Managing Technology in Higher Education

Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning

A. W. (Tony) Bates, Albert Sangra

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470584729
• eBook ISBN: 9781118038567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Universities continue to struggle in their efforts to fullyintegrate information and communications technology within their activities. Based onexamination of current practices in technology integration at25 universities worldwide, this book argues for a radical approach to the management of technology in higher education. It offers recommendationsfor improvinggovernance, strategic planning, integration ofadministrative and teaching services, management ofdigital resources, and training oftechnology managers and administrators. The book is written for anyone wanting to ensure technology is integrated as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Chapter One
The Challenge of Change

Today, everyone, if they are to have a job, needs the kind of higher order thinking skills that only those in managerial or professional positions formerly needed. We can only achieve this through major structural reform of our education system.

—Jane Gilbert, 2005, p. 67

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Meet Samantha, a Twenty-First-Century Student

Samantha is 25 years old, with a one-year-old baby, and lives with her boyfriend, Shaun, who works as a trainer in a fitness center. She works part-time at a local day care center. She has an old Honda Civic, a “smart” mobile phone, and her own laptop computer with broadband Internet access. She regularly uses Twitter, Skype, Google Search, Google Mail, Facebook, Flickr, iTunes, and YouTube, as well as standard PC software such as Word and Excel.

She is taking the fourth year of a bachelor of commerce degree from her local college, which is a 35- to 45-minute drive from her home. This is her fifth year in the program. She was unable to complete all her courses in her third and fourth years, because her classes often clashed with her day-care hours, and she kept getting behind with her studies. She is taking almost all her classes on campus, but she managed to find one course in her program that was offered online, which she is enjoying.

In her first year, there were around a hundred students in most of her classes, but this year there are about thirty per class. The college prides itself on its high-technology classrooms, with Smartboards, wireless access, clickers, and three screens in most classrooms. Some of her instructors have started to record their lectures, so she can download them, but others refuse to do so, because if they do, they fear students won’t come to the classes (and she agrees with them).

Samantha often uses Facebook to discuss her courses with friends who are in the same class, but most of the instructors don’t use anything more than e-mail outside class for com­munication with students, although one of her instructors has organized online discussion forums. On the whole, she likes being on campus, especially meeting the other students, but the lectures are often boring, so she sometimes joins in the class Tweets about the instructors while they are lecturing, which she finds amusing, if distracting.

She worries about the stress her studies are causing in her relationship with Shaun. She is always studying, driving, working, or looking after the baby. She particularly resents the eight hours a week she spends driving to and from the college, which she would rather spend studying. Shaun has a friend who has moved out of state who wants Shaun to join him as a partner in running a fitness center, but this would mean giving up her studies at her local college, and she doesn’t want to do that, as she may have problems getting credit for her courses at a college in another state. The thought of having to start her studies all over again fills her with dread. If that happens, she will enroll with either the University of Phoenix Online, or another of the fully online for-profit universities. They seem to understand her needs better than her local college.

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This student is unique, but nor is she atypical of today’s students, the majority of whom are 24 or older, working at least part-time, and commuting on a regular basis to college. With new course designs and the proper use of technology, we could do much better for students like Samantha.

Creating Higher Education Institutions Fit for the Twenty-First Century

Universities are resilient. The concept of the university has remained largely unchanged for over 800 years. Universities have always had to balance an uneasy tension between cloistered independence and relevance to society at large, but they have successfully thrown off or resisted control by church, princes, state, and commerce to remain on the whole fully autonomous, at least in Western society. In eight centuries, they have undergone massive expansion, the introduction of fundamentally new areas of scholarship, and radical restructuring, while protecting their core mission. As a result, universities appear to be more strongly established today and certainly more numerous than at any other time in history. Yet often when institutions appear to be all-powerful, they can be extremely vulnerable to changes in the external environment.

Indeed, today universities and colleges are facing strong pressures for further change. For cultural and historical reasons change is likely to be slow, at least for most public institutions. Nevertheless, economic development has been and will continue to be strongly linked to the ability of education systems to adapt to the demands of a knowledge-based society. Thus those postsecondary educational institutions that do change appropriately are likely to gain a strong competitive advantage, both for themselves and for the societies in which they operate. In other words, we need strong universities and colleges that are adapted to the needs of the twenty-first century.

Universities: Failing in Technology

Technology is a key factor for bringing about such relevant and necessary change in higher education institutions, but we will produce evidence that suggests universities and colleges still don’t really “get it” as far as technology is concerned. In particular, universities and colleges in general are underexploiting the potential of technology to change the way that teaching and learning could be designed and delivered, so as to increase flexible access to learning, improve quality, and control or reduce costs, all core challenges faced by higher education institutions today.

Although managing technology in a way that leads to the transformation of teaching and learning is the primary focus of this book, any discussion of information and communications technologies must be placed within the overall context of the role and mission of postsecondary educational institutions. We start then by examining the issues and challenges facing universities and colleges today, and suggest that although their core mission and values should remain largely unchanged, radical change is needed in their organization and in particular in the design and delivery of their teaching, if they are to be “fit for purpose” for the twenty-first century.

We will also argue that information and communications technologies have a crucial role to play in such changes, but for technology to be used fully and effectively, major changes are needed in the prevailing culture of the academy and the way in which it is managed. The aim of this book, therefore, is to examine how best to manage information and communications technologies, so that universities and colleges can appropriately address their main challenges and goals, can provide the kind of teaching and learning needed in the twenty-first century, and thus better serve students like Samantha.

Universities and Colleges in an Industrial Society

The organization and structure of the modern university began to form in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The forces leading to these changes were complex and interrelated. The growth of the nation state and the extension of empire required a large increase in government bureaucrats, who tended to be taught the classics (philosophy, history, Greek, and Latin). The rise of science, and the recognition of its importance for economic development through the Industrial Revolution, was another factor. Thomas Huxley in Britain and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany were two key figures who promoted the growth of science and engineering in the university. Indeed, Huxley had to start his own program for teaching biology at the Royal School of Mines—which later became Imperial College—because neither Oxford nor Cambridge University was willing to teach scientific biology at the time (Desmond, 1997).

Consequently the number of universities and colleges in Europe and North America expanded considerably toward the end of the nineteenth century. The land-grant universities in the United States in particular were developed to support agricultural expansion, and “red brick” universities were opened in the industrial cities of Britain to meet the increasing demand for engineers and scientists for local industries. Despite this expansion, though, entrance to university in many countries was limited largely to a small, elite minority of upper-class or rich middle-class students. As late as 1969, less than 8% of 18-years-olds (children born in 1951) were admitted to university in Britain (Perry, 1976).

As a result, teaching methods in particular were suited to what today would be considered small classes, even at the undergraduate level, with seminar classes of 20 or less and smaller group tutorials of three or four students with a senior research professor for students in their last year of an undergraduate program. This remains today the ideal paradigm of university teaching for many professors and instructors.

In the United States and Canada, the move to a mass system of higher education began earlier, following the Second World War, when returning servicemen were given scholarships to attend university, and for the last half of the twentieth century, access to university and colleges was expanded rapidly. For a mix of social and economic reasons, from the 1960s onwards, governments in Europe also started again to rapidly expand the number of university places, so that by the end of the century, in many Western countries more than half the 19-year-old cohort are now admitted to some form of postsecondary education. The figure for Canada in 2004 was 52% (Statistics Canada, 2009), and currently there are over 18 million students in postsecondary education in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009).

This represents a massive increase in numbers, and not surprisingly, governments, although spending ever more each year on postsecondary education, have not been able or willing to fund the staffing of universities and colleges at a level that would maintain the low class sizes common when access was limited. Thus in many North American universities, there are first- and second-year undergraduate courses with more than 1,000 students, taught mainly in large lecture classes, often by nontenured instructors or even graduate students. However, at the same time, completion rates (that is, the proportion of students who enter a degree program who go on to complete the degree program within six years) in undergraduate four-year degree programs remain below 60% in the United States for many public universities (Bowen, Chingus, & McPherson, 2009). In other words, universities are failing a significant number of students each year.

The widening of access has resulted in a much more diverse student population. The biggest change is in the number of older and part-time students (including students who are technically classified as full-time, but who are in fact also holding down part-time jobs to pay for tuition and other costs, like Samantha). The mean age of students in North American postsecondary education institutions now stands at 24 years old, but the spread of ages is much wider, with many students taking longer than the minimum time to graduate, or returning to study after graduation for further qualifications. Many are married with young families. For such students, academic study is a relatively small component of an extremely busy lifestyle.

By definition, many of the students who now attend university or college are not in the top 10% of academic achievers, and therefore are likely to need more support and assistance with learning. With the growth of international students, and increased immigration, there are now wider differences in language and culture, which also influence the context of teaching and learning. Yet the modes of teaching have changed little to accommodate these massive changes in the nature of the student body, with lectures, wet labs, and pen and paper examinations being the norm rather than the exception.

Finally, in most economically advanced countries, the unit costs of higher education have steadily increased year after year, without any sign of abating. Between 1995 and 2005, average tuition and fees rose 51% at public four-year institutions and 30% at community colleges in the United States (The College Board, 2005; Johnson, 2009). The average cost per student per year in tertiary education (excluding R&D costs) in the United States in 2006 was just over $22,000 per student, compared with an average of $7,500 per student for European countries (OECD, 2009, p. 202). Thus although there are now many more postsecondary students, the average cost per student continues to increase, putting excessive pressure on government funding, tuition fees, and hence costs to parents and students. More disturbingly, these increases in overall costs have not been matched by similar proportions of spending on direct teaching and learning activities (such as increasing the number of faculty). Most of the increased expenditure has gone into other areas, such as administration, fund raising, and campus facilities (Wellman, Desrochers, Lenihan, Kirshstein, Hurlburt, & Honegger, 2009). Thus postsecondary education has become larger, more costly, but less efficient.

Despite these challenges, mod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Executive Summary
• Chapter One: The Challenge of Change
• Chapter Two: Recent Developments in Technology and Education
• Chapter Three: Tracking Existing Strategies for Technology Integration
• Chapter Four: Leadership and Strategy
• Chapter Five: Organizational Structures and Initiatives to Support Technology Integration
• Chapter Six: Quality Assurance
• Chapter Seven: Resources, Money, and Decision Making
• Chapter Eight: Barriers to Change and Two Ways to Remove Them
• Chapter Nine: Building a Twenty-First-Century University or College
• References
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement