Moving innovation into the mainstream

Kim, J. (2102) 5 ideas to support innovation in higher education, Inside Higher Education, February 6

Joshua Kim offers up five interesting strategies for encouraging innovation in higher education in his short blog.

1. Embrace that the Smartest Person on Campus is the Campus. (In other words, involve the whole campus through communication and collaboration)

2. Develop a Common Language Around Innovation: make sure everyone understands what innovation is and what it takes

3. Support the Core While Running Lots of Experiments

4. Practice Collaboration by Difference: put together people with different perspectives

5. Invest in a Continued Conversation: build mechanisms that ensure an ongoing conversation/discussion about change and improvement

Some of the responses to the blog are also interesting.

Comment

I would add a sixth:

6. Make innovation in teaching and learning a strategic goal of the organization.

In an earlier post, ‘Is there too much innovation in education? I reported on critics who feel there is too MUCH innovation in education. However, we have seen in other posts that the expansion of access to post-secondary education combined with economic realities or even austerity mean that for many institutions the status quo is unsustainable, without substantial increases in taxation or tuition fees. If those options are not possible, for whatever reasons, then either quality will drop or new approaches will need to be found.

Now from my travels and the travels of others, it is clear that in fact there is a great deal of innovation going on in teaching and learning, at least in Canadian universities and colleges. For instance, on the Contact North web site, there is a collection of 23 cases of innovation in Ontario universities and colleges that are well worth reading.

However, the web site is aptly named ‘Pockets of innovation.’ In other words there are lots of great experiments and innovations taking place in post-secondary education, but they are too often isolated, associated only with the one instructor, and don’t change the rest of the institution. Thus any hope of economies of scale through the widespread adoption of an innovation is lost.

What is needed is an innovation strategy, one that not only encourages innovation, but also evaluates and facilitates the spread of successful innovations across the institution and beyond. As Joshua Kim rightly says, there is a knowledge base or a set of practices that facilitate the development and transference of innovation, and we should be building on that knowledge base. (Joshua provides an excellent reading list on innovation in his post).

Also to move an innovation from an isolated pocket to a scale that works, often investment and extra resources are needed, for instance, to ensure the software application is robust enough to scale, or to improve its usability. There should be a set of criteria to asses the success of an innovation.

Above all, innovation in teaching and learning should be a strategic goal of the institution, and as such should determine priorities, budgets, reward systems, and include a set of policies and actions to support innovation. Improving learning outcomes or improving the quality of learning (however defined) should be in there somewhere, as should cost benefits.

Surely this would be better than just increasing the number of students in a lecture theatre or using video to relay the lectures to those that can’t get in (no, that’s NOT an innovation – it goes back more than 40 years).

Questions

Does your institution have a concrete strategy for innovation in teaching and learning? Is it working?

Should your institution have such a strategy? Or does the thousand blooms approach work best?

© Computer Aid International, 2012

e-Learning Africa is requesting those involved in online learning in Africa to participate in a survey regarding the state of ICT-enhanced education and training in Africa. Here is their announcement:

At this year’s eLearning Africa conference in Cotonou, Benin, we will launch The eLearning Africa 2012 Report, a major new publication which will highlight the most significant trends, issues and challenges in ICT for development, education, and training in Africa.

The aim of the eLearning Africa 2012 Report is to enrich our conversations and practice with solid data, knowledge and experience from across the continent.

We want to ensure that the report incorporates the experience and insights of leading experts, practitioners and professionals, such as you.

We would be grateful if you would let us have your views by completing the online survey, which is available here: http://survey.icwe.info/

If you do not have a reliable internet connection, please follow http://elasurveypdf-en.icwe.info/ and you will be sent the survey as a word processing document that you can complete offline. Alternatively request one from elareport@icwe.info.

There are three iPads* which will be given as prizes to three respondents, randomly selected from all those who complete the survey.

The survey will be open for three weeks from today. Many thanks for choosing to participate. Please get in touch on the email address above if you have any questions. 

Yours sincerely,

Shafika Isaacs and David Hollow (eLA Report Editors)

University of Paris Sorbonne

Grove, J. (2012) Long, cold financial winter lies ahead for Europe’s academy Times Higher Education, February 9

What’s happening in Europe

This is a really depressing, bad news item. Especially in the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), universities are facing budget cuts in the region of 20% in the next year or so. For many of these countries, the entire principle of state-funded universities is under threat:

•  in Spain, €485 million will be taken from education overall, and assistance to local authorities – key supporters of universities – will be reduced by just over €1 billion (total: US $2 billion; population 46 million). A spokesperson for Spanish universities said: ‘Universities have  [already] limited common expenditure as much as possible. But we cannot do it any longer. We have been tightening our belts for so long [and] we try to make the most of the means at our disposal, but right now we have so little leeway [to handle these extra cuts].”
• in Ireland, university pensions are being cut by 15%. Mike Jennings, general secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers, believes that the current situation, which has had a severe impact on many individuals’ workloads, is not sustainable. “I think something has got to give,” he says. “People are doubling up and academics can give lectures to 1,000 people if it comes to that. But we won’t be able to correct essays or give feedback to students.  We are simply being starved to death, rather than having any dramatic blow to knock us out. It’s a case of death by a thousand cuts.”
• the head of unit governance, autonomy and funding at the European Universities Association said that for 2012 out of 47 member countries only Norway, Finland and Germany have maintained their commitments to increasing funding for higher education.
• the UK has already raised tuition fees to $9,600 ($15,000) a year, with a resulting drop in university applications, although to date this has been quite small (around 2%); however, since the UK government guarantees student loans, it has merely put off the day of reckoning, especially if the economy contracts, as expected, due to austerity measures, so there won’t be the jobs for graduates that they will need to repay their debts.

The need for reform

I could go on, but you get the picture. I’m not going to get into the debate about the stupidity of severe austerity measures to pay off bad bets by banks and bad decisions by governments who wouldn’t face reality, but I do have to say that particularly in Southern Europe (less so in Ireland) there is a good deal of room for increased efficiencies in their post-secondary educational systems.

Many turn out thousands of surplus graduates in law and philosophy for whom there are no jobs, while there is a shortage of skilled workers such as computer specialists, engineers and qualified workers for the creative industries. In many European countries, students pay no or very small tuition fees. No, I’m not arguing for closing down all law and philosophy departments, nor for the level of tuition fees in the UK, but in many of the southern European countries, there is almost open access for anyone who wants to go to university, which is fine, but no guarantee of a job afterwards as a result. In some countries (France comes to mind) university lecturers often have ridiculously low teaching commitments.

Unfortunately I fear though that the first to be cut will be what are considered ‘ancillary services’ such as learning technology support units (where they exist – many Italian universities have no such support), rather than looking to e-learning as one way to respond to a severe crisis.

What about Canada?

At this point, you may well be asking, ‘Well, what about Ontario?’ Canada’s largest province has its own financial troubles, with a $14 billion deficit in 2010–11 that is equivalent to 2.3 per cent of GDP. Net debt came to $214.5 billion, 35 per cent of GDP. As a result, the Ontario provincial government appointed a Commission led by an economist (Don Drummond) to advise it on developing a sustainable budget without privatization of health and education and without tax increases.

In my view, his report is excellent. First a matter of perspective. He states: ‘By current international standards, Ontario’s debt is still relatively small. We are a very long way from the dreadful fiscal condition of countries that have dominated the news in the past two years.’ However, he also points out that Ontario and Greece’s economies were very similar in 1985, and that economies can quickly spin out of control. Ontario’s is heading in the wrong direction and needs to be corrected.

One of the areas he looked at was post-secondary education. His conclusion: ‘The current system is unsustainable from a financial and quality perspective.’ However, he does not recommend drastic cuts to funding, but an actual increase of 1.5 per cent per annum. However, enrollment growth is anticipated at 1.7 per cent while the institutions’ costs have been rising by three per cent to five per cent. ‘Just to keep the system operating as it does now, post-secondary institutions will need both more funding and more efficiency…..The current system is unsustainable from a financial and quality perspective, as enrolment growth crowds out the funding that is available even to maintain the status quo.’

Thus the Drummond Commission recommends the following:

1. Contain government funding and institutional expenses;
2. Use differentiation to improve post-secondary quality and achieve financial sustainability;
3. Encourage and reward quality;
4. Revise research funding structures;
5. Maintain the current overall cap on tuition-fee increases, but simplify the framework;
6. Re-evaluate student financial assistance; and
7. Generate cost efficiencies through measures such as integrating administrative and back-office functions.

Basically, unless taxes are increased (and per-capita, Ontario spends less on post-secondary education than most of the other provinces) then universities will have to become even more efficient. This will probably mean larger classes, or a freeze on salaries, or heavier teaching loads, or less research, or a combination of all of these and other measures. What is significant though is that compared to the rest of the government areas of responsibility in Ontario, PSE comes out quite well. Enrollment growth will continue, because Drummond recognizes that this will be needed to keep the economy growing through a better educated workforce. So Ontario, although facing significant challenges, is nowhere near being in the same boat as many of the European universities. Nevertheless, there will need to be some significant changes in the post-secondary system.

Some other provinces in Canada are facing somewhat similar, but perhaps not quite so acute, challenges as Ontario, while others are able to increase expenditure on PSE without difficulty. However, because Ontario constitutes almost a quarter of Canadian GDP, all provinces in Canada will eventually pay a price if Ontario doesn’t get its economy and government budget under control. The Ontario government will finally make the decision about what to do, and may even include some tax increases, but in terms of the mandate, the Drummond Commission has done an excellent job overall in trying to protect PSE in Ontario as much as possible.

What about online learning?

The question that arises is: to what extent can online learning contribute to enrollment growth, increased efficiency, and/or maintenance or improvement of quality in Ontario? This was not discussed in the report, but it is a question that needs to be more fully explored, at least within the online learning community. Any views you may have on this topic will be most welcomed. Meanwhile I plan to do a post on this topic at a later time.

In the meantime, feel Europe’s pain. It will be particularly the students (and potential students) who will suffer the most if the universities are unable to bring about major reforms and efficiencies, because the money just won’t be there to continue the system as it is.

One part of the reflection process that I noted was that reminding yourself of the previous reflections is crucial. Toward the end of the week I found that rereading me reflections from earlier really helped me to not repeat those previous mistakes.

Week 2:

Always make the minimal amount of changes to go from working to not working. Yes, I know i started with this one last week, but it bears repeating. This week I did a lot of building new things and again found myself being slowed down by making too many changes and then having to figure out which one of those changes didn’t work as they were supposed to. Starting with the simplest thing takes discipline. I’m not sure why that is, but our brains seem to want to see big effects and use those to trip us up. In order to practice the simplest thing we need to be continually vigilant.

Pay careful attention to any error trace. Often the answer is buried deeply and even though after making changes it may look like the trace is the same as before, there could be changes in where the error came from a few lines down from the top of the trace.

Write bad code. One problem that I’ve been having (probably magnified by the fact that I’m working  in Ruby on Rails) is that everything I read really concentrates on writing and architecting really good code. The problem with that is that it is really hard to know what the best code is as you go along. As you code you get paralyzed by the different design choices. You then spend hours trying to make what you think may be good design work, only to throw it away because the direction of the code means that another design pattern actually makes more sense. Instead, if you write crappy code that just gets the feature complete as quickly as possible, you end up with a complete feature and time left over to refactor (of course this only works if you’ve written tests to ensure that everything stays working after the refactoring is finished). I think it’s a lot easier to see where to fix bad code than it is to ponder over what the best code is to write. Of course, a big part of this strategy is the commitment to go back and actually do the refactoring. Code review helps a lot as sheer embarrassment can be a great motivator for going back and making sure your code looks good!

 Follow the Law of Demeter. There are many complex aspects to this law, but the heuristic that I’ve been using is thinking about it as “don’t take your toys apart”. If your context has a class, then you can call any of it’s methods or attributes, but you cannot “break the toy apart” and call methods of that toy’s attributes. This article does a good job of explaining why breaking the Law would seem silly in a real world context. When you buy something, when the cashier asks you to pay, they don’t “break you apart” by grabbing your wallet (your attribute) and taking the money straight out. Instead, they ask you for the money and you give it to them. They don’t even have to know about your wallet, maybe you don’t have one and just shove your money into your pockets, that would make a waiter trained to take money from wallets very confused and would be a very awkward end to the evening. Throughout the week I found that code following the law was super easy to debug and refactor, code that didn’t wasn’t, with fun little errors popping up like “you called x on nil”.

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According to the BBC (and they can’t be wrong, can they?) it’s the U.K. Open University, with 40 million downloads so far:

Coughlan, S. (2012) Open University’s record iTunes U downloads, BBC News, October 3

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. The BBC thinks Stanford University and the OU must be running pretty close in terms of total downloads, but the OU is the clear winner in terms of the number of ‘hits’ it has running at one time. Here are the figures for today from the top 100 iTunesU individual downloads:

The remaining places were shared between 12 institutions (including Harvard and Duke) at one place each. The top two downloads today are both TED presentations (‘Understanding Happiness’ and ‘Creative Problem Solving’). The OU has eight in the top 20, with Stanford next with 4. The ranking is based on total downloads over time. And good for Harrisburg Area CC, a community college in central Pennsylvania, for breaking into an elite list with five offerings.

Incidentally, if (like me) you were wondering about Commonsense Media, it is a ‘non-partisan, not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in a world of media and technology‘ based in San Francisco.

Altogether Apple estimates that there are 300 million downloads a year from iTunes U, with 350,000 lectures offered by more than 1,000 universities around the world. However, and I believe this to be significant, the OU material is deliberately designed for online learning, and rarely consists of a video recording of a lecture. This might explain why there are only 4 MIT downloads in the top 100.

I wish though that Apple would provide more statistics, such as how many downloads are videos, how many are podcasts and how many are in some kind of text format. They could also make it much clearer what the formats are and what the symbols mean beside each item.

There is in fact huge scope for Apple to make iTunesU a much more user friendly and a richer system for higher education – but then, it is a ‘free’ service after all, so one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But what about a partnership say, where the ‘big’ educational institutions set up a foundation to build on what Apple has done?

Now the $64,000 question: how many of you have actually used a download from iTunesU in an online course (either as student or instructor) – and how did it go? And if no-one replies, how do I interpret that?!

© Top News 2010

This from the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education:

CNIE Awards Festival

There is one clear objective for the CNIE-RCIÉ Awards Festival is:

To recognize excellence in the innovative educational practice and use of learning technologies in all educational settings including distributed learning, open/distance education, and institutional contexts including government, commercial and or industrial sectors, both nationally and internationally, through a competition adjudicated by a committee of professional peers from across Canada

 The Awards 

Two different CNIE-RCIÉ categories are open to competition. They are:

·        Awards Festival [http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=node/152]

·        Graduate Student Stipend Award [http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=node/80]

 Online Submissions 

The deadline date for submission to the Awards Festival program is 9 March 2012.  For more details please see the CNIE-RCIÉ website (http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=node/152).

All proposal are submitted online at http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=node/170.

If you have any questions about the submissions process, please e-mail:

Tim Howard, CNIE-RCIÉ Secretariat, at cnie-rcie@cnie-rcie.ca

**************************************************************

RCIÉ Festival des prix 

Le Festival des prix du CNIE-RCIÉ vise un objectif très précis :

Reconnaître l’excellence dans les pratiques pédagogiques et l’utilisation innovante des technologies éducatives dans tous les contextes incluant les cours hybrides, la formation ouverte et à distance et les divers contextes institutionnels, à l’échelle nationale et internationale, par l’entremise d’un concours évalué par un comité de professionnels en éducation du Canada.

Prix 

Environ 20 prix peuvent être attribués pour des projets en français et en anglais.  Ainsi, deux catégories de prix du CNIE-RCIÉ sont ouvertes aux compétiteurs. Les catégories sont :

·         Festival des prix (combinaison des prix d’excellence et du festival médiatique)  http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=fr/node/153

·         Prix-allocation pour les étudiants diplômés http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=fr/node/530

Soumission en ligne 

La date limite pour les soumissions finales est le 15 mars 2011. Pour plus d’information, consultez le site du CNIE-RCIÉ à : http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=fr/node/153

Veuillez acheminer vos formulaires et documents de soumission en format électronique à : http://www.cnie-rcie.ca/?q=fr/node/172

Pour toute question en regard avec le processus de soumission d’un projet, communiquez par courriel avec :

Tim Howard, Directeur de l’administration, cnie-rcie@cnie-rcie.ca