In my last post I discussed how The Ohio State University rates against the Key Trends section of the 2014 New Media Consortium Horizon Report. I am following up with a look at how Ohio State is addressing the Significant Challenges and Important Developments sections of the report. Part 1 of this post is available here and both posts were influenced by discussions with Digital First team members.
Horizon Report Section 2: Significant Challenges Impeding Ed Tech Adoption in Higher Education
This section of the report divides the challenges into defined categories. These are Urgent challenges, where we understand the problem and can solve the problem; Difficult challenges, where we understand the problem but solutions are elusive, and Wicked Challenges, which are complex to even define, much less address.
Urgent Challenges:
Low Digital Fluency of Faculty: This challenge has been a constant before since the first days of The Digital Union on the OSU Campus. My observation points to technology user interface design, the part of the product that users see, has gotten much better over the years, both graphically and consistency working. If more opportunities to use digital media arise, or faculty begin utilizing materials produced by projects like the OpenStax project,the skills to utilize these tools will follow. Another component to improve digital fluency for faculty is teaching skills to produce their own materials, a process which has moved forward by leaps and bounds over the past five years. Ten years ago a writer would need to learn Quark Xpress or Adobe Illustrator for an extended period in order to produce a decent looking book; today a faculty member can publish an amazing book in iBooks Author or put up a course on iTunes U after a day or two at a Digital First boot camp. In spite of the growing flood of digital materials coming out our programs, there is another group of faculty who are unaware of this support at Ohio State, or simply have no interest in digital publishing. This may be tied to tenure publishing requirements not being in tune with the rapidly evolving digital publishing boom. Time will tell if the old requirements can be aligned to new techniques, it seems there is a movement on campus to recognize this work.
Relative Lack of Rewards for Teaching: The question of faculty compensation and the relative compensation for research versus teaching, along with the current attention media is giving to compensation for adjunct faculty, tenured faculty, and administrators is a broad conversation beyond the scope of this post.
Difficult Challenges:
Competition from New Models of Education: Online Colleges and MOOCs were the first salvo in shifting the model of higher education, more will come as schools sort out the challenges of granting credit and completion rates for online instruction. Ultimately these systems must engage students to be effective; the New York Public Library MOOK support group plan is an early attempt to bring interaction and face-to-face support back to these very large classes where students may not feel connected. My other though on this trend is that the students coming out of high school may have had technology in their hands for virtually their entire school career, so the jump to digital learning for new students will get easier. Ohio State must be in a position to compete for the attention of these new college students, or they will go elsewhere.
Scaling Teaching Innovation: This is a problem where there is not a focused effort to roll out a technology that can be supported across campus; the greatest challenges are with the bleeding edge and innovative solutions that may not be developed enough for general use by all faculty. Mike Hofherr has focused on scaling back a very broad set of services that were done for small numbers of faculty users, and has instead focused the efforts of his department to support technology that can be implemented across campus for all users. The shift can be seen in the ODEE service catalog, which now offers 10 core services. Another effort to scale up innovative teaching is the Innovate conference began five years ago with the goal of showcasing faculty who are using new technology well to better teach their students.
Wicked Challenges:
Expanding Access: The increasing numbers of students seeking education who may not be prepared for the demands of college level course work are identified as one wicked challenge, a challenge that is complex to define and address. I have seen glimmers of hope in the work of Dr. Matt Stoltzfus, whose initial efforts with online chemistry instruction were created to bring up the skills of high school students who were interested in Chemistry. This effort led to his iTunes U General Chemistry course, with 322 short lessons and hundreds of thousands of downloads.
Keeping Education Relevant: Fast innovation is technology fields continue to challenge universities. The Horizon report calls out the issue of staying relevant in a time of fast paced change, however I would also suggest technology and support groups must also become more agile. The days of a committee taking a year or two to evaluate a solution are fading, since new solutions or pricing models may be available before that year is done. Unfortunately this may force us to make ‘best option at this time’ decisions that may have to be modified over a sorter time-frame than traditionally considered at large universities, however the traditional pace of decision making will doom us to selecting outdated technology or outdated content for our customers.
Conclusion: As I look over this post, agility and willingness to change quickly are the common themes. A mindset where we adopt the best solution available today with the understanding that a better solution may come along in the next year or two is key to success in a rapidly changing environment. Being willing to review and change as new solutions, technologies, instructional techniques, and source materials become available will allow universities to remain leaders in the face of these challenges.