Framing
the Issues:
What's Next on the NLII's Agenda?
by Wendy Rickard
For
more than five years, EDUCAUSE's National Learning
Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) has pursued its mission to create
new collegiate learning environments that would harness the power of
information technology (IT) to improve the quality of teaching and learning,
contain or reduce costs, and provide greater access to American higher
education. While the program succeeded in raising awareness of the power
of IT to transform higher education, new issues and challenges associated
with technology, teaching, and learning continue to emerge. In response,
the NLII has identified four issues as key to the attainment of its
mission: (1) intellectual property rights; (2) institutional readiness
to enhance academic productivity; (3) faculty support and engagement;
and (4) collaboration between advanced IT initiatives. And although
the NLII's six mission-critical issues continue to serve as a foundation
for its activities (Box 1), the four issues identified here offer a
framework for new considerations.
|
Box
1: NLII Mission Critical Issues
- Enhancing
academic or learning productivity
- Developing
tools and standards to support new learning environments
- Advancing
our understanding of the virtual university by showcasing best
practices in distributed learning
- Creating
a market structure for the development of interactive learning
models
- Providing
assistance for the viability of those concepts, including outcomes
assessment and a cost/benefit analyses
- Articulating
the public and institutional policy issues that inhibit creation
of a national learning infrastructure
|
At the NLII semiannual
meeting in New Orleans last January, a panel of experts were asked to
put the four issues into perspective. Among the panelists were Carole
A. Barone, vice president of EDUCAUSE, Fred Beshears, assistant director
for instructional technology at the University of California - Berkeley,
Lawrence B. Coleman, professor of physics at the University of California,
Davis, Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information (CNI), Mark Resmer, executive director of Instructional
Management Systems (IMS), Carol A. Twigg, executive director of the
Center for Academic Transformation, and Douglas E. Van Houweling, chief
executive officer of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet
Development (UCAID). A white paper addressing the four issues is expected
be published by EDUCAUSE later this year.
Intellectual
Property Rights
As most of those
in higher education today have experienced, intellectual property in
the electronic age goes well beyond determining content ownership. According
to Lynch, three points are central to the NLII's overall objectives.
First is the immediate concern over course and content ownership. In
the past, and even today, educators have tended to approach course ownership
from the point of view of authors' rights. What we believe is quite
simple: faculty authors have rights in what they produce, and then they
transmit the authored materials -- or some part of those materials --
to publishers in exchange for money or some other advantage.
However, according
to Lynch, ownership in instructional material is not only -- or even
mostly -- about copyright. It is about employment agreements and institutional
policies. In other words, most of the issues surrounding faculty ownership
of instructional material center on policies that the institution establishes
and that are, in effect, part of the employment contract between the
faculty member and the institution.
In some sense,
higher education has been insulated from the issues surrounding copyright
law. "Today," says Lynch, "we are challenged as authors and as educational
institutions to construct policies that make sense, that protect everyone,
that provide appropriate incentives, and that do the right thing, which
may be easier to do in policy than in law." As he points out, copyright
law is not constructed primarily for the benefit of the higher education
community. The industries that are driving changes in interpretations
of copyright law are those that have the biggest copyright stake, such
as the music industry, commercial publishing, the film industry, and
television. "The types of things we see embodied in law don't speak
strongly to the values and goals that characterize the higher education
enterprise," says Lynch.
The second intellectual
property issue concerns when one person can use another person's content.
"Certainly, very few people author everything they're going to use in
the course of their teaching," says Lynch. "One often needs to bring
other kinds of content into the classroom. It is important to recognize
that this is a value that has historically been specifically honored
in copyright law. This is an issue of law and to some extent social
norms, not primarily one of institutional policy."
Third -- and perhaps
most contentious, according to Lynch -- are the murky issues surrounding
participation by students and others who are part of the instructional
process but who are also visible in the electronic domain. This issue
begs a host of important questions. "Now that classes are being conducted
in several places by video, should institutions obtain releases from
students if their images and comments are recorded or if their projects
are on the Web?" asks Lynch. "There is a whole set of sticky issues
related to releases, rights of publicity, and such that are greatly
aggravated by the amplification the Net provides." Those issues are
likely to become more problematic as privacy concerns grow.
How does an institution
distinguish between policy and good judgment? According to Beshears,
too many times universities defer to existing copyright law to deal
with thorny issues. Increasingly, instructional materials, such as course
Web sites, are developed collaboratively by groups that include graduate
students, undergraduate students, and support staff. In most cases,
the question of joint ownership is not directly addressed by university
policy. And it is often poorly addressed by existing intellectual property
law.
Beshears offers
some suggestions whereby EDUCAUSE -- through its subunits, including
CNI and the NLII -- can address intellectual property issues (Box 2).
"To be effective," he says, "requires clear identification of the issues,
the context, the agenda, faculty interests, publishers' rights, and
major intellectual property issues."
Box
2: EDUCAUSE and Intellectual Property Rights Issues
What aspects of intellectual property rights issues
should be addressed by the NLII? How should the NLII relate to other
organizations with an interest in these issues? |
| |
Library
& Journal Publishers |
Academic
Computing and Textbook Publishers |
| EDUCAUSE
Subunits |
CNI |
NLII |
| Issue |
Rising cost
of journals |
Developing
online course materials |
| Context |
Library pays
for journals |
Students pay
for textbooks |
| Agenda |
Separate peer
review from publishing |
Develop infrastructure
and market for online course materials |
| Faculty
Interest |
- Want continuing
access to their articles
- Little
interest in making money from their articles
- No fear
of being displaced by online journals
|
- Want continuing
access to their course materials
- Some interest
in making real money from textbooks
- Some fear
of being displaced by online education
|
| Publisher
Interests |
Fear of separating
peer review from publishing |
Want to make
real money from online education and corporate training |
| Major Intellectual
Property Rights Issues |
Who will pay
for and who is in charge of reviewing and publishing this stuff? |
Who develops
and owns this stuff? |
Institutional
Readiness to Enhance Academic Productivity
Since the beginnings
of the NLII, enhancing academic productivity has been at the forefront
of its agenda. Addressing the productivity issue involves more than
simply infusing IT into the teaching and learning process. It requires
making strategic investments in curriculum areas that can realize a
substantial return in both the cost and the quality dimensions. Experience
at the NLII has demonstrated that certain institutions, more than others,
have a greater understanding about what is required to see such a return.
Because of their prior investments and experiences, those institutions
are, in essence, more "ready" to engage in large-scale redesign efforts.
While pointing to models of success such as Virginia Tech's Math Emporium
and the University of Wisconsin - Madison's introductory chemistry course,
Twigg outlines two sets of readiness criteria that can identify those
institutions that are most likely to engage in successful redesign.
To assess institutional
readiness, Twigg suggests answering the following questions:
1. Does the institution
want to control or reduce costs and increase academic productivity?
2. Is there a demonstrated commitment on the part of institutional
leaders to use technology to achieve strategic academic goals, a commitment
that moves beyond using technology to provide general support for
all faculty and for all courses?
3. Is computing firmly integrated into the campus culture?
4. Does the institution have a mature IT organization(s) to support
faculty integration of technology into courses? Or do external providers
need to be contracted to provide such support?
5. Do a substantial number of faculty members have an understanding
of and some experience with integrating elements of computer-based
instruction into existing courses?
6. Does the institution have a demonstrated commitment to learner-centered
education?
7. Has the institution made a commitment to learner readiness to engage
in IT-based courses?
8. Is there a recognition on the campus that large-scale course redesign
using IT involves a partnership among faculty, IT staff, and administrators
in both planning and execution?
Institutional readiness
is necessary but not sufficient to achieve success. Experience has also
taught us that certain courses are more ready for redesign than others.
To determine course readiness, Twigg suggests asking the following questions:
1. Will changes
in this course have a high impact on the curriculum?
2. Does the course offer the possibility of capital-for-labor substitution?
3. Are decisions about curriculum in this department, program, or
school made collectively -- meaning beyond the level of the individual
faculty member?
4. Are the faculty able and willing to incorporate existing curricular
materials in order to focus work on redesign issues rather than on
materials creation?
5. Do the project participants have the requisite skills?
6. Have the expected learning outcomes of the course and a system
for measuring their achievement been identified?
7. Do the faculty involved have a good understanding of learning theory?
8. Does the institution have a business plan for achieving redesign
goals, so that the innovation can be self-sustaining in the future?
Faculty
Support and Engagement
The relationship
between faculty members and administrators has traditionally been one
of push and pull, and this is no less true as institutions struggle
to redefine learning environments through IT. Barone and Coleman relate
some of the more familiar misperceptions and misunderstandings that
occur between faculty and IT staff.
IT departments,
Coleman points out, typically do not understand teaching. "If I want
to use technology in my classroom, I don't want stuff I can't use,"
he says. "I don't want solutions to problems I don't have, because the
solutions can create more problems." Coleman says that in the eyes of
faculty members, the IT staff who profess to understand a particular
piece of technology rarely are able to make that technology work in
the classroom with the same ease as it performs in vendor demonstrations.
"I keep being told how easy IT is and how I should be using it because
of all of the benefits," says Coleman. "But the truth is, technology
is not that simple and the benefits are simply not that clear."
The support issues
are no less complex. Barone says that only a few institutions of higher
education are enjoying the strategic benefits of their massive investments
in IT. Most are still experiencing what she terms the "drizzle effect"
of making technology investments on a political rather than a strategic
basis. William Graves -- president of the Collegis Research Institute,
vice president of COLLEGIS, and chair of the NLII Planning Committee
-- calls such action random acts of progress.
According to Graves,
institutions should be developing a coherent, student-centric expression
of their academic programs and student services on the Web -- their
academic intranets. This requires standardizing a set of scalable Web
development and delivery tools, purposefully integrating Web-based student
services with Web-based and Web-enhanced academic offerings, and prioritizing
investments to support strategic institutional strengths and initiatives.
"Faculty and staff members need professional development opportunities
that are structured in a way that will lead to the infusion of online
literacy skills throughout the curriculum," says Graves. "There also
needs to be a loosely coupled online learning community that is institutional
in its breadth and richly diverse in its academic and administrative
substrates. This is a tall order -- one that can be supported by, but
seldom led by, the IT department. Top-down support and involvement are
required."
Despite expectations
to the contrary, few if any institutions have the resources to support
each individual faculty member's unique efforts to incorporate technology
into his or her pedagogy. Centers for teaching and learning provide
some relief for beleaguered support staff, but they are an inadequate
solution over the long term. Campuses will need to devote to teaching
and learning the same level of budget, systems, and staff support that
theyhave devoted to administrative areas such as student information
systems or financial systems. The management of network-based learning
requires sophisticated back-office systems and staff support structures.
Investments on this scale imply major financial reallocations. At the
New Orleans meeting, a session entitled Building Capacity for Distributed
Instruction analyzed the spectrum of approaches to support for distributed
instruction -- approaches ranging from using traditional, in-house support
to outsourcing this function on behalf of one or many institutions.
Thus, we see emerging new business models and new modes of collaboration
in the support of teaching and learning.
According to Barone,
there is a serious disconnect between technology evangelism and technology
implementation. "First, we need to remember that boutique solutions
-- solutions that address the needs of a single course, professor, or
department -- simply don't scale." Pointing to the success of Virginia
Tech's Math Emporium, Barone emphasizes the need to produce systemic
change. "We need to create a campus environment in which it is possible
to engage in a respectful dialogue and collaboration," she says.
Collaboration
between Advanced IT Initiatives
Two leading initiatives
in the fields of advanced networking and online learning -- Internet2
and IMS -- are both tackling the questions of how their activities fit
together and how they benefit higher education. IMS is a set of technical
specifications that will help manage some of the more routine tasks
associated with the educational process, tasks such as assessment, course
and content management, and evaluation. According to Resmer, the executive
director of IMS, his project and Internet2 intersect at the point of
access control and profiling. "IMS is not just about metadata," he said.
"And Internet2 is not just about fat pipes." IMS addresses learning
profiles and management of data, and Internet2 addresses the ability
of the network infrastructure to accommodate increasing volume and types
of data. "In both cases," he says, "we are trying to move beyond where
we are now."
Van Houweling believes
that much of what we need to accomplish right now is for the good of
all higher education. "Internet2 is focused on the network infrastructure,"
he says. "But the reason is that there are advanced applications we
can't do with the existing infrastructure, especially in the area of
collaboration." Intellectual property such as digital video, virtual
reality, and other applications needs to travel through the network
with an ease that is not now possible, he says. The benefits of the
outcomes sought by Internet2 and IMS are richer content through higher
bandwidth, more interactivity with minimal delay, and more-reliable
content delivery.
Participants in
the discussion that followed noted that to be effective, collaboration
between advanced IT initiatives should involve a number of other organizations,
including net@edu (the organization formed by the merger between Educom's
Networking and Telecommunications Task Force and FARNet), the Corporation
for Research and Educational Networking, and A*DEC.
This discussion
also revealed that fostering adoption is a key issue for both Internet2
and IMS. Both projects are looking at the size of the potential market,
which is much bigger for learning than it is for research. Selling to
100 Research 1 institutions, or even to 3,000 higher education institutions,
does not represent a viable market. However, selling to 100,000 or more
companies and schools does.
The role of EDUCAUSE
is to continue bringing together the projects and the planning leaders.
And it was suggested that EDUCAUSE could assist in creating activities
to help reach its membership. As was pointed out in the discussion,
to use either Internet2 or IMS requires a complete enterprise-wide commitment,
including the involvement of chief financial officers, vendors, and
others. But first, those leaders need to be informed of the benefits
each initiative offers. To that end, it was suggested that a partnership
of key universities that are both Internet2 and IMS members be formed
to develop a set of integration plans. These may include creating more-robust
learning model innovations that take advantage of Internet2, although
the scope must be realistic; developing cookbooks and best practices
from different communities for the use of learning tools and resources
in the Internet2/IMS context; making sure that IMS takes a leadership
position in promoting the development of digital libraries; and having
IMS support interfaces for watermarking and micropayment strategies
to change economic models of publishing.
Conclusion
During its first
five years, the NLII successfully introduced discussions on the role
that IT plays in higher education: improving the quality, increasing
access, and reducing or containing costs. As part of those discussions,
the NLII articulated the need for a national learning infrastructure,
clarified the potential of IT to improve academic productivity, pinpointed
the relevant policy issues to help policymakers and planners navigate
the new educational landscape, and addressed the need to stimulate a
market for instructional software. The NLII established a conceptual
framework that has achieved widespread acceptance. It also served as
the birthplace for IMS, which not only represents the first product
to emerge from the NLII but also serves as evidence that higher education
truly can be transformed by technology on a national scale.
Today the focus
has moved from conversion to implementation. With more and more higher
education leaders convinced of the potential benefits that IT can offer
teaching and learning, the challenge now is to break down the institutional
and environmental barriers with a view toward a graceful transition.
The NLII is committed to addressing those mission-critical issues and
is poised to announce, this summer, a new set of programs and initiatives
designed to further the agenda set in 1994.
