Looking 5 years out

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.

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Exploring PCI-DSS

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.

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Sloan-C Blended learning workshop day 2

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?

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Sloan-C Blended Learning Workshop day 1 brain dump

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!

ITIL v3, service lifecycle

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.

Conquering ITIL v3

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.