How is it that instructional technology at IPFW actually undermines the activity of instruction?
I considered this question after moving older courses I have taught to my Course Development area before they were scheduled to be removed. Like most faculty, I have a portfolio of courses that I teach, and I re-use much of the same material from semester to semester. Within hours, I was receiving emails from students asking where the readings for the class had gone. Much to my horror, I had found that in moving my older courses to this Course Development area, I had shredded the current course I'm teaching this semester, and for which I had carefully prepared before the semester had started.
Although I'm by no means a software engineer, I consider myself a pretty adept user. I was stunned to see that this implementation of instructional technology would allow me to do so much damage in so few clicks, without any kind of warning from the software. Good user design would have a pop-up warning ask the user "Are you sure you want to do this?" before wiping out large swaths of information. Instead of using my time to work ahead in my classes, let alone write an overdue book review, or get ready for a conference presentation in two weeks, I spent a good part of my Saturday reconstructing a course for which I already had gotten running two weeks earlier. How could the software have allowed this to happen?
The answer ultimately may have less to do with Blackboard, and more to do with what I would call the paradigm of the inverted pyramid of instructional technology. At the top of the inverted pyramid, there are the faculty and students. I know there are many important parts to the University, and sometimes faculty and students think we are the University to the exclusion of everyone else who works here. However, let's face it. Without faculty, students, and most importantly, instruction, there would be no University. Supporting the inverted pyramid are the meager resources that roll out software upgrades and backup processes that turn faculty and students into glorified beta-testers. Blackboard goes down, the network goes down, a process for backing up courses goes awry, and guess what? The pyramid topples, ITS scrambles to fix the problem, and instruction at IPFW has just taken another hit from instructional technology.
In identifying the problem as one of an inverted pyramid, I do not mean to disparage ITS. ITS does a terrific job helping diagnose software and hardware problems. It also has to serve many masters, including billing, enrollment management, as well as supporting instruction. It does all of these things and it does most of them well. This is exactly the problem. The worldview of this paradigm is one of technology as defined by support areas of the University, not by the most important constituents and the core mission of a university to offer instruction. Thus, there is little if any incentive for ITS to pay attention to how faculty and students are actually using technology on the ground, especially when there are other units in Financial Affairs that need support just as urgently.
The worldview of technology as an end unto itself, and instruction as something that must acquiesce to the limitations of how the technology gets implemented, results in part from a structural defect at IPFW in which ITS falls under Financial Affairs, and not Academic Affairs. I can't blame the handful of personnel at IPFW charged with supporting instructional technology for the hundreds of faculty who teach on this campus. Those poor souls have an impossible task. In the past few weeks, I've heard from other faculty of mounting frustration with the lack of responsiveness ITS to supporting instructional technology. But how could ITS be any more responsive, given how little of its resources are devoted to the most important function of the University?
I guess the bottom line is that until there is paradigm shift in how faculty and students get placed at the center of technology resources through a meaningful implementation of instructional technology, and not at its periphery, not much will change. And I have a hard time seeing how this paradigm shift will take place until something happens with the organizational structure at IPFW. Until then, faculty and students should expect to keep hobbling along as glorified beta-testers completely exposed to bad design and subject to instructional technology that is at odds with instruction.
UPDATE: After speaking again with Scott Vitz on W 2 Sep, we determined that the problem occurred when I moved a course template being used by my current course to the Course Development area. That indeed broke the relational links. I think my point about bad user interface design still applies. There was no warning message before this occurred, and nothing to indicate right away that I had wiped out my content when I did this. If you do not have a course template, however, then you probably will not experience this problem.
I considered this question after moving older courses I have taught to my Course Development area before they were scheduled to be removed. Like most faculty, I have a portfolio of courses that I teach, and I re-use much of the same material from semester to semester. Within hours, I was receiving emails from students asking where the readings for the class had gone. Much to my horror, I had found that in moving my older courses to this Course Development area, I had shredded the current course I'm teaching this semester, and for which I had carefully prepared before the semester had started.
Although I'm by no means a software engineer, I consider myself a pretty adept user. I was stunned to see that this implementation of instructional technology would allow me to do so much damage in so few clicks, without any kind of warning from the software. Good user design would have a pop-up warning ask the user "Are you sure you want to do this?" before wiping out large swaths of information. Instead of using my time to work ahead in my classes, let alone write an overdue book review, or get ready for a conference presentation in two weeks, I spent a good part of my Saturday reconstructing a course for which I already had gotten running two weeks earlier. How could the software have allowed this to happen?
The answer ultimately may have less to do with Blackboard, and more to do with what I would call the paradigm of the inverted pyramid of instructional technology. At the top of the inverted pyramid, there are the faculty and students. I know there are many important parts to the University, and sometimes faculty and students think we are the University to the exclusion of everyone else who works here. However, let's face it. Without faculty, students, and most importantly, instruction, there would be no University. Supporting the inverted pyramid are the meager resources that roll out software upgrades and backup processes that turn faculty and students into glorified beta-testers. Blackboard goes down, the network goes down, a process for backing up courses goes awry, and guess what? The pyramid topples, ITS scrambles to fix the problem, and instruction at IPFW has just taken another hit from instructional technology.
In identifying the problem as one of an inverted pyramid, I do not mean to disparage ITS. ITS does a terrific job helping diagnose software and hardware problems. It also has to serve many masters, including billing, enrollment management, as well as supporting instruction. It does all of these things and it does most of them well. This is exactly the problem. The worldview of this paradigm is one of technology as defined by support areas of the University, not by the most important constituents and the core mission of a university to offer instruction. Thus, there is little if any incentive for ITS to pay attention to how faculty and students are actually using technology on the ground, especially when there are other units in Financial Affairs that need support just as urgently.
The worldview of technology as an end unto itself, and instruction as something that must acquiesce to the limitations of how the technology gets implemented, results in part from a structural defect at IPFW in which ITS falls under Financial Affairs, and not Academic Affairs. I can't blame the handful of personnel at IPFW charged with supporting instructional technology for the hundreds of faculty who teach on this campus. Those poor souls have an impossible task. In the past few weeks, I've heard from other faculty of mounting frustration with the lack of responsiveness ITS to supporting instructional technology. But how could ITS be any more responsive, given how little of its resources are devoted to the most important function of the University?
I guess the bottom line is that until there is paradigm shift in how faculty and students get placed at the center of technology resources through a meaningful implementation of instructional technology, and not at its periphery, not much will change. And I have a hard time seeing how this paradigm shift will take place until something happens with the organizational structure at IPFW. Until then, faculty and students should expect to keep hobbling along as glorified beta-testers completely exposed to bad design and subject to instructional technology that is at odds with instruction.
UPDATE: After speaking again with Scott Vitz on W 2 Sep, we determined that the problem occurred when I moved a course template being used by my current course to the Course Development area. That indeed broke the relational links. I think my point about bad user interface design still applies. There was no warning message before this occurred, and nothing to indicate right away that I had wiped out my content when I did this. If you do not have a course template, however, then you probably will not experience this problem.
3 comments:
I think what struck me most about Steve’s analysis is his remark about a needed “paradigm shift.”
I’ve actually spent the past two weeks intensely frustrated, trying to figure out what the abbreviation ITS actually stands for. I too have many friends in ITS, and I know it is staffed and managed by very competent caring professionals. I often get timely and informative answers to my questions.
At the same time though, I wonder just how “service” oriented this large bureaucracy actually is. I would think that the “S” implied that their primary mission was to serve the faculty and student body of the institution, but I’ve been led recently to believe I’m working under a false assumption.
For example, the following two incidents have occurred in the first ten days of class:
1. In regards to a serious problem I was having with Adobe Connect, I was told that ITS does not support “home” computers. Hello? I’m full-time faculty employed by DCS to teach English courses over the Internet. Even the English department does not expect me to work from campus, as they’ve never seen fit to put a computer in my office.
2. A student called the helpdesk because she was having trouble opening mp4 files from Blackboard. The helpdesk referred her to me. Is that an indication that ITS expects me to provide my own support for my distance learning students? Or is that a subtle message that they think that the distance learning faculty is stupid and don’t know how to create links, upload files, create attachments, use the P drive, etc.
I’m also concerned that we DCS faculty, where the majority of the student credit hour growth is occurring, aren’t being provided with necessary tools. I’m not happy that I have to use the YouTube server or Screentoaster if I want to embed streaming video. These are very public and risky places to be housing intellectual content, plus I would think the university would have a logical interest to keep their own brand on their product.
I would like to praise CELT and Sam Birk, who I know worked with ITS and Marketing to create a great iTunes University presence for IPFW. So I know the University, including ITS, is concerned about these kinds of issues. It’s just frustrating that everything moves glacially and lots doesn’t seem to get done without a lot of teeth gnashing.
What I’d like to see in the next nine months is this:
1. A clear mission statement from ITS that states they are here to serve the faculty and the students as their number 1 priority.
2. A streaming media server.
I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request, nor an unreasonable timeline.
Worth, thanks for posting this comment. My original post emphasized the need for a paradigm shift that puts instruction at the center of the implementation of technology, but what I appreciated about your comment is that while there is a need to shift the technology paradigm to one that actually supports instruction in general, there is another shift that needs to take place. In terms of instructional technology, we still seem to be stuck in the one-room schoolhouse where instruction is what the teacher at the front of the class tells students to do. Clearly what you are doing is a different kind of teaching model with different kinds of technology demands. If this institution is going to take seriously the centrality of instruction, we are going to have to move beyond the "fixed computer workstation at the head of the class" mode of instructional technology.
Back to the theme of serving students and faculty, I think we need to find a way to get all the so-called major players together at the same table. This would include:
• Some distance learning students
• Distance learning faculty
• Other faculty who rely on technology
• CELT
• ITS
• Help desk
• And a heavy hitter from the top of the IPFW administrative ranks.
I know the last thing we need is another committee, but there needs to be a better way to get us all proactively talking with each other instead of all this retroactive finger pointing and teeth gnashing. I have no idea what form it would take, but I would hope it would not be another committee meeting.
On a related front, I wonder if ITS and Help Desk would be interested in hosting a session at the annual CELT conference that could address immediate concerns of DL faculty and other faculty who use technology. By “immediate,” I mean a sort of ghostbusters’ session – who do you call, when do you call, and for what do you call? That kind of thing.
I get questions everyday from students who can’t get their html creator to work right, can’t access my pdf files, can’t access my mp4 files, can hear my podcasts. I refer them to the help desk (AFTER I check to make sure everything is working form my end), and the help desk refers them back to me. Why is that? How can we end this cycle of frustration? I know HelpDesk has put together help files, and done a nice job, but it’s a lot like leading a horse to water.
I would think ITS and HelpDesk would have a huge body of knowledge accumulated by now from student questions and faculty issues – they need to be sharing it directly with us.
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