Managed change an oxymoron; managing change and technology in Higher ed #change11

My summation and response to
Tony Bates 16 Oct 2011 recording

There is/ or is there - a general failure to manage technology well in our institutions?
Tony Bates asks if change needs to come inside or does it need to come from outside to transform the HE sector
I think his questions would be better instead of asking does it come from here or there to have a more ant informed analysis: Where does change come from, or just what is going on here?
The question below the surface will always be about whether this is for good or bad also...should money be spent if we cannot even say what it costs to do this...
An obviously situated question which is of course going to have as an answer "it depends"
Perhaps Mols question shift from can we prove, to can we improve would have been a good one.
And this does tend to be his approach as the talk continues
A diversion: use of death by bullet point in his slides could be enhanced please here's an oldie but goodie by Seth Godin on really bad ppt http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/really_bad_powe.html


Regarding if its from the inside or outside, the audience answered with:
Educators not always good at leading change (Jenny)
Faculty, HE or academics, with no will to change
Needs to disturb the inertia


Technology major change in HE has been massification
Lots of students not high flyers: in HE we are not teaching an upper 5 0r 10% of elite students, we are having to teach therefore rather than just having the students learn and therefore we need to consider how delivery occurs

The techy web 2 gives learner much more control
Whether inside of institution or not
Going to campus hasn’t changed much
Institutions needs a fundamental rethink

Techy management in 6 unis spain and italy, and another 6 case studies
And online strategic plans form 36 institutions, carried out over several yrs

There were very different approaches,
Also some common features- but overall more common than different

Crude analysis-
How many profs students use lms
Lecture capturing
Wifi
Enhance classroom teaching was what unis identified as a third strand
The classroom teaching good: we want the techy to make it better,
Core techy using were lms
Conclusion, institutions conservative but adding cost with no added learning benefit
As there is a large increase in cost with putting in techy

Leadership and planning, success marked by:
Senior management team speaking from same page, the impt of techy as core for future, shared vision
Measurable strategic goals
Egs:
Increase flexible delivery, anytime, anyplace
Development of 21 c skills, ability to imbed it skills in relevant subject area (in my uni eg having skills for searching, working in wikis)
Improving cost effectiveness not said anywhere, yet up to 40% of budget going this way

Need for planning at several levels, particularly at programme level, he believes this most important level as students often come in as dependent level, but that they should be able to leave as more independent, and this can only occur at the programme level not from on high and not at individual lecturer level

Projects that fail: they run out of steam and or dependent on one person
Committees tend to be advisory not able to be employed
Learning tech units, building larger and larger as faculty don’t have the pedagological skills to know what to do
Individual instructors piecemeal approach, programme level not coherent

Best practices
Often worked to have a high level committee with sub committees
(how this was studied, who was asked??? Im going to assume students were not asked, seemed a lot of policy analysis and a lot of being told what goes on rather than seeing what goes on. Again, an ant observational approach could have enhanced the data capture)
Often cannot implement without infrastructure
Clear mandates for committees and resources to make things happen
Formal channels of communication
All in all as Tony does identify this is an industrial model (for a non industrial context on a non industrial topic! Such irony)

A lot of innovation never beyond small scale mobilisations, person dependent
Exploration+ resourcing+ pilot+evaluate+evaluate +spread but most institutions did not have a strategy of this

Governance decision making all over the place
IT structure, core decisions having major impact without academic inputneed clear lines of decision making, mandate oriented

He argues for a diffusion of innovation approach throughout the institution.
(Hmmmm, top down, managerial, with direct and control overtones, as he said before, an industrial model, but maybe forgivable given institutions are still in a way back way of operating...)
With core decisions at programme and he says increasingly by students (but has not said how)
Formal quality assurance processes surprisingly the unis that had these were often not best at integrating IT
Better ones, programme level working up with media designers,

Really interesting Q:
What’s the cost, more or less expensive for an online course vs a classroom one.
What we know is we don’t know!

2 main costs:
Instructor time
How much instructor support

Ways to control costs
Redesign, transfer work to students
Eg students collect data, wk collaboratively
(my own eg is students use of peerwise, writing their own exam, giving feedback to each other)

What would be better also:
Preservice training = none did this. Teacher training often assumed, yet having a phd as basis for entry to academia has an emphasis on research not teaching.
No one taught to teach is the general culture (made worse by positively discriminating toward research and against teaching)

A Socratic myth, 6 bright rich students, one Socratic expert all under a linden tree
It simply doesn’t exist
We haven’t moved from idyllic, it cannot be

Problems:
We don’t have a good reward system for teaching
Lack of training as they only have the model they had as students themselves
Lack of admin knowledge
All creating systemic barriers to change

(like the way he keeps going into discussion with the 30 or so people present in this online session)

Ideas from the audience:
Kahn model, still it doesn’t alter for students to be participatory
Opportunities for making learning informal but accreditation restricts this
Use video much more
Global accreditation system
Flipping the lecture- use capture, then ask students to come in after, but doesn’t really change the model
Look at what students need to do on campus that is critical, and what they could do online

Interest area of Stephen Downes: How this sort of advice might work outside of an institutional context, eg for a mooc? Where there is distributed learning rather than an institutionalised focus.

Tony's response: Some people don’t need or want accreditation as lifelong learners, I wouldn’t be on it if I didn’t think it was useful for my learning
But many need the accreditation, and therefore a portfolio rather than a transcript but employers don’t recognize the importance of that

Huge investment in current accreditation processes
Most unis would not support mooc as a business plan


And then it stopped working, the mp3 I mean, just as Jenny was asking a question.


My overall feeling, ANT would be a better approach to the concerns, it really needed some empirically based observation versus the information told from a management centred data collect.
Ant approach could disrupt the power of a management centric approach, and perhaps inform ways that things might be otherwise, from any level in such a network.
Noting the systemic barriers provides opportunity to also chip away at the shape of things, because these barriers take work in being sustained, and that such chipping away can also occur anywhere in the network, not just from the top.

Managed change an oxymoron: we never know where it will take us.
The changes keep happening faster than we can ever catch up.
http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/philosophy/60-second-adventures-thought-0
The best we can hope for is to mediate the damage as we move toward hopes and avoid fears.