainty, because few of us received any formal training) is really rocking the faculty boat.  Schools of every stripe, especially ones used to primarily recognizing and rewarding research, are being forced to do some soul-searching.  The very process of thinking about what to do is focusing more attention on teaching than it has had in some time. 

The other big issue, that of threats to staffing levels, really boils down to a need to be able to assess the quality of a DL course that a student might want to take, and of a DL course that a faculty member might want to offer.  In spite of ceaseless efforts, I have never been convinced that we do a good job measuring the quality of traditional classroom courses, and measuring quality of online courses is not going to be any easier.  The worst outcome for us, and for education in general, would be for these concerns to make us and schools like us turn inward, and try to shut out the outside world.  That would be a real educational (and marketing) disaster.

18.   What do you think would be valuable questions for empirical research on the use of instructional technology, the growth of online education, and the emergence of the new distance learning ventures?

As the Pew studies recently reported indicated, measuring the costs of IT and online education is a hard job.  There are so many hidden costs (support, library, faculty time), and so many shared costs (campus web site), that numbers are very soft.

Descriptive statistics on numbers of courses, students, faculty would be instructive in measuring the growth of online education.  Assessing its value is another thing.  Early evidence suggests that end-of-term evaluations do not change much when a faculty member starts using IT.  Student technical skill levels change over time, so measures of comfort with IT are likely to just measure social trends, not success of faculty in integrating technology.

Of course, what we need is outcomes measures:  are students learning more, remembering more, writing better, find facts to support an argument better, able to critically think and analyze better?  In small ways, we should try to compare measurable inputs (faculty time, student time, technology resources, technology support) with measurable outputs (primarily learning outcomes, but with some room for satisfaction). 

In my economics research, I use a tool called Data Envelopment Analysis which measures the efficiency with which measured inputs are “converted” to measured outputs.  An interesting experiment would be to take two groups of courses, some using technology and some not, and compare that conversion across the groups to see whether the conversion is done more efficiently in the presence of technology.

19.   Who would you name as the most talented and fitting scholars currently doing, or capable of pursuing, research on any of these issues?

Measuring education outcomes:  Eric Hanushek, Hoover Institute, Stanford U.

Assessing costs and benefits of technology, and scholarship of teaching: Steve Gilbert, President , TLT Group of AAHE.