ScottBlog

This year at the Educause annual conference several of my Frye colleagues gave a panel presentation on their experiences post-Frye with attaining leadership positions (look in Resources tab for the PPT).  It was very informative and hopefully the video will be available online for all to see.  I jotted down many notes and had these take-aways for those looking to move into leadership positions:

• When looking for a new position, know your strengths and your area of preference/comfort. Look for institutions and at position reporting lines that match those preferences.  For example, if you are academic computing focused, look for positions that report up through the Provost / Dean.  Also know what the institution is about and what its focus is.  You are looking for a good fit.
  • Also learn about other areas outside of your own.  Get on projects outside of your area.  You will need to know the broader view of IT to be an effective leader.  For example, if you work mainly on the systems side get on some academic computing project teams.
• Know what stage of organizational development the institution you are considering is in.  Do they need someone to carry on what is happening?  Someone to fix something that is broken?  Someone to transform them?  Also know where your strengths lie.  An article in CIO magazine described 3 types of CIOs – operational, transformative, or strategic.  Know where your strengths or your goals lie.  Make sure the institutional need is a fit for you.  Organizations change over time and what they need change.
• What to do in those first 90 days that are often seen as critical?
  • Meet everyone you can.  Set the tone in your team.  Find out what others outside of IT think, need.  Listen a lot.
  • Establish benchmarks quickly.  You will be asked to show proof of change.  Collect data showing how things are when you arrive.  Prepare comparisons to other organizations too.
  • Decide on your top 1 or 2 priorities and make a plan to execute them.  You can’t change everything at once.
  • Meet with your peers in the institution.  Establish those connections.
  • Create communication vehicles.  Create avenues for transparency.
  • Find mentors.  Utilize mentors.  Mentors can come from unlikely places.  If you ask someone to be a mentor  they just might say “yes.”
• What about mistakes?  What would the panel do differently?
  • Give yourself permission to make mistakes.  You will make them.
  • Listen more during those first 90 days, talk less.
  • Remember you are new to your staff.  They do not know your ways.  You do not know the organizational ways before you came.  Learn the culture and be clear and explicit about your expectations.
• What about interview advice?
  • Do your homework about the institution.  This is key.
  • Be confident about yourself, but be yourself.  Do not try to be what they want.  That will not work out on the long term.
• What about self-improvement?
  • Seek out professional development wherever you can.
    • Take advantage of what Educause has to offer.
    • Look to other organizations, like the American Council on Education.
  • One panelist was always quite shy and soft spoken.  She took some assertiveness training courses years ago.  Needless to say she’s not shy now about speaking up.

Candidate searches in an IT environment often ask the question “What will the IT environment be like in 5 years?”  Looking ahead in IT is nearly impossible, even 1 year is a challenge.  I enjoy listening to the end-of-the-year radio shows where the tech commentators listen to their predictions from 12 months prior and comment on them.  Most are quite funny.  Could I have predicted the iPad or ubiquitous mobility 5 years ago?  Let’s see what I was blogging about 5 years ago.

Turn on the WABAC machine and let’s see.  It’s 2006. Pluto was demoted.  iTunes store had sold 1.5 billion songs in 3 years (it was only 3 year sold).  It’s up to 10 billion now.  Daniel Powter was topping the charts with “Bad Day.”  My blog posts were few but I was working on adding functionality to our moodle install as well as going to Educause nationals.  My focus at Educause 2006 was an interplanetary Internet (a very good keynote), learning spaces were still hot, outsourcing resnet, posting more materials online causing an increase in printing volume, web 2.0 and CMS 2.0.

Where are those topics now?  While learning spaces were hot, now they are part of our campus planning fabric.  Then it was outsourcing resnet, now it’s outsourcing email.  In both cases, we are taking a hard look at what services are not strategic (but still essential) and moving them out and refocusing institutional resources on strategic and mission-related projects.  My Frye experience continues to resonate.

I think there will always be some unforeseen disruptive technology that shakes everything up. What we have to do is accept that is the world we exist in and simply roll with it.  I prefer to not jump in with both feet but rather assess things (be reflective) before taking a step.  Take iPads for instance.  We see some faculty buying them for themselves and using them to improve their productivity, improve their access to information, and now enhance their teaching.  My team is planning an iPad summit with the cutting edge faculty to discuss how they are using iPads and how they could imagine iPads impacting student learning.  So far, at my institution, they’ve been used for, at most, instruction but not student learning.  I hope a result of the iPad summit will be some great pilot ideas to improve student learning which we can then support and fund.  I prefer to not buy the iPads and then shop for ideas – teaching first, technology second.  I see this as the delicate dance instructional technologist play with faculty — sometimes lead, sometimes follow, and sometimes line dance along side.

One of the enjoyable aspects of this blog is using it to gather and process topics I’m involved in at work.  On my front burner right now: PCI-DSS.  One of my colleagues has been working on this mostly and now I’m joining in.

What is it you ask?  I’m sure you’re dying to know.  It’s a set of requirements that anyone who processes credit cards must adhere to so that personal information and card information is protected.  It was started in 2001 by Visa and Mastercard, then called Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP).  It’s since expanded and became PCI-DSS and in 2010 PCI-DSS v 2.0 came out.  One result of PCI-DSS is that receipts only should be showing the last 4 digits of your card number.

Some of my main resources at the moment are

1. Achieving Cost-Effective PCI Compliance:  presentation from the 2011 Educause Enterprise Computing Conference co-presented by Cathy Hubbs who was in my Frye cohort.
2. Two Diverse Approaches to PCI-DSS Compliance: presentation from the 2011 Educause Security Conference.
3. PCI FAQs

Cathy’s presentation in (1) has a great set of questions to answer on page 25.  You really need to get your arms around where you are using credit cards and how they are being processed.  What you need to do depends on your level which is based on how many card transactions you process annually.  A few pages later in page 32 she has some equally great recommendations.  The Baylor presentation (2) notes that in higher ed limiting scope is critical.  That is, limiting what is in scope vs. not.  If something stores, processes or transmits card data it is in scope.  That really makes you want to ditch credit card processing.  That’s what the U. of Delaware essentially did.  Those little dial-up terminals that you see in merchants seem like a good way to go — since the info travels over the phone line and not your network you have less to be concerned with.  And be sure you’re not storing credit card numbers in your ERP (ideally nowhere).  Keep things out of scope.  Baylor also notes to prioritize and tackle the critical area first and work your way down to lower risk items.  It could be daunting to try to do it all at once.

Now, of the 4 levels merchants can be in, level 3 is a common place where schools can find themselves.  For level 3 you need to do an Annual SAQ (Self-Assessment Questionnaire), fill out an attestation of compliance form, and lastly have a quarterly network scan by an approved scan vendor (ASV).  The ASV scan is done externally to look for public-facing vulnerabilities.

So if you’re looking into PCI-DSS, find some good resources, read up, and talk to other institutions.

UPDATE – all conference materials are now posted here.

Day two arrived and zipped by faster than day 1!  Here is what I I’m taking away -

Blended Learning: Past, Present and Future

Another good plenary panel session.  Again many tweets give you an idea of the big ideas discussed. Some of my favorite quotes/snips

• Best of both worlds -> blended is classroom enhanced web learning.
• DOE report calls blended “pedagogically rich environment.”
• UCF finds blended has lower withdrawl rates and higher student satisfaction rates
• UCF studied 1.8 million, yes that’s million, student evaluations and found “excellent” rating used most in blended courses.
• Not moving parts of course online, but transforming to online.
• UCF students are blending their programs by choosing different offerings in different formats to find their way through.  UW-M too.
• UCF finds $ savings is in not having to build buildings for their increasing demand.

Next up Can Blended Learning Help Ease the Transition to College?

A community college in Baltimore — 35K students — delivers face-to-face and online college readiness course.  It is required for all degree and certificate-seeking students.  7 weeks long. Delivered by faculty and staff across college (after 28 hours of training + 4 hours for online delivery).  Huge demand (since required) — 200 sections last fall!  They use SmarterMeasure to assess readiness of online students.  They are considering going blended because students do want some face-to-face and they need to find ways to deliver a lot of sections.

After lunch with the Normadale crew again I was off to the Eduventures presentation.

Hybrid Education: The Consumer Perspective

As with all things Eduventures — a very data-rich presentation.  Thankfully the PPT is posted at the link above.  Check it out.  Some key headlines I saw

• Most interest in blended is in AA and masters programs.
• Online interest rate has tapered.
• Surveyed 52 institutions — 58% public, 36% private, 6% for-profit.
• over 20,000 responses! — 72% current students, 28% prospective students.  Included continuing ed students.
• 34% of prospects interested in blended. 19% of current students interested in blended (24% of all in survey).
• For disciplines, English and Sciences had most (45%) interest from prospects.
• Of the prospects who were interested in blended program in next 3 years
  • 51% prefer more online components than face-to-face.
  • 31% prefer equal mix.
  • 18% prefer more face-to-face components.
• When those prospects were asked about how they liked a 90% online / 10% face-to-face 64% said that was attractive.
• When asked about what kinds of face-to-face components they liked
  • networking event
  • 1 week every few months
  • practical / employer-linked project
  • 1 day residency to start
• What face-to-face components they didn’t like
  • quizzes / exams
  • 1 day at the end
  • 1 week to start or end
• When asked what activities they were interested in (check out the slides, really)
  • 84% wanted real-world applications
  • 83% simulations
  • 77% project-based assignments
  • ….
  • down to 47-48% socializing and group work.
• When asked what motivated them
  • 35% adding skills, become more marketable.
  • 17% job advancement (see slides)
• When selecting a blended program
  • 96% said course / program quality top selection
  • 92% said faculty teaching abilities
  • 91% said cost
  • ….
• Interestingly, reputation is trumping geography.  Students used to be selecting online programs close to them but now they’re more interested in reputation — far away is ok if you’re quality.
• Great scatter plot on how students become aware of programs — online course catalog most important and then the school website.  Social media, youtube, texting are very low on importance.
• For prospects, flexible scheduling is key for them — convenience is low.

Eduventures concluded with the observation that it appears that the demand is high but the supply seems low.  Leaving questions — is it that students can’t find blended offerings?  They can’t figure out what is blended?  They’re just winding up taking online because they can’t find blended?

Last up were 15-minute “Great Idea” sessions from Sloan-C effective practice winners.  This segment moved at a good pace from presenter to presenter.  My favorites were

Imperial College London (yes, 3 of them flew out to the conference!) – using online supported self-study to get students prepared for their advanced business degree.  The students are coming from varied backgrounds and don’t have all the foundational skills necessary.  The self-paced online courses are managed by a tutor who is there to answer questions but the courses are truly self-study as students can jump in at any time and I’m assuming there is no interactive component with other students.  They saw them as a way to have more students experience some of their best faculty (via recordings).

Knewton – continuous adaptive learning to solve college readiness.  This literally blew my mind!  Imagine an adaptive textbook that changes as your skills change.  Imagine creating a playlist of what you need to learn to get ready for college.  Imagine a system that knows how you learn best, when you learn best and adapts to meet your personal learning style.  The demo was AMAZING. They use some game-style achievement tracking to help students ladder through masteries.  In terms of reporting you can drill down to the atomic concept level to see if a given student mastered the concept.  You can see it here.

My first thought was how expensive will this be?  They see it as a way to replace textbooks and they’re getting publishers on board — the textbook cost is redirected to this instead.  He said it would be free to faculty to use but V1 was going to be lacking a UI to load up the logic and structures.  V2 would have a UI for building your “course” – perhaps in 2012 I think.  Also coming in V2 is tutor sourcing : You (the student) ask a question about, say, the quadratic formula.  Knewton decodes your question, identifies what it is about, finds people who know the answer, then finds people who learn just like you, then asks them, and you get answers that work for you.  Once the session video is up I’m going to show my colleagues.

And then it was over.  Twitter was great for this conference and it allowed me to capture some of the best snippets.  I had some great chats with people and everything was well done.  Well worth the trip!

UPDATE – all conference materials are now posted here.

Just wrapped up day 1 of the Sloan-C Blended Learning workshop.  A very good and very dense day – to quote D P Gumby “my brain hurts.”

If You Build Hybrids, Will They Come? Grassroots Initiative to Institutional Embrace

I got there early and chatted with the presenter Dorothy.  I also got to chat with a nice woman from a graduate school that was thinking about blended.  The link to the presentation has a lot of resources that I plan to look through.  Keystone is in Pennsylvania and has about 1600 student FTE and is mainly a commuter school.  They had to convince upper administration to do blended.  Key items for me

• Blended gives a way to learn how to be an online learner safely.  Students will be advancing their skills using online out in the workforce so we need to teach them how to be effective in that modality.
• Some institutions, like Keystone, created a framework for blending so it can be described to students.  One school noted they have 8 week courses.  3 sessions will be online.  They meet on Tuesday nights.  The instructor chooses which sessions – often 1, 5, and 8.
• Provide talking points for your champions in the administration to build support.
• Their online learning committee approves online part of blended.  10 people on committee. Lead by librarian who leads Teaching and Learning with Technology office not by blended program manager.  Committee is key folks like divisional faculty reps, registrar, dean, media services.
• Use QM to judge quality – have blended checklist based on it.
• They require training before a faculty can teach blended.
• Course approval form has approve, deny, and provisional results (i.e fix these 3 things and then it’s good to go).

Blended Learning: Big Issues and Strategies

This was a panel presentation that hopefully will have some of the material posted.  Excellent panel.  I sat next to a fellow midwesterner from the UW system (quite by accident).  Some favorite tidbits of mine were

• You must tie your blended initiative to your mission or it will fail.
• We need to enable students to “move time.”  Time is a precious resource for busy urban professional (CUNY school).
• At UW-Milwaukee 68% of the blended students live around the campus.
• Also at UW-M programs that required a synchronous component have failed.
• “Thoughtfully blend with pedagogy.”
• “Choreographed development of courses and programs.”
• With blended there better be an important reason to convene class.  Don’t gather to lecture.
• Initial total costs will be higher.
• You must have a faculty development program with your blended initiative or it will fail.  You have one shot at launch to get it right.
• At UW-M because the blend format is determined by the faculty it is harder to recapture the space use since it is irregular.
• UW-M panelist, Tanya Joosten, is quite active in this area.  She’s done research in her courses on student outcomes in different delivery modes — blended, online, face-to-face.  She found blended students did best when she did an item analysis in her courses. She’s also found a statistically significant increase in graduation rate of blended students.
• Accreditation will be focusing on time to degree.
• Blended = student-centered active learning.  Many opportunities for authentic assessment, low stakes frequent assessment, students can get more feedback on learning and have the opportunity to change their learning before it’s too late.
• Must be clear to students what they’re signing up for.  UW-M defines this clearly to students.
• Establish a common language on your campus.
• It’s not what tech you use but how you use the tech you have.

Lunch was in a tent.  Yes, a tent.  It’s in the 30s outside!  It was heated and was really extension of the building.  But it was a tent.  I randomly sat down at a table and who do I sit down next to — two folks from Normandale College!  In fact Jenny whom I was sitting next to will be teaching a film course at Augsburg next year and she’s an Augsburg alum.  Minnesota-dar.

Demystifying Evaluation to Effectively Capture Evidence of Impact

This is one where I’ll need to study the materials.  She provided a brief overview of the key concepts behind evaluation, contrasted with research and assessment.  I think I would have gotten more out of it right then if it was formatted as a 1.5 hour workshop like the morning sessions.  Evaluation is a sophisticated field and institutions can really benefit by having a professional evaluator available.

Re-thinking student written comments in course evaluations: Text mining unstructured data for program and institutional assessment

This one was interesting though a bit heavy — much lingo around research methods.  But some of the key concepts were

• myths and fears – students lack maturity, its a popularity contest, unreliable and invalid, outside factors influence, these cannot meaningfully improve instruction
• components of course evaluations by students – course content, instruction, and context
• students more engaged mid-term and will give more constructive feedback
• overall nice overview of research on student evaluation of courses
• he looked at words used, their adjacencies, made scatter plot to show what words tended to appear near each other
• he saw some correlation between likert and open-ended results

Next was the keynote from Josh Jarret – Blended Future: Trends Reshaping Higher Education and the Role of Blended Learning – Program Officer, Postsecondary Success, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  He was great as were his slides. The presentation is posted online.  My favorite tidbits

• 75% of our students are non-traditional (based on criteria on his slide)
• #1 predictor for student success is mom’s education
• Student experience map is spaghetti path — few take a single path.
• How do we break the iron triangle? cost – quality – access . Can’t increase one without lowering another.
• He then talked about blending, but not of courses because he’ll leave that to the other sessions (clever!).
  • Blending individual craft to virtual teams to shared courseware.
  • Blending data analytics and learning (amazon.com, action analytics)
  • Blending formal and informal learning (do not try to pull, instead try to push learning to those informal spaces — speaking of virtual spaces)
  • Blending of institutions — partnerships
• check twitter for many comments on his kenote!

The poster sessions were a bust for me.  There should have been Sloan-provided signs for them.  I couldn’t tell what they were and they were in the hallway which made it sometimes awkward.  Time to rest up for a full day tomorrow!

So this image shows the service lifecycle.  If you google image search this you’ll find a ton.  I am intrigued by the rigorous approach to this.  In higher ed things, to me, seem to have been pretty casual.

ITIL takes a formal approach to the creation (defining it and identifying requirements), then moving into the live environment (I still remember when we didn’t have test systems, only production), and lastly operation and improvement (something often neglected, make it and let it run and forget it).

Service Strategy

So my little guide says that a service provider has to realize the people, or customers, don’t buy things but instead they buy to satisfy a need.  I like that thinking.  I’ve always been very people-centered, or user-centered, or customer-centered (if I am to evolve my language) so this resonates.  I can see how IT shops can miss the mark when they aim for the most whiz-bang website possible and should instead be aiming for a website that does what its users need.  Of course the motivation here is to provide something people want and pay for.  This means you have to understand who your users, urm customers (still working on that), are.

All this exists within a context of an organization which has its own culture.  And the service provider does serve the mission of the greater organization.  We also have to remember that our customers (there, I did it) have a choice which means we have competition.

In higher ed, so many schools have outsourced student email and many have done the same for faculty and staff.  Why?  The university is no longer the provider of email, much how it stopped being the provider of internet service years ago.  Email used to serve the need of the university to communicate both within and without the institution.  Now commercial providers are better and everyone can have email from the day they can type and navigate a computer.  Email is not a strategic service anymore.  IT is better served to focus its resources, often reduced or at best holding stable, on services that serve the strategic mission of the university.  Outsourcing email is not free, but it helps redirect resources where they can best impact student learning.

So, there may come a point where a service needs to be abandoned and given to the competition.

I’m starting to learn about ITIL v3 and I seem to learn best by writing and processing the material.  First I’m starting with a pocket guide to get the essential concepts.  ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and it is a means to manage services.  But what is a service in this context?

“A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.”

So you want to help people achieve something without them bearing some of the burdens, and how you help is through a service.  There is an assumption that the service may have a cost to the people using it.  Since the service is providing something people want there is a value placed on it — do the costs and value align?

“Service Management is a set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.”

Now “specialized organizational capabilities” is pretty vague.  Those are all the things that surround the service relating to its delivery. I’ll probably get to those later.

ITIL provides IT governance, has a measurement and improvement aspect and takes into account the customer perspective.  Oh, and ITIL was developed in the UK which gets my interest — so many of my favorite things have come from that little island.

Carleton was very hospitable and Hawaiian on a cold Minnesota Friday.  It was a good day at Gusday 10.  We had some tweets going on throughout the day as well.  I snapped some pictures too at facebook.

Here’s a rundown of my takeaways:

• Creating Engaging Online Courses – Luther Seminary
  • they offer 60 courses online or hybrid
  • been doing it for 10 years
  • they are running the Jenzabar LMS which is limited so they build most course sites in HTML with the LMS page as the hub
  • they have 3 people in the Learning Design and Technologies area
  • they think of the learning objectives first, the technology second
  • they build the courses for faculty, the faculty are the content experts not the builders
  • they use a lot of flash movies from flip video cameras – faculty introductions and the like
  • “Multi-Media Learning” by Mayer: 2 channels – audio and video, overload one and the other shuts down, too much visual in powerpoint and the audio part is lost too
  • use camtasia studio for annotated ppt
  • courses use small groups of 5, conference calls with group and instructor, group forums and course forum
  • adobe connect to enhance call experience
  • be specific in online courses, always
  • use mid-course check-ins, critical incidents
  • trying eportfolios this term
  • http://www.luthersem.edu/ldt/
• Off-Hour On-Call Support – Bethel
  • A Saturday outage got the attention of the administration
  • Bethel has grown 20% in 5 years, new campus in Bloomington
  • issue vs outage
    • issue – (my monitor doesn’t work) not good for on-call, resolved during regular hours
    • outage – (Blackboard is down again) right for on-call reporting
  • using a definition from Georgia State
  • providing 57.5 hours of on-call coverage (until midnight during the week and evenings Fri-Sun
  • have a purpose statement – conduit for communication through a liaison to other staff, level 1 and 2 issues
  • compensation? – 6 person rotation, 1 person / week, 1/10 flex time before next rotation (6 hours)
  • equipment used
    • netbook with mobile internet
    • bomgard.com hardware remote access
    • shared PDA phone
    • phonetag.com – transcription and SMS / email creation of ticket with WAV
    • phone tree on campus to get into off-hours VM
    • started 10/1/9, about 2 calls / week
    • process: someone calls regular number, it’s off-hours so they pick that option, it rolls to phonetag number and the leave a message, an SMS is sent saying someone called, in a few minutes a ticket is created with the message and another SMS is sent with the message text.  The on-call person then decides it is an outage and does some initial triage and calls in the appropriate person if needed.
• Document Imaging – Carleton
  • using Onbase from Hyland Software for 11 years
  • being used in silos, not consistent use of fields
  • not sharing documents across departments
  • isn’t a replacement for the business application, just a place to store files like virtual filing cabinet
  • the goal is not that it be easy to put documents in, rather it should be easy to find things in it
  • ties to RP through another little app
• Project Management – Carleton and St Cloud State
  • St Cloud started, they have a position that just does project management
  • project vs operation work (sometimes fuzzy — are annual rollouts a project?)
  • project has beginning and end
  • 5 steps in process
    • initiate – idea
    • plan – scope
    • execute
    • monitor / control – check in w/stakeholders, watch scope creep
    • closing
  • project management – one project
  • program management – managing group of related projects
  • portfolio management – managing collection of all
  • charter is entry point to process
  • routine meetings to prioritize
  • reach decision point – document and sign off
  • communication plan for updates
  • completion document, lessons learned, future projects, document what was done
  • first create a process then find a tool to support it
  • Carleton – just enough project management
    • team of 4 ITS staff, shared, vet projects through group
    • big P projects (large organizational projects, often external driven, by leadership, $$, visible, higher risk)
    • little p projects (smaller team projects, by team leads, little $, little risk)
    • they’re using a wiki to track – opened to key ppl outside of ITS
    • charter is useful for people to organize thoughts about why it was great idea
    • have different states for projects
    • considering dotproject
    • update projects 1/month

I really enjoyed Carleton’s approach to just enough project management — they provided the slides too.  I think it could work for us as it’s enough to organize things but not too much to be onerous to people. The document imaging put a good perspective on the role of document imaging.  The Off-hours session provided a cool system for capturing reporting of incidents and getting them resolved.  Luther Seminary is doing some interesting stuff online and I noticed it is a full-service department — faculty record their video and drop off the flip.

Three of us trekked to Madison to attend the conference held at the lovely Monona Terrace.  The drive down was good but the drive back had much rain which slowed us down a lot.  We did stop and stock up on Wisconsin cheese (not myself though).  There were some good sessions and some not so good.  Here’s the highlights from my good sessions:

• Distance Learning Czar:  It was clear that so many of the schools there were way into distance and online learning.  The idea of someone in charge of distance learning was repeated especially at the session featuring Carlos a fellow Frye ’09 alum!
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization. This technique was explained well at a session on Marketing online programs.  The focus is clearly to capture students when they’re searching for an online program.  Looking forward to getting the powerpoint on this one.
• Part Time Instructional Design: This session (see ppt) was the winner of Thursday for me.  It laid out a program at Del Mar College where instructional design is done by a team: 2 faculty, 1 instructional technologist, 1 librarian, 1 director.  The 2 faculty positions are 1 course release overloads for a term and are competitive slots — they apply for them.  The team does instructional design with faculty, course reviews, mentoring, development of support materials, general sounding board for online learning.
• Quality Matters: Again and again places mentioned how they took the base QM rubric and modified it for their school.  Seems like a no-brainer to do so we have a way to assess the quality of our online offerings.  The question is who does the assessing and what is the result?
• Economics of Online Learning: you can expect 12 – 32% of tuition as revenue (25% typical) for an online program.  I saw a session by someone from Compass Knowledge Group.  They help institutions develop and run online programs.  The data (based on 50 programs of various sizes) was useful in identifying the components and potential cost % of each.  Another one I’m looking forward to the powerpoint for the details.
• Penn State Resources: faculty self-assessment and quality standards.  From a session that described the complexity that is Penn State, two resources were of note.  A faculty self-assessment allows faculty to test their readiness for online teaching.  And quality standards
  based on quality matters for their online courses.
• What do online students consider essential to their learning?  Their perspectives match up well with, take a guess, the quality matters rubric.  A study of 202 Penn State World Campus students found pieces what they consider essential to their learning and what pieces not so much — maybe a surprise but they don’t consider games and simulations essential to their learning.  But that doesn’t mean those items don’t support their learning.  The presentation is up at slideshare to see the details.
• Epson DC-06 Document Camera.  For $299 you get a usb-based document camera that is so easy to use and captures a great picture.  Time to dump our RCA-video based document cameras for a few of these.

The latest Educause Review just came out with several interesting articles.  There was much focus on the economic context higher ed is in right now.

• Managing in a New Reality by Philip J. Goldstein
  Goldstein points out that working within a tight budget is not new to IT organizations — cuts happened as recently as 2004 in many organizations.  He gives several areas where IT leaders can leverage the current crisis to create a better future for their organizations and institutions.  He also points out several areas where IT leaders can support their institutions in different areas where things will be done differently.
• Top 10 IT issues for 2009 is out
  Some things did jump out at me.  Both in this article and the one above ERPs and the disconnect between the promise and the value realization comes up.  Many institutions find a lack of buy-in from the administration as to the use of the ERP and process improvement.  Change is difficult and changing the way something has always been done is more difficult.  But as people are asked to more with equal or negative staffing levels the ERP can help.  Governance came up too, something I’ve been interested in.  With budget pressure IT needs transparency in its spending to help other units understand where it spends and why.  I was surprised to see LMS/CMSes bringing up the end of the list.  That is, I was surpised to see them on there at all.
• Essential versus Strategic IT Investments by James Hilton
  This should sound familiar as he talked to us at Frye about this exact topic.  I can’t  say I’ve listed to the audio of the interview but the excerpt sounds to be just like our session with him.
• Learning and Technology — “In That Order” by Malcolm Brown
  I was looking forward to this piece since he posted to one of the Educause lists looking for students to participate.  He interviewed 14 students inviting them “to suggest what educators should be thinking about as we plan our learning environments for the next two to four years.” These observations and the specific examples in the article are good reminders with fall approaching.   He found the common messages to be
  • “too much or unfettered technology is bad and directly hinders learning; and
  • the use of technology should not come at the expense of personal interaction both in and outside the classroom.”

Well, here is the end.  Everyone feels like summer camp has ended.  The group really gelled after just a few days.  Many people thought the backnoise channel played a role in that.  I have to agree.  It was great having a whole second conversation going on.  Imagine if during a presentation you could hear the thoughts of other people in the audience, the questions thay had, their comments, the additional resources they know of — that’s what backnoise provided. The faculty made a wordle of the backnoise text

Everyone is pretty exhausted — especially the ones that stayed up to midnight each night (I wasn’t one of those). But I’m still exhausted.

To sum up, here’s 3 types of things I want to take away

• things to do
  • check on campus crisis plan
  • plan a user support retreat
    • include: Pink exercise, hedgehog concept, Terry Hartle view of higher ed
  • check on the cognitive cost of voice recorders, flip video, other things
  • IT advisory committee
  • get “Good to Great for Social Sector”
• things to think about
  • managers (doing things right) vs leaders (doing the right things)
  • creative leadership model
  • current disruptive currents in IT
• things to think differently about
  • life-work balance
  • looking at things as essential vs. strategic
  • cognitive cost of services
  • tracking projects in the department

Today things are winding down.  We have group project presentations this afternoon and one speaker this morning.  We start the day with Mitzi Montoya, Assistant Dean of Research at North Carolina State.  She talked on “Marketing for Sustainability.”  She too was a great speaker and really hit on some relevant marketing ideas for IT.  For me, the key take-away was the cognitive cost of a service. That is best described as how hard it is to get to your service, or how many steps does it take.  This is a lens that I want to use to look at what we provide.  Two things come to mind — voice recorders and flip video cameras.  We should pick models that are easy to use, reduce the cognitive cost.  Other items included a reminder about “Good to Great for Social Sector.”  I’ve read most of “Good to Great” but would like the tie back to nonprofits.  The hedgehog concept came up which was a good reminder to think of us in terms of that concept.

The afternoon was filled with group presentations.  My group presented on “Innovation.”  We took the definition of “ideas applied successfully” and deconstructed that a bit for higher ed.  Another group tackled “globalization” which made me ponder why we don’t leverage video conferencing, including desktop video conferencing, for remote support including Rochester.  Another group presentation on “collaboration” and did this great exercise for getting to know each other.  This exercise came from Jody as she uses it in her classes.  I have a bunch of ideas for a user support retreat now.  The group on “sustainability/green it” reminded me about the President’s Climate Commitment — I know Paul signed it but is the campus moving forward on it?

The day ended with a group picture, a graduation ceremony and 1 minute speech from each of us about the experience.

Today we delved into e-scholarship again this time with Christine Borgman from UCLA via video skype.  It worked really quite well.  She used her work with CENS as a case study.  Not a lot of takeaways — I’m just not that interested in e-scholarship or see the pressing relevance right now for Augsburg.  The major research institutions in the room were far more engaged in the topic.

The after consisted of a tour of Emory facilities including Cox Hall — I feel like I visited one of the holy sites for learning spaces.  I of course snapped many of my own pictures. One tidbit, they spent 30% of their budget on lighting — something to not forget.  We also visited the tiny room where they are digitizing books in partnership with Amazon.  I snapped a few pictures of their machine.  As we watched it looked like maybe an average of 5 seconds per 2-pages with a yellowback book. They noted for every 1 hour of digitizing they needed 2 hours of post-processing.

We then had a panel discussion with leadership from the library and IT at Emory.  A few quotes include “manage complexity in an organization resistant to change,” “higher ed lacks guts but has a heart,” and “the part that is not in the classroom is a business.”  The various discussions made me think

• we need to track what projects we have going on (something Leif has been interested in).  There has been so much talk about projects driving things.
• how do we keep meeting the changing demands and stay nimble? — our beginning efforts to build a knowledgebase, make videos are all moving towards a campus culture where people can use some self-service.  I want to have the personal contact to be meaningful and advance our goals and the mission.  We have a talented, committed outstanding user support staff.  We can’t keep expanding and changing what we support without streamlining some of the basics — some questions are essential but not strategic.

Day 8 opened with discussion on e-scholarship by Chuck Henry, president of CLIR and JQ Johnson at U of Oregon and Frye alum.  This was  not the most pressing topic for me since it was library-centric and publishing-centric.  But I did get a lot of good references from Chuck on Humanities examples of e-scholarship like

• Parker Library @ Stanford – scanned and indexed manuscripts
• Roman de la Rose – digitizing 150 of 200 versions of the manuscript
• Nines – 19th century studies online scholarship
• TaPoR – environment for text study

Something in the discussion made me take note of Stacey’s blog post on library stats software.  Something to follow-up on with the library.  I think this is the package we have explored.

JQ focused on the Open Access model of e-scholarship.  Again, not a topic close to my heart but a few things jumped out like

• arXiv.org – an open archive of e-scholarship in the sciences
• opendoar.org – directory of Open Access repositories, search them all

The afternoon brought James Hilton, University of Virginia VP and CIO.  He was an energizing speaker and I was writing furiously during his session.  He framed his talk around the fact tht the fabric of inquiry is changing — what questions we can ask and the ways we can answer them.  For example when the Large Hadron Collider is running again it will generate 3 million DVDs of data per year.  The four areas of computation, visualization, simulation, and technology-enabled represent the key areas affecting inquiry.

He then dove into how we navigate these disruptive changes.  He highlighted looking at things as essential vs. strategic.  I think this lens will be very relevant for me.  For example, email is essential but it is not strategic.  And if something is essential and commoditized it lends itself to be outsourced so that you can direct resources towards strategic endeavors.  More on that in a bit.

James also touched on the “Does IT Matter?” book.  He noted that because IT is mature enough now investment in IT alone does not give a strategic advantage.  He framed it as, does oxygen matter?  It doesn’t give us a strategic advantage but it sure is hard to live without it!  He also warned that IT will become irrelevant if it is not aligned with the institutional mission.

He then moved into the need to embrace emergence.  The world is emergent and not planned.  We need to work in an emergence mode: we know where we are (starting point) and we then pick a direction to go.  But we don’t define an endpoint — we don’t know where we’ll end up.  We operate in a “fine tune as you go” mode and need to have a comfort with ambiguity.  We need to develop a discipline of refining based on experience.  Another mantra he uses is “tomorrow is better than today.”

We need to ride the current disruptive currents at play in higher ed IT.

1. Unbundling
   1. taking that which was whole and breaking it up into parts
   2. mass media: 3 networks in the old days to 100s now
   3. content: iTunes unbundled the album into songs
2. Demand Pull
   1. people can get what they want when they want it
   2. mass marketing vs. search
   3. lecture vs. exploration
3. Commoditization
   1. people’s appetites have gone up but so has capacity
   2. the US steel industry failed because they ignored a Japanese process for making cheap steel (because it was cheap), then the Japanese process continued to improve and stayed cheap and it then killed the US steel industry
   3. fashion: cheaper, lasts not as long
   4. U of Phoenix: drives down labor cost and scales up
4. Consumerization
   1. email
   2. networks: airport brought wireless to the masses
   3. software: if google apps can be class and role aware, it can do 90% of what a CMS does
   4. user support: outsourcing helpdesks to PerceptIS or Presidium (people had mixed results with them)
   5. storage: amazon backup $0.02 a week for 1GB backup, why are we providing storage
   6. passing the enterprise altogether and going straight to consumers
   7. computers: this was the big discussion point. he’s set the path to reduce the number of public labs over the next 3 years

The computer lab issue raised a lot of discussion. They found that 99% of the new students had computers and students were using the labs for web browsing and word processing — activities done easily on their own computers.  They started transforming some of the lab spaces into student spaces — a nice way to repurpose the spaces.  They’re also planning to use virtual labs to deliver applications to students.  There will still be a need for specialized labs for software that isn’t common (unbundling).  It makes me think we need to look at our labstats and see how our spaces are being used.  Student learning spaces are more strategic than the commodity computing need in my opinion.

He wrapped up with the advice of identifying your values and steering by them.  He emphasized power (influence) over force.  He likes to think of leading as “enrolling them with a vision.” However, you can’t enroll everyone so you need to get a critical mass of support for changes.

The weekend has come and gone.  I went with a group to the Saturday night Atlanta vs. Milwaukee baseball game.  Atlanta lost.  The high-tech stadium was interesting — the giant display screen was better quality than my TV!  I haven’t been to a baseball game in like 20 years.  It was interesting to see all the norms and traditions that happen.  On Sunday I joined a group that went to the aquarium downtown.  I got a lot of nice pictures of animals.  We had lunch in the CNN food court — a few people went on the CNN tour (I didn’t).  We took a cab downtown and took the MARTA back.