Back from the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning

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.

Educause Review for July/August is out

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.”

Thursday, day 11

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

Wednesday, day 10

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.

Tuesday, day 9

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.